You’ve seen fashion photos in print and online, but have you ever wondered what—and whom—it takes to make them? We went behind the scenes at a shoot for fashion website Refinery29 to find out.

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Fashion photography is no longer the sole province of glossy magazines, as blogs and retailers produce and publish highly stylized work. Even for a relatively small operation such as the website Refinery29, which combines lifestyle content with a designer clothing store, producing a shoot can require as many as eight pairs of hands. The company recently moved into new digs in Manhattan’s financial district, outfitting an in-house studio for the editorials and advertorials that it regularly commissions.

Invited to shadow their crew for a day, we watched how each team member contributed to produce the final images for the story, which you can find at www.refinery29.com/fashion-fears.

Portraits by: Peter Kolonia

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Tokyo Adorned
By Thomas C. Card Abrams $40

Tokyo’s “Harajuku kids,” named for the neighborhood in which they congregate, are known around the world for their loud and distinct fashion sense. Street-style photographers swarm their ranks, and pop star Gwen Stefani even appropriated the vibrant culture for her 2004 album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. But what drew photographer Thomas C. Card to Tokyo and its various fashion tribes was tragedy—namely the surge in self-expression that reverberated in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011.

In a culture centered around discipline and uniformity, the Harajuku kids celebrate personalization. In Tokyo Adorned, Card offers a micro view of the many girls (and a few boys) that populate this dynamic scene. Arranged mostly in diptychs juxta­posing full-body portraits with medium closeups, Card’s portraits of these young models against white seamless free them from context and champion their individuality. Outside the scene, they appear vulnerable yet self-assured. The attention to detail and craftsmanship (many outfits are homemade) astound, and Card’s style puts all of it on display—even painfully obvious colored contact lenses. One of the intro essays, by fashion maven Samantha Boardman, is titled “Clothes Speak Volumes.” For some, style is a tribal aesthetic, but others, like Kumamiki (above), have a stronger sense of ownership: She’s turned Party Baby into her own clothing line.

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In Long Island’s Five Towns lies the birthplace of American suburbia. With rows upon rows of uniform plots and identical houses, the hamlets—like the neighboring Levittown—provided a safe haven for budding families in the wake of World War II.

But when 2012’s Hurricane Sandy devastated much of New York and New Jersey’s coastline, even the more inland Five Towns were not spared. In her project The Spring After the Storm, Laura Glabman documents the remnant destruction left behind by the now receded ocean.

Many of the homes on the isle remained structurally intact, but when the plants began to bloom that first spring after Sandy, the trees that didn’t survive stood in stark contrast to the bright green foliage of the ones that did. Glabman was determined to capture the intense reminder of loss in and around her hometown of Hewlett, NY.

A fan of Ed Ruscha’s repetitive Americana, Glabman had been photographing the little boxes on Long Island and the Rockaways for a few years. After Sandy, she and her husband drove to the beach, but the devastation was so raw and the residents’ desperation so real that she couldn’t bear to shoot.

But come spring, as she rode her bicycle in a familiar 15-mile loop near her home, she began to notice the deep red foliage of the dead plants in juxtaposition with the bright colors of the spring bloom. Returning with her car and her Canon EOS 5D Mark II, she began to collect reminders of the tempest the community had just weathered. Glabman hopes to publish the series along with other work in a book.

In communities like Hewlett and Levittown, when your house is like your neighbors’, the one place homeowners gets to express their individuality is their lawn. For some, the landscaping represents decades of work. “They developed their own little enclave,” Glabman says. “They designed and grew and planted and trimmed it over the years. When Sandy came in, it destroyed all of that.”

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_For much of the 80s and early 90s, Lynn Goldsmith photographed the biggest rock stars on the planet. A gifted portraitist, her images have graced the covers of national magazines, album covers, and music biographies. Her latest book, Rock and Roll Stories (Abrams, $44) is a collection of favorites pulled from the archives, paired with a brutally honest and earnest retelling of the stories that formed her (reluctant) identity as a “rock & roll photographer.”

Goldsmith’s reputation as someone who could get even the most notoriously fickle celebrities to open up for her camera brought all manner of artists into her studio. The music she loved, the images she made, and the lovers she took were often interwoven, all part of the story she tells in Rock and Roll Stories. There are plenty of highs, but no life is without lows, and Goldsmith’s were played out in front of a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden—like the time ex-boyfriend Bruce Springsteen embarrassed her onstage at a concert she helped organize.

And while the roster of rock stars she’s romanced is distinguished (Springsteen, David Byrne, Sting), her stories remain intensely personal. And she projects the confidence that comes with being able to tell a tale of the time she smoked a spliff with Bob Marley, while showing you the picture of Bob rolling it. She’s not bragging; she doesn’t have to.

These days Goldsmith is a bit more out of the spotlight, but no less magnetic. Shortly after being selected as one of American Photo’s 2013 Books of the Year, she sat down with us at our Manhattan office to talk about the book, her career, and why it’s important for photographers to stand up for their work._

You’ve said that until now, you were never comfortable about being called a “Rock & Roll photographer.” What’s different?
I had to really look back at my own life to see what made me feel most connected to the world. Not only the camera, but why the subject matter? That was when I came upon my childhood, and remembering being a kid at four years old and being sent to overnight camp. Those moments, when my counselor took me out and sang to me, and had me sing with her….subconsciously, it wasn’t until I forced myself to write about it that I could see why music was a connector for me.

So that’s what the book is about?
The whole point of this book was to rewrite, add to, and expand upon what PhotoDiary was. I have enough of an archive that I don’t need to repeat images, but I never felt that _ PhotoDiary_ was complete because I never came to terms with being called a “Rock & Roll Photographer.” That book was more about me forcing myself to look at why people were giving me this name, and what did I have to do with it.

I was in such denial. I would say “I worked for Sports Illustrated, I worked for National Geographic, and I just came back from Mexico, covering the earthquake.” I’ve always been against labels, but to me a label in photography, meant, if it really applied to someone who had true skills, you were a portrait photographer, a landscape photographer…

What does it mean to be a rock & roll photographer now, vs. the glory days?
I don’t think there is such a thing as the glory days. In the book, I show my pictures of Elvis Presley, which I sold for $75. In my day there were very few major publications because they were more focused on news—they didn’t put celebrities on the cover. What record labels paid isn’t that far from what’s going on today. They wanted to pay you $100 for a press picture, you know, and you had expenses.

No matter what generation we come from, we will face challenges, and I think that the success of any person is to draw lines on what the value is of their work, and to demand that for it. And to educate those who are trying to get it for less: Why does it cost that? In our environment now, compared to then, was that in the 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, photographers met with photo editors and art directors, and there was a very human connection. Now so much is, email, look at it online, that it becomes easier for them as human beings, the person who allocates income, to not see others as human beings. And for me, that’s the challenge. How can you make yourself a human being to them, and them to you? How can you not fall prey to the mindset that even though Jim and Joe and Sally and Khalil are giving it for free, that you don’t go along with that. You have enough self-esteem to put a value on who you are and what you create.

How does a photographer get the kind of access you got?
You make the person in front of the camera—whether they be famous or not famous—feel incredibly comfortable. They have a level of trust with you. That access is given to people who an artist likes to have around and knows how to work effectively, so that their time isn’t wasted, and that they can trust.

You’ve been a champion of hair and makeup artists—there’s a great anecdote in Rock & Roll Stories where you recall showing the label photos of the artist with and without makeup, and asked which one they wanted to pay for.
If I didn’t do it myself, I paid people myself, because I knew it would make my images better. And that’s what they play on. But at least at that time, I owned those images. So I could make someone look better, then run around Manhattan on my bicycle and be able to create a market for that person. I’d sell or license those pictures, and hopefully be able to repay the money I had shelled out, and build my career in that way.

What does it mean to be a woman working in this industry? I can’t imagine there were a lot of female photographers at these events. Was it helpful, or hurtful?
There weren’t that many women photographers, period. I think that whoever we are, whether we’re attractive, white, African-American, Asian, or whatever it is we are, we bring the totality of that.

I didn’t realize it until I saw the image made of me and Patti Smith by Michael Putland, but we looked at it, and Patti said, “Wow, remember all the times we just walked down the street? If only we knew how good-looking we were.” I brought that to it, but I think I also brought my sense of humor and level of intelligence.

But then it also worked against me, in that most of the publicists were women, and they didn’t necessarily want me around. Or it worked against me because I wasn’t the photographer that they could take with them on the road, because they didn’t want to be seen cheating on their wives. And I wasn’t available. Some of those men photographers used to pull women for them, if it wasn’t a roadie….those were the days of rock & roll. It would be, “So and so, go in the audience, there was that one in the third row…” and that’s certainly not what I’m gonna do. So there’s always pluses and minuses, no matter what. I don’t know what everybody’s thinking. I only know one thing: I can’t change who I am on the outside. I think that if I’d been black, I would be way more successful.

As a black woman?
Oh yeah. I hired a black woman and trained her to be a photographer, and I could get her in anywhere and to do anything. I teach once in a while, and I’ve had African-American women students. I tell them, “you’ve got it going on for you.”

How so?
First of all, if they’re photographing other African-Americans, there can be an immediate level of trust, and a feeling that you can be more yourself. That’s one thing right there. African-American to African-American. But you take a gorgeous African-American woman and put her in front of a white rock star…

Is it a disarming thing, or otherization?
There’s white guilt, there’s all kinds of stuff. The young girl that I was training, Angie, she really wanted to photograph Robert Kennedy Jr. She knew where he came out of his house, everything. I said listen, if this is something you really want to do, go up to him and ask him. How often do you think he gets approached by a beautiful African-American woman? And she got the photo. If a white guy, a schlub, had walked up to him, what do you think he would have said? Pluses and minuses.

How do you influence an artist’s aesthetic without making your influence obvious?
Look at Bryan Adams! This was his [second] album. Do you really want to look like a green munchkin? This is how he shows up [flips to page 94 in book]…is that how you show up for your first shoot? That was the style he chose. He made a record—and this was his style—and his music didn’t sound like that. So I’m not trying to take him from this to this just because I think it will make him look better, it’s because to me, his music sounds like this, and not like this.

So the music is filtered through you.
I tell the Ricky Nelson story in there. I always try to make my best effort to see someone perform. I listen to the record, but I want to see them perform before I photograph them. With Ricky, I went to see him perform at the Ritz club, this is Ricky Nelson, from my youth, from the time of Elvis, and out comes this guy with gold chains around his neck and high-waisted continental pants. His new album [1981’s Playing to Win] was totally rockabilly; after seeing him perform, I knew. And that hairstyle? He had like a bouffant hairdo. If you’re playing Vegas, OK. But if you’re playing New York, and you’re playing the Ritz, a hip place…I didn’t say anything then, I just prepared for the studio shoot the next day, and got [ex-boyfriend] Mitch Glazer’s clothes.

He came in like, “OK, you have twenty minutes.” I just said to him, “listen, if you want to be photographed the way you look, I suggest you get on your plane and leave. Because I am not going to make pictures of you looking like that.” It’s not just I wouldn’t put my name on that. I love Ricky Nelson. He needed to hear that from somebody. And the beauty of it was, the next day, I got a call from his management saying, “Ricky came home and told his wife to throw everything in the closet out, and she wants to know where I should take him shopping.”

My husband is often appalled at my mouth. But I think that because the artist knows that what I’m saying is not to be negative, but from a very positive place, and that I care about them.

Tell me about Obie, Bruce’s “biggest fan.” You told The New Yorker that “I wished I could have been like her. She inspired me because she was able to give with no strings attached. She gave freely because she believed in the power of love.”
That’s why I wouldn’t call her a groupie. She was a No. 1 fan. A groupie is different from a fan.

What does it mean to be a groupie?
In my opinion, a groupie is someone who is willing to exchange any sexual favors to anybody involved in getting to whoever the star is in the group. And in fact, would probably do that with any range of stars—it’s not even just that one artist or group. It’s a person whose self-esteem is so low that they need to give up what I consider to be sacred stuff to be in the presence of. And in my opinion, they don’t even know what they are in the presence of. They just need it for validation.

And you were in the “presence of” for quite some time.
That’s why I hated being called a rock & roll photographer. That’s also why that’s not the only thing I did. I want to be around people who inspire me. There are a lot of people who give over the power to individuals that they want to think are better than themselves, and they can’t separate the messenger from the message. To be around that too much is really boring.

There’s a sexual dynamic in many of the photographs in Rock & Roll Stories. There is even an entire chapter dedicated to your relationships with various musicians.
I know so many guys who become fashion photographers or involved in some way with photographing women, because they want to get laid. That’s not my modus operandi, because I don’t need to do this to get that. I don’t need to carry all this heavy equipment. There’s many easier ways. And more profitable ones.

But the kissing and telling in the last chapter is not because I am trying to sell books, and not because I’m proud of having been with a particular famous person that other people want. It’s because I learned certain lessons, as we all do. I think the greatest lessons are learned in our romantic relationships. That’s where we’re the most vulnerable, that’s where things often hit you the hardest. So when I talk about something it’s because I think it will help other people. When I talk about Bruce, I share how in many ways I feel sorry for the guy, in that I wasn’t ready to be loved, and therefore I could do a hot-and-cold thing. I think there’s a lot of girls in their 20s and 30s that do that, and maybe they can benefit. When someone opens their heart to you, you should really take a close look at that, and how you communicate and behave with that person.

**What kind of work are you doing now? **
I continue to do self-portraits. Besides that aspect of my work, I’m always doing, as most people are, bodies of work that have nothing to do with selling to anybody. It’s more of a way to be curious about who I am and who other people are, and then utilizing work to help get me to focus in on those answers. So I always do a range of different kinds of imagery. I’m still ripping apart my Barbie dolls…I’m always doing something, visually. However, I’m also focused on my next Will Powers project. Hopefully by April I’ll have an EP of four new songs, and I have to work on em.

No Rolling Stone covers in the immediate future?
I don’t care. It’s not like in the early days, where to have a LIFE magazine cover, to have a Rolling Stone cover, that meant something. None of that stuff means anything to me. And certainly a CD cover doesn’t mean anything to me. There’s only so much time left. What does mean something to you? If I can figure out ways that what I do can be of service, whether it’s work for Doctors Without Borders…if you can take what you have skills in and apply it to areas that could help other people, that feels good. Much better than a Rolling Stone cover. Who cares, you know?

To view and buy prints of Goldsmith’s work, visit the Morrison Hotel Gallery at 124 Prince St. in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. For more information, call 212.941.8770. Goldsmith also has prints for sale at her personal site, rockandrollphotogallery.com.

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You’re an artist with a printing business in Manhattan. How’d you get here?

I came to New York to have a job. I love the Midwest, but I couldn’t be an artist there, because I wouldn’t be able to support myself as a printer. When I was printing for a lab, I loved what I did, but I wasn’t meeting the clients, I was just given this pile of work. In September 2013, me, Jake, the digital genius, and my [life] partner Kathleen, who also helps me in my home studio, started Jam Editions. Now it’s our company, our reputation.

The miniature scenes that you build and then photograph are incredibly detailed. What’s your process?

I spend about 7 to 15 months making the miniatures, and maybe two weeks shooting. Every image I start off with is pure failure. The first idea I have is too obvious. The first time I process the film and make a contact, I have to go to the bar and sit. I’m depressed. I have my beer and think, ‘How the hell am I gonna salvage this?’ I’m going to print these traditionally, so I have to make sure it’s the perfect print. I don’t want to sit there and do interpretive dance in the dark.

What’s the collaborative process like with Kathleen?

I like collaborating. For the biggest part of my career I’ve worked with my partner Kathleen. It’s nice to have two sets of ideas playing off one another. I decide color, camera angle, and the quality of light, and she gets to do the nitpicky details that really make the scenes come alive. We spend every hour of every day together. We work together at our day jobs; we work together in the studio—it’s interesting.

What kind of gear do you use?

I use a Cambo Legend, an 8×10 I put together on eBay, piece by piece. The Beattie Fresnel focusing screen is a little difficult to use, but I do not like putting my head under a dark cloth. I’m usually shooting at night anyway. The lens is a 165mm f/8 Super Angulon that might be as old as I am. I still like the slow process of looking through the camera, being able to work the angles, the depth of field, trying to direct the focus on film. I want maximum depth-of-field. I shoot at the same f-stop every time, f/64, so I use a lot of 10-, 20-, and 30-degree spot lights. Sometimes there will be 10 to 12 lights—I’ve used as many as 14. My philosophy is that I’m sculpting the light. If you look at the scenes, there’s light coming in that shouldn’t be.

How do you divide your time between your business and making art?

I’m a photographer who owns a digital printing company, but I’m also a fabricator, and I make sets for videos and film—everything but wash dishes. I don’t think photographers get to be photographers the way they used to be. When I talk to students, I tell them that you have a plan A, but you also have to have plan B, C, D, and E.

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Bar

Beauty Shop

Subway

Mall

Laundromat at Night

Library

Violin Repair

Majestic

Chinese Take-Out

Museum of Art

Church

Living Room

Casino

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Andrew Shum, 37, first bought a camera in January of last year; the attorney from Santa Clara had recently taken a sabbatical from his day job to travel the world. Recognizing the steep learning curve that he had to climb, he signed up for a class in Seattle with pro photographer Reed Hoffmann. He took a shine to his new teacher, so he quickly signed up for the Mentor Series trek to Thailand, knowing Hoffmann would serve as a mentor on the trip.

“I followed Reed around a lot,” Shum admits. “I said ‘Hey Reed, you take all these nice pictures, and the people look great and natural when they’re walking down the street. Why is it that when I take pictures of people they’re picking their nose?’ ”

The neophyte tagged along as Hoffmann navigated crowded locations, discovering how to identify interesting people and compositions. On that first trip to Thailand, he spent much of his time there just figuring out how to use his camera and find balance in the frame, learning how to get just close enough to his subjects.

Continuing his sabbatical, he next traveled solo to Cambodia and focused on tightening up his compositions. By the time he made it to Greece for his second Mentor Series trek, he was working with photographer David Tejada to hone his command of geometry and symmetry in his images.

But for this shot of a quartet of donkeys being led up a winding stone staircase, it was mentor Layne Kennedy’s “sexy S-curve” tip for composing with geometric shapes that he had on his mind. Waiting together for the donkeys to file past, when Kennedy went one way, Shum went the other. No longer a shadow, his eye was now his own.

Andrew Shum lives in Santa Clara, CA, and practices law. His number-one tip: Get closer.

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Anton Corbijn has been making portraits of famous artists for five decades. He’s directed feature films and dozens of music videos, but he is likely best known for his extremely personal rock and roll portraits. Cutting his teeth shooting rock stars for the New Musical Express in the 70s, he evolved to provide creative direction for the likes of U2 and Depeche Mode, building relationships over many years that are still fruitful to this day—his video for Depeche Mode’s “Should Be Higher” was released earlier this year.

But WAITS/CORBIJN ’77-’11 (Schirmer/Mosel) is a document that chronicles his relationship with the less famous, if no less talented, bourbon-soaked troubadour Tom Waits. For 35 years, Waits worked exclusively with Corbijn, leaving the Dutch photographer with a bevy of images to edit down to the 226 that made the book. Their friendship is apparent, and the deep trust developed between the two over the years allows for some extremely expressive, if not always revealing, portraits of the gravel-voiced singer/songwriter/actor.

The book’s final pages find Waits wearing yet another hat, featuring his photographs, poems, stories, and collages—meant to serve as a companion to the work Corbijn made with Waits as his subject. American Photo spoke with Corbijn about the book—whose limited hardcover edition sold out in nine days—and what it’s like to shoot such a colorful storyteller.

How did you and Tom first meet?
Backstage at a concert, when I was a young photographer in the ’70s. But it really started up in ’82, ’83. He really liked the work I had done with Captain Beefheart, a hero of his. It became a more serious relation, rather than a guy from a magazine trying to photograph him all the time. We became friends over the years. I think we liked working together, whether it was press pictures, or because we were at the same place at the same time. It was very playful, generally. I’m always trying to photograph where you can’t tell if I paid to take the photograph or they paid me to take the photograph. There were many instances where we did meet and didn’t take pictures.

What birthed the idea for the book?
There was never an idea, of course. It was just something that came up after I realized I had so many pictures of Tom. There was never a plan, that’s the beauty of it. There’s a lot of gaps in the book. It doesn’t try to say I photographed Tom beautifully, or this is Tom Waits life. All the book says is this is what Tom and me do together, and this is how Tom looks at things. His own art. Which is unique, I think. I don’t think Tom ever showed anything like that. He kept quite a raw perspective. A deep perspective of how Tom functions, and where his eyes go to, and what makes him tick.

How did you go about sequencing the images?
I’m a photographer, I’m not a music journalist or anything. I’m a portrait photographer, and I work with artists, whether they’re painters or magicians or movie actors or directors or whatever. It’s always the work that has the function of a magnet for me; I like to meet people behind the work that I like. So no, I didn’t cut it up to be specific about something. Because it’s always Tom, and Tom tells stories, and he acts stories, and that’s what the pictures show. There’s a few pictures that come close, maybe, to the private Tom, but basically it’s Tom as an artist. But you can see we’re very relaxed with each other.

Is this a book about Tom, or a book about you and Tom?
I think it’s more about my relationship with Tom. I don’t think the images necessarily fit into the periods of music that he’s doing. He comes up with an idea, I come up with an idea for photographs, and it’s very low key. There’s no makeup, no management, not even an assistant. Just him and me driving around and doing stuff. It’s grown up men that don’t want to grow up. It’s very nice.

Tell me more about Tom’s art that’s featured in the book
Instead of having text explaining some stuff, we thought it would be nice to get an idea that’s closer to Tom’s mind, or how he thinks, by having his own work. You can get a lot from that, I think. That’s how it was set up, and it was very interesting. I really liked what Tom did, I love the perspective he puts on the stuff, the little stories that go with the photographs. They’re very funny.

Do you see things similar to the way Tom does?
I’m very much like the son of a protestant minister. I think he’s a lot freer in his mind. In my pictures, I always do more than just make an image, I try to convey something, if I can. I don’t think Tom wants to do that, by definition. He has fun with the picture he takes, and the picture tells enough.

How tough was it to edit down 40 years of work?
In the early days, I didn’t have a lot of money, so I didn’t photograph that much. I took a picture here, a picture there. In the later years, I photographed a lot more. Some time was spent cutting down the later years, because I had so much material…for 2002, I couldn’t have 40 pages of just one year, so some fell by the wayside. It’s hard to take a bad picture of Tom, even for me. I’ve tried very much to take bad pictures, but it’s hard.

See the rest of our Book of the Year winners

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Anton Corbijn has been making portraits of famous artists for five decades. He’s directed feature films and dozens of music videos, but he is likely best known for his extremely personal rock and roll portraits. Cutting his teeth shooting rock stars for the New Musical Express in the 70s, he evolved to provide creative direction for the likes of U2 and Depeche Mode, building relationships over many years that are still fruitful to this day—his video for Depeche Mode’s “Should Be Higher” was released earlier this year.

But WAITS/CORBIJN ’77-’11 (Schirmer/Mosel) is a document that chronicles his relationship with the less famous, if no less talented, bourbon-soaked troubadour Tom Waits. For 35 years, Waits worked exclusively with Corbijn, leaving the Dutch photographer with a bevy of images to edit down to the 226 that made the book. Their friendship is apparent, and the deep trust developed between the two over the years allows for some extremely expressive, if not always revealing, portraits of the gravel-voiced singer/songwriter/actor.

The book’s final pages find Waits wearing yet another hat, featuring his photographs, poems, stories, and collages—meant to serve as a companion to the work Corbijn made with Waits as his subject. American Photo spoke with Corbijn about the book—whose limited hardcover edition sold out in nine days—and what it’s like to shoot such a colorful storyteller.

How did you and Tom first meet?
Backstage at a concert, when I was a young photographer in the ’70s. But it really started up in ’82, ’83. He really liked the work I had done with Captain Beefheart, a hero of his. It became a more serious relation, rather than a guy from a magazine trying to photograph him all the time. We became friends over the years. I think we liked working together, whether it was press pictures, or because we were at the same place at the same time. It was very playful, generally. I’m always trying to photograph where you can’t tell if I paid to take the photograph or they paid me to take the photograph. There were many instances where we did meet and didn’t take pictures.

What birthed the idea for the book?
There was never an idea, of course. It was just something that came up after I realized I had so many pictures of Tom. There was never a plan, that’s the beauty of it. There’s a lot of gaps in the book. It doesn’t try to say I photographed Tom beautifully, or this is Tom Waits life. All the book says is this is what Tom and me do together, and this is how Tom looks at things. His own art. Which is unique, I think. I don’t think Tom ever showed anything like that. He kept quite a raw perspective. A deep perspective of how Tom functions, and where his eyes go to, and what makes him tick.

How did you go about sequencing the images?
I’m a photographer, I’m not a music journalist or anything. I’m a portrait photographer, and I work with artists, whether they’re painters or magicians or movie actors or directors or whatever. It’s always the work that has the function of a magnet for me; I like to meet people behind the work that I like. So no, I didn’t cut it up to be specific about something. Because it’s always Tom, and Tom tells stories, and he acts stories, and that’s what the pictures show. There’s a few pictures that come close, maybe, to the private Tom, but basically it’s Tom as an artist. But you can see we’re very relaxed with each other.

Is this a book about Tom, or a book about you and Tom?
I think it’s more about my relationship with Tom. I don’t think the images necessarily fit into the periods of music that he’s doing. He comes up with an idea, I come up with an idea for photographs, and it’s very low key. There’s no makeup, no management, not even an assistant. Just him and me driving around and doing stuff. It’s grown up men that don’t want to grow up. It’s very nice.

Tell me more about Tom’s art that’s featured in the book
Instead of having text explaining some stuff, we thought it would be nice to get an idea that’s closer to Tom’s mind, or how he thinks, by having his own work. You can get a lot from that, I think. That’s how it was set up, and it was very interesting. I really liked what Tom did, I love the perspective he puts on the stuff, the little stories that go with the photographs. They’re very funny.

Do you see things similar to the way Tom does?
I’m very much like the son of a protestant minister. I think he’s a lot freer in his mind. In my pictures, I always do more than just make an image, I try to convey something, if I can. I don’t think Tom wants to do that, by definition. He has fun with the picture he takes, and the picture tells enough.

**How tough was it to edit down 40 years of work? **
In the early days, I didn’t have a lot of money, so I didn’t photograph that much. I took a picture here, a picture there. In the later years, I photographed a lot more. Some time was spent cutting down the later years, because I had so much material…for 2002, I couldn’t have 40 pages of just one year, so some fell by the wayside. It’s hard to take a bad picture of Tom, even for me. I’ve tried very much to take bad pictures, but it’s hard.

See the rest of our Book of the Year winners

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While the straits for music photographers have become so dire that bands now charge the photographers rather than pay them for their work, they may have a new revenue stream—from an unlikely source.

The Echo Nest is a “music intelligence” company spun-off from MIT’s Media Lab that uses a massive database of information about music to serve up recommendations for various music sites and streaming services. It just announced a partnership with Getty Images to license more than 27,000 photos from their archives to the Echo Nest’s clients. Access to the images is tied to an Echo Nest product called Dynamic Music Data, which uses the Echo Nest’s database to deliver a real-time stream of bios, blog posts, news, and social conversations about artists and their music from around the Internet.

The first Dynamic Music Data clients are MTV, the BBC, Nuance, and Yahoo! Music, but the images are available to any client who signs up for the service and pays the additional monthly licensing fee for the Getty images. The Echo Nest and Getty curate the library of images, but the agreement is not exclusive, leaving the door open for smaller agencies and even individual photographers to work with the Echo Nest to license their images (like the photo of Jimi Hendrix at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, seen above) to the Echo Nest’s clients.

For the music fan and Internet consumer, the gratification isn’t quite immediate: you’ll need to wait for one of the clients to add the Getty license to their service. But once they do, and you browse a client’s site (like mtv.com or music.yahoo.com) to find new artists or stream music, you’ll be treated to professional images from one of the largest and most prestigious stock photo agencies, without ever having to leave the site. And Getty photographers have new customers to license their images to as the editorial market continues to shrivel.

With music sales no longer intrinsically tied to the album release format, the Echo Nest’s product represents a new way to illustrate music in a market that continues to trend away from physical products—albeit one that is curated outside the influence of the actual artists. For a lot of music, album art can be woefully static. It’s one thing to have a 12” x 12” cover for a vinyl record, but much less impressive when viewed as a 50×50-pixel JPG in a Web browser. But individually licensing images would be a monumental task.

“The difficulty of licensing high-quality artist photographs has forced music sites and apps to rely primarily on album art as a graphical representation of artists,” Shane Tobin, the Echo Nest’s director of strategic partnerships, said in a press release. “We are pleased to partner with Getty Images to solve this problem by making it incredibly simple to serve up the best music data and the best artist images through a single solution.”

And while this particular deal is limited to photographers working with Getty, the venture could lead to new partnerships if it’s successful. It’s unknown exactly how large a slice of the licensing pie will go to the photographers, but for a struggling (or even successful) music photographer, it represents a whole new client base that was previously out-of-reach.

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Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott—affectionately known in fashion circles as simply Mert & Marcus—live a charmed life. As art-conscious club kids in the ’90s, they fell backward into fashion, each other’s arms, and, most important, photography.

They choose not to discuss their romantic status, but their creative collaboration is so powerful that it has long transcended physical attraction. Alas told us that for him, making Mert & Marcus pictures is about the time they share and the work that goes into them—neither has any desire to work separately—and continually pulling from an eclectic range of influences in the service of their point of view.

The duo’s discerning, constantly evolving aesthetic makes them coveted among haute-couture magazines and advertisers who give them the freedom to make images without the constraints placed on many of their fellow photographers.

In the economics of photography, the divide between commercial and editorial work is pronounced; for fashion, even more so. Fashion photographers use editorial work, often unpaid, to express themselves artistically and to attract the attention of deep-pocketed luxury brands. Alas and Piggott developed their aesthetic shooting and styling for forward-thinking magazines such as Dazed & Confused and i-D and moved on to regularly shoot editorial work for the likes of Vogue and W and ads for brands such as Louis Vuitton and Givenchy.

Stylists love the pair because their infinitely expanding collection of influences means they might be working with any imagery, from raw nature to space alien to zombie baroque. Designers love them because they entice people into a world where a handbag costs more than some cars. “Our job is to create an identity for brands so people can relate to them,” Alas says. “But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hold any artistic value within that process.”

Such a perspective is not necessarily unique, but what sets them apart is their range. Many photographers become known for an easily identifiable style that editors and art directors can bank on. But these two seem to be from the Bruce Lee school of photography. The martial artist whose style became famous for having no identifiable style was unbeatable because opponents could never predict his next move. By not restricting themselves to one style—often even they don’t know what’s coming next—Alas and Piggott have made themselves appealingly versatile.

“It probably would be easy to have one style, to be honest,” Piggott says. “But we would get bored.” Alas concurs: “The substance directs the light, the look, the colors, not our style,” he says. “It would be so vain to start a project with our style. That’s not how we approach it.”

When Alas and Piggott met in 1993 at a party on a pier in Hastings, England, they were barely in their twenties, both club kids looking for the next party. Alas, a Turkish emigré who had studied classical music, tells us that before they met, they hadn’t lived much life yet, and that, in effect, growing up together formed the basis of their fluid working relationship. “We kind of experienced everything together anyway, from the start, so it’s so easy to communicate. It’s like looking back at your diary to say, ‘Oh, do you remember this?’ It evolves very quickly between ourselves.”

Their meeting began a whirlwind romance that ultimately led to their picking up a camera and learning how to make pictures together. They ran with an artsy east London crowd, going to galleries with Lee McQueen (founder of the Alexander ​ McQueen design house) and stylist and fashion editor Katy England, and chasing artists like groupies. Piggott taught Alas, who was assisting McQueen at shows during the early ’90s, how to use a camera, and they developed their workflow and aesthetic in a loft on Old Street.

The two would go to bookshops on Charing Cross Road, look at the their favorite monographs, and try to figure out the lighting. For their earliest shoots, they did everything themselves—styling, hair, makeup, and set design. Their first published work in Dazed & Confused was sparked, unsurprisingly, over drinks with friends who just happened to work there.

Early work for cult titles like Dazed allowed them to work in fashion while retaining the freedom to push their limits artistically. “The Love magazine, the i-D magazine, and in the old days, The Face magazine—all these magazines didn’t have so much of a commercial purpose, but they did have prices of the clothes,” Alas says. “So, yes, we want to do art, we want to show the world that we’re not just about a bag and shoe. Yes, we are rebels and we don’t care about money. But it’s an industry. It’s commercial, plus culture, plus art. In one bag.”

The pair’s pragmatic attitude has helped them navigate the world of commercial fashion, but their taste is responsible for their status as trendsetters. They borrow only from the best. Images by Mert & Marcus draw on the work of such notables as Guy Bourdin, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Helmut Newton, and the duo continually pull from new influences.

But with that approach, their visibility opens them to controversy. A 2011 Love magazine editorial Alas and Piggott produced called “What Lies Beneath” drew criticism online for bearing an undeniable likeness to photographer Jeff Bark’s haunting series Woodpecker. Their 46-page spread, with its striking similarities in subject, tone, and iconography—and even some props—can be said to expand upon the vision of Berk’s original eight images, with a bigger budget and higher production values.

Indeed, not much shackles their creativity: Their shoots boast some of the biggest budgets, most talented collaborators, and hippest influences. They create images with cameras and computers with help from a small army of digital technicians, retouchers, and art assistants before, during, and after their shoots, obsessing about every detail and finding solutions to every problem that arises. Having a team allows them the luxury to concentrate on the more artistic decisions to be made on set rather than be bogged down by technical troubleshooting.

Those artistic decisions are typically collaborations with like-minded creative rock stars like Love founder and editor Katie Grand or Vogue creative director Grace Coddington. Their circle of co-conspirators is small but close. They talk on set in a sort of culture-vulture shorthand, using loose associations to describe the desired vibe for the shoot. When they say to Coddington, “Factory girl, ’60s England, she’s poor, she’s lonely, she’s depressed,” everyone knows what they’re going to get.

So when Vogue’s imposing fashion director, Tonne Goodman, invited them to do last year’s infamous shoot with Adele—which we included in our 2012 Images of the Year (January/February 2013)—they trusted that their vision would make it to the page. Though they were excited fans of Adele’s music, Alas and Piggott had no interest in painting the media’s well-worn picture of a heartsick young starlet with a sharp cockney cackle and velvet vocal chords. They wanted to bring her into their world, make her one of their characters. “We wanted to embrace her beauty, her figure,” Alas says. “Bring her into this world of romance.”

Again, controversy followed. The resulting images drew jeers from critics who called for more authenticity, up in arms at the extensive post­processing applied to the images. Alas could not care less. “When I see a celebrity the way the celebrity [always] is, I have no interest,” he says.

Alas and Piggott do not confine their artistic expression to glossy magazine pages. For years they’ve been working on an archive of personal work, including plenty of nudes, destined eventually for a book (they’ve been offered deals by a few major publishers but have yet to sign). Whatever a Mert & Marcus book ends up looking like, the duo will likely have moved on to something new. And to be sure, it will unpeel more layers of artistic inspiration.

For Piggott, those eclectic touchstones include “dreams and holidays and life,” while Alas explains how his travels influence the work. “You go to a museum, you remember Mona Lisa looking at you,” he says. “You see a girl that looks like Mona Lisa, and you remember that experience.”

That such art informs their work doesn’t mean they’re trying to make a new Mona Lisa. They don’t hide their influences; they made a cactus shrine to Helmut Newton at their palacio in Ibiza after the photographic great died. Lots of photographers borrow from Newton, and from Richard Avedon and Bill Brandt. But what holds these two together as a team and sets them apart from others is their point of view and their restless hunger to try something else—and then something else again. Alas says that he doesn’t even like 80 percent of their past work. It’s that drive and dissatisfaction that pushes them forward.

“I think that’s the hardest thing, when you have a certain level of taste,” Piggott says. “Trying to please yourself.”

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