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Over a career spanning nearly three decades, Damian Strohmeyer has scored 70 Sports Illustrated covers. Five of his images appear in SI’s 100 Greatest Sports Photos of All Time. He’s shot World Series, Super Bowls (27 of them), NCAA basketball, and the Olympics. His other clients run equally top-shelf: Canon, Nike, Major League Baseball, the US Golf Association, Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post. Strohmeyer says his success comes down to a few simple rules. Among them: Be prepared, be courteous, and be knowledgeable. And of course, take excellent pictures. Here he shares his secrets for making gold medal worthy sports photos.

Be Prepared

“I don’t mind being out-photographed,” Strohmeyer says. “I really mind being out-thought.” Shooting sports is no more unpredictable than any other assignment. Which is to say, it is always unpredictable. While some photographers enjoy the thrill of working without a net, Strohmeyer has always preferred a more Boy Scout–like approach. “You want to be flexible, and you want to be able to handle unusual requests or last-minute requests, but to do that it helps a lot to be prepared,” he says.

“The day before the job is when I put all the thought processes in order,” Strohmeyer says. “What equipment am I going to need? What’s the client looking for? Checking the weather if it’s an outdoor event, checking the lighting if it’s indoors.” He plans his shots based on the venue’s sightlines, any remotes he plans to set up, and, depending on the game, according to individual players’ tendencies. “The more little things you can get out of the way before the shoot, the more time you’re going to have to concentrate on the actual photographs,” he says.

When traveling, Strohmeyer advises, always carry backup: batteries, flashes, and lenses. “Obviously you don’t travel with two 400mm f/2.8s,” he says. “It’s not really practical. But if it’s a big enough job, I’m going to have two 70–200mms in case something breaks down.”

And backup isn’t limited to gear. It’s also the network of people you can call on to bail you out if FedEx delivers a case to the wrong place, you leave your monopod at home, or worse, something breaks. “If my 400mm f/2.8 were damaged before a football game, there’s somebody I can call who can get me through that job,” he says.

Tell A Story

Whether it’s a shoot for editorial clients or commercial ones, your pictures will need to communicate. A lot of that communication depends on your ability to express yourself creatively, Strohmeyer says. But even the most interesting subject will lose impact against a background that’s lousy.

So what makes a background work? “You want the background not to subtract from the picture,” Strohmeyer says. If it enhances the image, that’s even better. Shooting golf? Use the course’s sand traps, green grass, and trees. The golden glow of a basketball court can work when the players’ uniforms have a lot of contrast; 
a brightly shaded key area (under the basket) can be even better. 
If you can find them, wide swaths of pure color will often add to 
the photograph.

Alas, those kinds of backgrounds aren’t made to order, and you’ll need to do what you can to compensate. “I [shot a game] at a horrible location recently. The background, you almost couldn’t have made it worse. It was like putting a football stadium in a strip mall,” Strohmeyer says. “In cases like that, you shoot everything wide open and try to fill the frame up the best you can.”

Know Where the Action Is

If there’s one thing that’s more deeply embedded in Strohmeyer’s photographer DNA than being prepared, it’s knowing your beat. “People say to me often, ‘You know quite a bit about sports.’ I never thought of myself like that, but I guess it’s true,” he says.

After years immersed in sports, first as a student basketball player and then as a passionate, observant sports journalist, there just aren’t too many surprises. “Hockey I don’t profess to know quite as much about, but in basketball, I know how the players align, what side the action’s going to go to, where the isolation is, just because I know the game,” he says.

In a practical sense, this knowledge is your friend. “If a pitcher has a 95 or a 98 mile an hour fastball and there’s a right-handed hitter, he’s much more apt to push the ball to the right side of the infield. Who does a particular quarterback look for in critical situations? At a high school football game, how do you know where the ball is going to go? Find the biggest guy on the team—they’re going to run all their plays over to that guy. In high school and college basketball, most players are right-handed and still favor that side of the court. That helps you. All those little things help you figure out where to be and how to anticipate shots.”

And if you do miss something, all you need to do is wait, Strohmeyer advises. “My boss in my first job in Topeka, Kansas, would say, ‘If somebody does something once and you miss it, don’t worry about it too much, because chances are they’re going to do it again.’ I call this the rule of repeating action.”

Try A Different Perspective

Many iconic sports images show action on the field. But some of this shooter’s favorite shots are of moments off the field. Such opportunities make pictures that give a 360-degree view of the story.

“There are a lot of nuances in baseball, and you want to kind of have one eye open all the time,” Strohmeyer says. “[Former Boston Red Sox pitcher] Pedro Martinez was always kind of a joker, and as a starting pitcher, he was in the dugout all the time. At one game I remember looking over, and all of a sudden the other players were taping him to a post in the dugout with athletic tape. It was a hilarious picture, but you had to be paying attention.”

In the arena, remote set-ups can literally give another dimension to your shots. “I like basket-level pictures, because that’s the level the players play at. It gives you a different perspective,” Strohmeyer says. Shooting from directly above can give a photo a clean, high-contrast background and show the geometry of the game. “When the goalie bends over backwards to make a save, and he’s looking straight up in the air, that’s a great picture,” he says.

Remotes have to be approved by officials, and the rules vary by sport, league, and venue. “Most of the time it’s not a big deal, because it’s done fairly frequently, particularly in the NBA. Colleges, maybe not so much,” says Strohmeyer. “It’s a communication thing. There are a lot of considerations, the biggest of which is not interfering with play, but the main thing is to be above board with people and bring them into your concept. Get the people in the building to embrace the idea.”

Remember, You’re Shooting People

Under the padding, helmets, and face masks, athletes are humans, and that’s what fans want to see. How do you get behind the face mask? “Great athletes, great pictures” is one rule of thumb. “Some players just stand out. [Wide receiver] Randy Moss was always face-forward, and he made athletic plays,” Strohmeyer says. “He jumped high. He extended out.”

Also look for athletes—as well as fans, coaches, and officials—who face forward, with wide-open eyes and expressive faces. Part of that is the individuals; another factor is light. Even in auto racing, Strohmeyer says, “there are tracks where at certain times of day the light gets low enough you can actually see into the cockpit of the car.” Light shifts throughout the course of an event, and so should you: Shoot front-lit for a while, then backlit; if you’ve shot a lot of horizontals from the side, change it up by going deeper and longer. “There are all these evaluations you make about the types of photographs you want to take that go on constantly,” he says.

In the end, Strohmeyer says, “you’re trying to sum up the drama and the emotion of the sport. You want those pictures to have memory. And if you can do that, you’re going to be pretty successful, whether you’re shooting an ad campaign for Gatorade or a game for the local high school paper. If you can tell the stories in that manner, you’re going to 
be successful.”

ENTER OUR JULY SPORTS PHOTOGRAPHY CHALLENGE

The post Tips From a Pro: Damian Strohmeyer On Shooting Better Sports Photos appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Ceramics is quite a lonely life. You’re either working by yourself on a pottery wheel or you’re making weird, giant sculptures. I’m probably more social and not a potter,” says Andrew Yee, reflecting on his unusual route from ceramicist to fashion photographer. “Photography is very social. Especially in fashion. It’s very difficult to create an image by yourself.”

As the 33-year-old Honolulu native retraces his steps from artsy high-schooler in Hawaii to Ceramics major at Marymount College in Los Angeles to 2005 graduate of Parsons The New School for Design in New York and to Manhattan-based pro, it is apparent that Yee is anything but solitary. Or sedentary. Even when chatting on the phone, he bounces from point to point, every new idea a shiny object worth pausing to consider before moving on to the next, trusting that whatever path he’s on will take him someplace pleasant, or at least someplace interesting.

Wherever the conversation goes—to the perils of travel in India (“We flew 28 hours and drove for five, and we were in customs for three hours. It was insane!”) or unrealistically real models (“The best real girl, meaning she spent two hours in hair and makeup and she’s five-ten”) to bloggers’ impact on American fashion (“Bloggers have so much influence now: They write about something and suddenly it becomes the norm”)—Yee steers back so often to the social and collaborative aspects of photography that it’s easy to get the sense that he’s simply not himself without someone to play in his sandbox with.

His preferred collaborator is Damian Foxe, the fashion director of the Financial Times‘ magazine How To Spend It. Foxe produces a few dozen fashion stories each year, and Yee shoots many of them. Their partnership has yielded fashion stories that are set in far-flung locales and characterized by chewy, sensuous images chunky with texture and pattern and wet with saturated color. A package set in India feasts on metallics, earthy textures, and jewel tones; a shoot in rustic Utopia, Texas, near San Antonio, captures so much environmental detail you can feel the tree bark scratching the model’s translucent skin.

“The clothing is the main thing that brings us all there, but the location often dictates the story,” Yee says of the symbiosis of clothing, hair and makeup, location, and personality that happens in fashion shoots. “For example, obviously, we’re not going to shoot cocktail dresses in India. You can have all these grand ideas, and then sometimes you see the model or the location or the weather pours down on you, and you have to morph.”

Yee has a “more is more” aesthetic that’s well suited to high fashion, an area he easily drifted toward at Parsons, where he developed his style shooting his fellow students’ projects. “I don’t know how I got my aesthetic, really; maybe it’s my personality,” he says. “But I hate, absolutely hate, middle of the road. For me it’s either no makeup and no hair and [the model] is completely broken, or it’s a glitter face with tons of jewelry and a wig. Any kind of realness in between just gets really uncomfortable for me. Sometimes things need to be a little different to be grabbing. If you’re going to make a statement, make a statement.”

American fashion, however, sits squarely in the middle of the road. “It’s at this state now where it’s very realistic—almost street wear,” Yee says, pointing to classic brands like Ralph Lauren. “America is a powerhouse. It’s about sales and approachability. And we’re such a young country. We don’t have all that history of fashion, the ridiculous corsets, and wigs, and royalty. We started out with pilgrims. Basics.”

Yee says this isn’t a critique of American fashion, just a different aspect of the business. “A lot of American publications will look at my work and say—I hear this all the time—‘It’s so beautiful but it will scare our readers.’” A few years ago, he says, the mismatch got under his skin. “I had a moment where I thought I wasn’t really with the times,” he says. “‘Am I just being extremely difficult and crazy?’ I tried to [alter] my portfolio for that market, and it just doesn’t work.”

So he shoots frequently for European publications: HTSI, Vogue UK, Elle Germany, Russian and Spanish editions of Marie Claire and Harper’s Bazaar, a long list of others. And that’s precisely his advice to young photographers: Have an aesthetic. “Find a vision for you that can be applied multiple ways,” Yee says. “Because you’re going to get thrown into job situations, especially in the fashion industry, where you have one shot at it and if you mess that shot up, 95 percent of the time they’re never going to circle back to you.”

Yee admits, though, that even an unmistakably unique and valuable look is not enough to navigate the twists and turns of the fashion industry. “It’s really tricky,” he says. “There’s a lot of dealing with clients. My approach is just to tell myself, ‘Take it easy. It’s fashion. It’s a game. But it’s also a business and you have to take it seriously. I still struggle with making connections and going to meetings, but it’s the nature of the beast.”

That’s why lurking beneath the surface of this ebullient creative adventurer is a tough task­master who knows how to produce a shoot. It’s a role he took to naturally as a production assistant for photographers such as Michael Thompson and Joshua Jordan before signing on with Atelier Management in 2008.

In many ways, to Yee a shoot is an opportunity to host a perfect party. At a shoot, he says, “often it’s just creative people sitting around having too many coffees and too many cigarettes and nothing gets done. Essentially we’re creating an art piece, and you need a lot to create a piece of art. I know things take time. It also just needs to be as efficient as possible.”

If you’re coming to a Yee production, he would prefer that you come prepared. Know your craft well, and if you’re a client, know what you want. “I hate wishy-washy,” he says. “I understand that we’re creating art and it does take trial and error. When it comes from an unskilled place or an inefficient place, where you’re trialing and erroring, trialing and erroring, and it’s going nowhere, then it’s the worst.”

In the end, it’s still all about the people. “I have shoot teams that I love working with and going on amazing trips with,” Yee says. One such trip was, in fact, Utopia. On that shoot for HTSI, all the parts worked: idyllic (if sweltering) setting, capable model, skillful crew, gracious hosts. “This [local] family just engulfed us, like we were part of the family,” he says. “They put us up in these lovely little cabins. They cooked for us; we went to their barbecues. It was nice to go and not be like, Fashion!”

The post The Extreme Aesthetics of Andrew Yee appeared first on Popular Photography.

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It’s a Friday in early August, and on the walls of the Joseloff Gallery at the University of Hartford hangs a student exhibition of the Hartford Art School’s MFA program in photography, where Alec Soth has been in residence this week. Throughout the wide-ranging installations a half dozen plain white tables are interspersed, on which sit stacks and stacks of books. Soth ambles in and takes a seat at one of them. “I’ve already done like 30 critiques this week,” he says, his voice deflated to a whisper. Clearly, sitting down for an interview is not high on his list of things he’d rather do right now. But Alec Soth is not one to be put off by a little challenge.

Admittedly shy as a kid, Soth (sounds like “both”) has demonstrated over his career—launched in 2004 with his breakout monograph Sleeping by the Mississippi (Steidl), which follows the big river to tell visual stories of the sometimes bleak lifestyles and often quirky person- alities that dot Middle America, and evolving through the 2008 DIY publishing venture Little Brown Mushroom and recent live performance projects—that success comes from peeling yourself off the wall, engaging with others, and stepping to the front of the room.

This lesson is not lost on him, and he’s sensitive to it when he visits programs like Hartford’s. “There’s usually those people in the back who don’t say much, but you can see they have something going on,” he says. “I’ve always sympathized with that person, because I was that person.”

Today he still looks most at home sitting in a quiet space surrounded by books. “In the beginning books were important because it’s how I digested most of the work that I saw,” says the Twin Cities native, who studied fine art at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, and found his own voice in photography during a summer class at the University of Minnesota. “And I think photography, by virtue of the very medium, works well on paper and in pages. There’s a kind of control you have with a book. It’s repeatable; you can guide a narrative.” He picks up a perfectly bound portfolio and flips through its pages. “When I was starting out there was less emphasis on the book. Each student in this program is expected to produce a book and an exhibition, which I think is a big advancement in the medium.”

While Soth’s inherent inclination is to put his work between two covers, his own creative intuitions, wanderlusty projects from Mississippi to Dog Days Bogotá to Niagara, as well as the demands that come with international accolades (including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013) have led him to stretch beyond the borders of the printed page and outside the boundaries of the solitary shooter. “A lot of photographers are photographers because they like working alone. I got into it because I liked working alone,” he says. So in 2013 he held the Camp for Socially Awkward Storytellers, an event that brought 15 artists from around the world to Minneapolis for a week to find stories, make art, and, as a culminating mini thesis project, present it to an audience.

“They were super challenged because they didn’t know they were going to be doing that,” he says of his campers. But they rose to it: One student from China tried to meet people in the city; another artist interviewed people outside of a food co-op. “It was hugely successful— and a big life-changing thing for me,” Soth says. “I just knew it was going to lead to something else.”

Indeed. After the camp—in which Soth himself did not actually perform—karma came calling in 2014. “I got asked out of the blue by the Aperture Foundation to do a live event at their fundraiser,” Soth says with a sardonic chuckle, reflecting on the understatement. The fundraiser was to launch The Open Road, an anthology of influential American road photographs, by artists such as Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore. The producers didn’t want him simply to show up and chat about his pictures; they were looking for a collaboration with creative potential. Inspired by the subject matter, Soth jumped in with both feet and reached out to musician and outspoken political activist Billy Bragg, whose longtime interest in American folk music is well known. It was like Luke meets Obi-Wan, rock star version.

“So we did this tour,” Soth says, “from Rock Island, Illinois, to Little Rock, Arkansas,” tracing the roots and lore around the song “Rock Island Line.” “I told the story and he sang the songs,” Soth says, with videographer Isaac Gale and folk musician Joe Purdy to document the tour in video and song. “I realized I had to put effort into it, but I started learning that there was creative potential in it,” Soth says.

Riding a collaborative wave, Soth paired with New York Times Sunday Magazine photo editor Stacey Baker on a story in which they encountered the perils of speed-dating and the comforting endurance of couples who’ve stuck together for decades. What began as an assignment for Pop Up Magazine turned into a TED talk in Vancouver. “I think there is something that can be conveyed with images and live events,” Soth says. “It’s challenging and it’s scary, which is good.”

After his Connecticut residency, he goes back to Minneapolis where he will host his latest experiment, the Winnebago Workshop. The “mobile photography lab for teenagers” merges the penchant for travel and storytelling at the core of his work; his recent collaborative experiments; a newfound desire to teach; and an old Thor Hurricane he’s had sitting in storage since he bought it for the Magnum project Postcards from America in 2011. Each day for a week, Soth, two other teaching artists, and about seven high school juniors and seniors will pile into the RV (“It’s sort of a Breaking Bad– mobile”) and set out on day trips to find stories and make art.

He sees teaching as a chance to contribute in a way he wouldn’t if he were only making photographs. “I think I’ve just hit an age in my life where I feel like I can possibly offer something educationally, and I’m so indebted to my high school teacher, who changed my life. I’m not convinced I’m capable of doing it, but I’m curious to try,” he says. The important thing is keeping it true to his DIY ethos and out of the confines of traditional education. “I want people who are not just looking for something that looks good on their college application, but for people who are the sort of oddballs, that have something going on that maybe we can open up,” he says.

As for his MFA students who may be less concerned about creative freedom and more worried about a career, he advises: “First of all, it is hard. And I’ve had tons of missteps along the way,” he says. “That’s the thing about being creative. You come up with creative solutions to problems. And that’s not just in your work, but in life.”

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Life changes, and with it, so will your art. “It’s called an art practice because you have to practice it,” says Rachel Barrett, 33. Earlier in her career, she criss-crossed the U.S., documenting cooperative, back-to-the-land communities in Bolinas, California, and upstate New York, as well as roadside markets and oddities at points in between. After the birth of her child in March 2014, she traded many of her travel-heavy projects for new ideas she could explore locally. Working in her home studio in Brooklyn, New York, she’s creating a series of still lifes called Specimens.

“This work is still very new, so a lot of it feels more like an exercise,” Barrett says. She sets weekly milestones for herself, such as completing one or more photo-graphs or generating new ideas. One of the first images she made in the series “has a lot of purpose and significance,” she says. It’s my daughter’s umbilical cord shaped into a heart, a crystal from a dream catcher my best friend made for me upon my wedding, and the wishbone from the chicken my husband and I had for dinner the night I went into labor. But I’ve shifted, simplifying many elements so others take on more significance.”

It’s a shift that parallels the one she’s experienced in her entire approach to her work, balancing her personal projects with freelance editorial and commercial photography as well as teaching. And it’s a shift that’s often easier said than done. “In school, things feel finished when they may not be, and in many ways you work in a bubble,” she says. “Trying to make your life as a photographer is a juggling act. You can only learn to time manage and prioritize by actually doing it.”

Indeed, Barrett has found that making photo-graphs isn’t just a part of life but integral to it. After graduating from New York University with a BFA in photography, she made her way into working in independent film; her own photography fell by the wayside, but the hiatus was brief. “When I picked up my camera and started shooting again, I knew I needed to rededicate myself to photography,” she says. “But I needed the structure and discipline of school to help me.” So she enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, receiving an MFA in photography, video and related media in 2008.

Structure and self-discipline have served her well in her career, but her interest in other people, and the interplay between individual and place, are equally essential to her work. Her earlier projects explored the dynamics of communal living and connection to the land. “Bolinas is a place where time stands still,” Barrett says of her 2009–10 series documenting life on a cooperative in Northern California. “And photographs are a place where time stands still. So my intention was to create an expression of experience.” This idea of the individual interdependent with community, she says, helps to propel the creative process. “Even if your process is incredibly solitary, you need peers who are equally engaged to help you move your work forward,” she says.

Even Specimens has its origins in relationship, though of a different kind. “In most of these images I’m using objects that don’t belong to me. That led me to thinking about my relationship to objects, with myself as a collector and organizer,” Barrett says. “Making the early images led me to where I am [with the project] today, with much more purpose and intention. I’m still figuring it out.”

Allowing an idea to change is all part of the process, an important lesson Barrett took away from her graduate studies: “Don’t dismiss an idea before you try it out, because although it may not ultimately work, it may well lead you on to something great,” she says.

As a student, Barrett says, it was easy to think of work and art as separate from the real world, but in fact, she’s found, they are an essential part of life. And when they operate in tandem, it can lead to new projects or opportunities, like making books or, importantly, getting hired. Her series chronicling the end of the independent New York City newsstand as they were replaced with uniform kiosks throughout the city from 2006 to 2012 is in postproduction and being shopped around to publishers. And her thoughtfully intimate, nature- and light-filled aesthetic has drawn numerous commercial and editorial clients.

“In 2009 I was out in Bolinas working on that project, and took a day trip up to Point Reyes. We were shopping at the Cowgirl Creamery and this amazing woman—Shorty, of Shorty’s Produce, next to the Creamery—saw my camera and started talking to me,” Barrett says. “It didn’t take long before she picked up the current issue of Culture magazine and said I should contact the editor, Kate, who used to be at Cowgirl, and gave me her email address. When I came back home the following week I sent an email saying that I’d love to work for them. It was a few months before I heard back. The photo editor told me they had been holding on to my email for when they had shoots in New York, and they hired me repeatedly for really fun stories.”

The moral of the story, she says, is that while a distinct personal style rarely gives a photographer total control over a project, it’s next to impossible to get in the door without one. “Sometimes a client really wants me to make work like I normally would,” Barrett says, pointing to her portrait of Meghan Shea for the October 2013 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine as an example. “Other times I’m there to help actualize an existing vision.”

Whether making still lifes at home with her baby nearby or shooting an editorial portrait, Barrett sees whatever she creates as a piece of a whole creative existence. “I’m doing what was so exciting to me about photography when I first began making pictures 20 years ago,” she says: “looking at familiar things in a new and unfamiliar way, how these things look when photographed, and, always, the magic of the light.”

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Robert Polidori started his career in motion pictures, and his renowned photography still retains a cinematic quality. Often on assignment for publications including The New Yorker and_ Vanity Fair,_ Polidori has documented scenes ranging from disaster—such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—to grandeur, such as his ongoing, three-decade study of the restoration of the Château de Versailles. Here he talks with American Photo about the philosophy and methods behind his visual mastery.

_You may be best known for your photographs of interior spaces. What appeals to you about those subjects? _

Thanks for not saying that I’m an architectural photographer, because I always get thrown in that category. It’s true, I’ve photographed a lot of interiors and a lot of buildings, but believe it or not, I consider them portraiture. Architectural photography is like product photography. You’re taking pictures of buildings—basically they’re product shots. I would say most architects like to see their work represented like virgins. Unused. Devoid of people or traces of people. I’m interested in what I would call more habitat photography, that is, the ways people use architecture and what traces such use, over time, leaves behind. For me, it’s a kind of psychological, or socioeconomic, sociopolitical, socio-psychic portraiture.

So you’re looking at the psychology of place?

Of place and time—it’s history that I am trying to serve. There’s the Freudian concept of the superego. [It has a role in] the way people wear clothes, who they think they are, or who they want to be. It’s the same with the interiors that they inhabit. Living takes place over time.

When I made a transition many years ago from cinematography to still photography, it was because I was highly influenced by a book that I read called The Art of Memory, by Francis Yates, about ancient memory systems. The room represents to me the psychic state of the inhabitants.

And even in still photographs you can see how those states change over time.

I would say that different periods of time are deduced by the appearances of traces of one thing over another over another over another.

It sounds like Versailles, which is not only a former residence but now a museum of history, is an ideal place for such a study.

I was interested in Versailles because it was patently made for the kind of time studies that I wanted to do. I have some photos where you see behind the fabrics that are on a wall. You see different stratas simultaneously. That’s a way of seeing time. [Carl] Jung did this thing, what he called the collective…

The collective unconscious.

Yes. Then I do a twist on it. I call it the collective superego. History is defined by experts, historians, academics, people who decide for the culture what that culture was and thinks that it is and thinks that it should be going toward. It’s collective there. In my view, every culture finds periods in the past which it likes, which it has resonances with, and other periods which it doesn’t. These change over time, the way fashion does. In a place like Versailles—which existed as a seat of government for more than a century and a half—a lot of fashion and a lot of history have gone by. And they’re constantly remaking rooms the way they were at a certain time period.

I’ve been working there 30 years. Even in a single decade, they’ll accent this more than that. This is what I call historical revisionism. Not in the way that’s used by Nazi war crime deniers. I mean simply what the two words say: You’re re-visioning history.

When you restore something, what does that mean, to restore? Is it to make something that once existed look brand new again? Or is it to keep it like a—not to sound vulgar—like a mummified cadaver? Or is it a composite view of time, taking aspects of the way that it looks now and in the past, but never simultaneously that way? It’s a composite. Those time processes are sociologically rich for me.

What role does large-format photography play in your attempts to answer those questions for yourself?

I think that’s twofold: resolution, and what I call the grammar of pictorial representation. I think the picture should almost look better than the thing itself, or else why bother to go through the whole thing of taking the picture? You should just go and look at it then. I’m not big on the snapshot thing, though I understand snapshots can imprint a very fleeting moment. These are not without value, don’t misunderstand me.

When it comes to other kinds of documents, I like to examine them. Having them be higher res, as the expression is now, to me is more satisfying. They just lend themselves to better scrutiny.

Two, view cameras afford one perspective correction. For me, proper view camera manipulations are like proper grammar. I try to take the picture in a certain way that it communicates and is referential. In that way, I think of myself also as an iconographer. I make icons.

_What do you mean by that? _

In nonrepresentational art, say, those drips and stuff, they’re not representing any other thing except the actual paint. That kind of stuff to me is of limited interest, but regardless, I think objectively it’s a nonrepresentational icon. What interests me in photography is its referential nature. Though there are certain photographers, especially in the last decade, who are making non-referential types of images, what interests me is the language of images themselves. Certain images seem to have more meaning or psychological, psychic content than others.

_How do your recent photographs of the slums of Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro function as icons? _

I’m attracted to the kinds of things that aren’t going to exist much longer. To me, they’re the ones most deserving of being recorded. Over time I started seeing human habitats as nesting phenomena. These dense types of cities superficially look like seabird rookeries. Then there seem to be two prevalent yet opposing ways that cities are made. One is the pre-planned one, and the other is what they call in French un cité sauvage. They just crop up wild with no plan. Need made it.

One of the things that I find interesting about these wild cities is that they’re actually highly individualized. Each apartment in the new highrises in these areas is nearly identical. But the interiors are much more individualized than the upper middle class homes, which seem to be almost identical. I noticed this also in New Orleans after [Hurricane] Katrina. I used to think that one of the main advantages of wealth was the capacity to individualize one’s life trajectory. That still may be true. But visually it’s a different story.

Because in wealthier homes people are decorating from the same big brands?

Yeah. I found that amazing. I came to realize that these poor dwellings were psychologically or psychically more rich. Whereas the more wealthy ones, they were more purchasing a persona, or adopting rather than springing forth from the psyche. That’s my point of view. I could, of course, be wrong there.

We talked about decay and change in your work. In the slum communities, which are so crowded with disparate objects, do you see growth or decay?

Decay comes with time. It shows traces of time. Totally new stuff, to me, is more boring because it doesn’t show much time.

Earlier, you mentioned that you don’t consider fashion to be art. It’s more product.

That was snooty. Here are the things I don’t like about fashion photography. One is the psychological stance. Eyes are the window to the soul, or at least to the psychological state. In the great majority of fashion photography in the past, say, 40 to 50 years, they have zombie like eyes. They look at the viewer—or at the photographer, who is the metaphor for the viewer-to-be—like, “I’m not looking at you. I do not value you.” There’s a sense of denial that runs through it. I always wondered, why does denial sell clothes? However, pathos doesn’t. Not only in fashion photography but in all product photography, pathos is the last psychological state which is admitted.

Pathos is where things get messy.

It is the affirmation that life is not infinite. That life is tragedy. This, they never admit. But all great beautiful models do end up in death. All those clothes will end up ripped.

_How did the Bottega Veneta project come about? _

That’s just a fluke. It happened because Tomas Maier happens to use artists for his campaigns. Most big fashion campaigns are made by maybe the same five to ten photographers.

It was shot at the Palazzo Papadopoli, in Venice—how did you end up in a venue so well suited to your aesthetic?

They wanted me first to shoot it in a theater, but there were only one or two possible contexts there, so I asked for a location with more possibilities. I based the psychological state that I wanted to project on [Michaelangelo] Antonioni movies, like L’Avventura. Also, each of the models had a different sense of time. So I shot the background, then I would shoot her, and then him, and then composite the images together. Technically, it was easier to shoot them separately. I like the ones where he’s close up and she’s further back, and it’s focused on both, with almost perfect depth of field. It’s an idealized point of view. This is what the eye thinks it sees. Ultimately, I’m interested in what we perceive. When you want to be an iconographer, you have to understand how the brain perceives it, not just the eye.

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It’s a Friday in early August, and on the walls of the Joseloff Gallery at the University of Hartford hangs a student exhibition of the Hartford Art School’s MFA program in photography, where Alec Soth has been in residence this week. Throughout the wide-ranging installations a half dozen plain white tables are interspersed, on which sit stacks and stacks of books. Soth ambles in and takes a seat at one of them. “I’ve already done like 30 critiques this week,” he says, his voice deflated to a whisper. Clearly, sitting down for an interview is not high on his list of things he’d rather do right now. But Alec Soth is not one to be put off by a little challenge.

Admittedly shy as a kid, Soth (sounds like “both”) has demonstrated over his career—launched in 2004 with his breakout monograph Sleeping by the Mississippi (Steidl), which follows the big river to tell visual stories of the sometimes bleak lifestyles and often quirky personalities that dot Middle America, and evolving through the 2008 DIY publishing venture Little Brown Mushroom and recent live performance projects—that success comes from peeling yourself off the wall, engaging with others, and stepping to the front of the room.

This lesson is not lost on him, and he’s sensitive to it when he visits programs like Hartford’s. “There’s usually those people in the back who don’t say much, but you can see they have something going on,” he says. “I’ve always sympathized with that person, because I was that person.”

Today he still looks most at home sitting in a quiet space surrounded by books. “In the beginning books were important because it’s how I digested most of the work that I saw,” says the Twin Cities native, who studied fine art at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, and found his own voice in photography during a summer class at the University of Minnesota. “And I think photography, by virtue of the very medium, works well on paper and in pages. There’s a kind of control you have with a book. It’s repeatable; you can guide a narrative.” He picks up a perfectly bound portfolio and flips through its pages. “When I was starting out there was less emphasis on the book. Each student in this program is expected to produce a book and an exhibition, which I think is a big advancement in the medium.”

While Soth’s inherent inclination is to put his work between two covers, his own creative intuitions, wanderlusty projects from Mississippi to Dog Days Bogotá to Niagara, as well as the demands that come with international accolades (including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013) have led him to stretch beyond the borders of the printed page and outside the boundaries of the solitary shooter. “A lot of photographers are photographers because they like working alone. I got into it because I liked working alone,” he says. So in 2013 he held the Camp for Socially Awkward Storytellers, an event that brought 15 artists from around the world to Minneapolis for a week to find stories, make art, and, as a culminating mini thesis project, present it to an audience.

“They were super challenged because they didn’t know they were going to be doing that,” he says of his campers. But they rose to it: One student from China tried to meet people in the city; another artist interviewed people outside of a food co-op. “It was hugely successful—and a big life-changing thing for me,” Soth says. “I just knew it was going to lead to something else.”

Indeed. After the camp—in which Soth himself did not actually perform—karma came calling in 2014. “I got asked out of the blue by the Aperture Foundation to do a live event at their fundraiser,” Soth says with a sardonic chuckle, reflecting on the understatement. The fundraiser was to launch The Open Road, an anthology of influential American road photographs, by artists such as Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore. The producers didn’t want him simply to show up and chat about his pictures; they were looking for a collaboration with creative potential. Inspired by the subject matter, Soth jumped in with both feet and reached out to musician and outspoken political activist Billy Bragg, whose longtime interest in American folk music is well known. It was like Luke meets Obi-Wan, rock star version.

“So we did this tour,” Soth says, “from Rock Island, Illinois, to Little Rock, Arkansas,” tracing the roots and lore around the song “Rock Island Line.” “I told the story and he sang the songs,” Soth says, with videographer Isaac Gale and folk musician Joe Purdy to document the tour in video and song. “I realized I had to put effort into it, but I started learning that there was creative potential in it,” Soth says.

Riding a collaborative wave, Soth paired with New York Times Sunday Magazine photo editor Stacey Baker on a story in which they encountered the perils of speed-dating and the comforting endurance of couples who’ve stuck together for decades. What began as an assignment for Pop Up Magazine turned into a TED talk in Vancouver. “I think there is something that can be conveyed with images and live events,” Soth says. “It’s challenging and it’s scary, which is good.”

After his Connecticut residency, he goes back to Minneapolis where he will host his latest experiment, the Winnebago Workshop. The “mobile photography lab for teenagers” merges the penchant for travel and storytelling at the core of his work; his recent collaborative experiments; a newfound desire to teach; and an old Thor Hurricane he’s had sitting in storage since he bought it for the Magnum project Postcards from America in 2011. Each day for a week, Soth, two other teaching artists, and about seven high school juniors and seniors will pile into the RV (“It’s sort of a Breaking Bad–mobile”) and set out on day trips to find stories and make art.

He sees teaching as a chance to contribute in a way he wouldn’t if he were only making photographs. “I think I’ve just hit an age in my life where I feel like I can possibly offer something educationally, and I’m so indebted to my high school teacher, who changed my life. I’m not convinced I’m capable of doing it, but I’m curious to try,” he says. The important thing is keeping it true to his DIY ethos and out of the confines of traditional education. “I want people who are not just looking for something that looks good on their college application, but for people who are the sort of oddballs, that have something going on that maybe we can open up,” he says.

As for his MFA students who may be less concerned about creative freedom and more worried about a career, he advises: “First of all, it is hard. And I’ve had tons of missteps along the way,” he says. “That’s the thing about being creative. You come up with creative solutions to problems. And that’s not just in your work, but in life.”

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Ever since his unofficial apprenticeship at Andy Warhol’s Factory in the mid-1960s, Stephen Shore’s career has been defined by his constant search for new photographic questions to answer. In the process, he has pushed boundaries and squashed conventions. From helping to usher color into art photography with the series American Surfaces (1972–73) to challenging it with a number of black-and-white projects throughout the 1990s, the visual vocabulary he developed has become integral to how we see America in particular and photographs in general.

Fast forward to 2012, when a personal question sent him abroad. Inspired by the Survivor Mitzvah Project, a Los Angeles–based charity that helps people who fled Nazi persecution to Eastern Europe and Russia, he took his camera to Ukraine. His paternal grandfather had emigrated from there in the 1890s—a personal connection to his subject that marked new territory for the photographer.

“My wife said this would be a great subject for me to photograph—and she was right,” Shore says. The resulting book, Survivors in Ukraine (Phaidon, 2015), depicts the ordinary lives of people whose extraordinary escape from the holocaust has ironically left them impoverished and isolated.

We asked Shore, the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts and director of the photography program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, to walk through a few of these images, and offer us a master class on how to see light, structure a photograph, and create images with subtle emotional power.

Lesson One: Avoid Manipulation

An overarching question for Shore in Ukraine was this: “How could I take pictures that didn’t depend on the associations people would have with [the holocaust], but at the same time not ignore it? For many years I stayed away from subject matter that had an obvious emotional charge,” he says. “I found Ukraine to be, for me, a very emotionally charged place. It was kind of in the air, it lingered for me, and I can’t tell if it’s something about Ukraine or something about my family history there, or a combination.”

He visited twice, in the summer of 2012 and the fall of 2013, and before his second trip, he says, “I wondered, ‘Is the same kind of feeling going to wash over me again?’ And I found it did, as soon as I landed. So I think the openness to a certain emotional level in the picture is different.”

Lesson Two: Hone Your Technique

To be fully open to new possibilities in content, strong technique is an essential resource. For Shore, who dedicated all of the 1970s to intentionally, methodically experimenting with every formal variable in a photograph, the technical considerations of making a picture have become second nature. “At some point you get a handle on it,” he says. “It’s like if you were a baseball player and you’re playing the outfield. Someone hits a fly ball, you can’t think about the trajectory of the ball and how fast you have to run to be able to intersect with it and catch it. At some point your muscles have developed a kind of memory…from hours and hours of practice. And you just do it. At a certain point it comes naturally, after years of experimenting.”

Lesson Three: Use the Right Gear

Shore shot “American Surfaces” with 35mm. Finding the color negative film at that time not sharp enough to make prints as big as he wanted, he switched to 4×5, and later 8×10, view cameras. But even those came with frustrations, mostly of the ‘this gear is too damn cumbersome’ variety. “What I was really looking for was a 35mm camera that could take a picture that was as sharp as a 4×5, that had the same tonality and crispness,” he says. “But it didn’t exist. Well, now it does.” (Shore used a Nikon D3X for his first set of Ukraine images and a Nikon D800 for the second trip.)

Shooting digital in Ukraine opened up creative possibilities that Shore would not have had with a view camera. “I could think about taking pictures in places I could never think about taking pictures before,” he says. The interiors there were often extremely dark, and he bracketed many of his photos, combining an exposure for the highlights, an exposure for the midtones, and an exposure for the shadows. Sometimes he was photographing in rooms so dark he had to bring in extra light just to focus the camera, as in one image from the book of a bed with lace pillow covers. “That was a room with very, very little light, and I think it would have been, maybe not impossible, but really difficult to have taken that picture with film,” he says. Yet in that picture the light looks fine.

Shore found himself embracing digital for portraits, too. “I could do these portraits with a view camera, but the speed…with the digital camera becomes less of an imposition on the sitter,” he says. “That changes their emotional state when the picture is being taken. It changes the degree of cooperation that’s necessary on their part.”

Lesson Four: Show, Don’t Tell

Shore’s images often take in a scene in a way that appears organic rather than didactic. In a photo of children playing on a swing set, for example, we barely see that swing set, but once we look at it, it becomes a focal point.

“If I were shooting this with a 35mm film camera, the swing set would get lost in the picture,” Shore says. “So if I wanted to show the swing set I would have to get off the balcony where I took this from and take a closer picture of it. That picture would say, essentially, ‘Look through my eyes, and look at this swing set.’ Or ‘Look at this swing set; it is worthy of your attention.’” Instead, he says, shooting with the Nikon D3X means that swing set “can be one of a number of points of interest. So that the viewer, instead of being directed, is given a small world in which they can explore…which is so much better than my saying, ‘Look at it.’”

Lesson Five: Invite Exploration

While the still lifes in this series at first look quite different from the other exteriors—more stark, less lush, less inviting to the eye to explore—they actually are built on similar principles, reading with a level of detail that invites the viewer to roam the image. “Even if there’s a single dominant subject—the gourd on the floor, for example,” says Shore, “I can also rely on the descriptive qualities. You can look at the newspaper; you can look at the tear in the wallpaper. Where the painted floor is wearing out. The ads on the newspaper. These descriptive things hold the picture.” This way of designing a photograph so that the subject can simply be, free of the photographer heavy-handedly guiding the viewer, is a defining quality of Shore’s work. “I don’t have to hit you over the head with something, because I know I can rely on the camera to describe it very clearly,” he says.

Lesson Six: Get Physical

A self-directed student without a formal photographic education, Shore spent his early career examining structural variables, asking questions, and putting solutions to the test in different situations. This was not a merely intellectual exercise. “I’m thinking about exactly where I’m standing,” he says. “If I move an inch to my left or right, the space in the picture changes.”

He found this experience to be such an effective way to hone his craft that in their first two years, Shore’s students shoot only film. The physicality of loading film and processing images in the darkroom instills an embodied learning that he believes is difficult to achieve in the virtual world of DSLRs and Photoshop.

“When you go into the darkroom and say, ‘These highlights are a little too bright,’ and then you go and make a new print, you learn to see light,” he says. “When you use a camera and a tripod and decide, ‘I want to move this two inches to my left,’ and you pick it up and put it down, just going through that physical activity makes that decision more visceral and clearer and more conscious than if you held the camera up to your eye and swayed a little bit to your left. You learn, in a more visceral way, photography.”

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Everything is personal for Elinor Carucci. If you ask her for an interview, for example, there’s a chance she might invite you to her home in New York City. If you arrive, say, voiceless with laryngitis, she might offer you tea. Sitting in her living room, you may notice the panels of black seamless next to kids’ drawings amid copies of her monographs and bikes mounted on the exposed brick wall. You may sit on a low sofa and sip green jasmine together. In five minutes you will have become like old friends.

You will have been wrapped in the warmth with which she greets family, friends, photo subjects and students—with which Carucci meets all aspects of living, even the most painful.

“I try to be very nurturing. I think it comes both from the culture of Israel—the Jewish and the Israeli culture,” says the Jerusalem native, who immigrated to New York in 1995 at age 24 to pursue photography. “And a lot is the personality of my parents, who are very warm. Even the nudity shown in my photographs and the intimacy are more common in Israel, I think.”

It’s true, Carucci’s work can be jarring to the unprepared American eye, but not because of the nudity or images that expose moments of family life that usually stay behind closed doors—Dad in his underwear; Junior’s face in a tearful, mucusy sheen post-meltdown; Mom’s sutured belly and sore, swollen breasts. There is an intensely interior quality in her photographs and a willingness to look unflinchingly at even the most painful aspects of living. What gives us pause is the way she looks so deeply and with such affection at the messiness of life we usually rush by, or would just as soon forget altogether.

This sensitivity is a quality that, for Carucci, is both a blessing and a curse in her work as a fine artist, an editorial photographer and as a graduate program faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In the mid-1990s, a naïve newcomer to the city (after three years she still felt new to it), the competition and the constant knocking on gallery doors got under her skin: “I was crying all the time. I called my mom and said, ‘I can’t do this—it’s so, so hard.’” Her mother’s advice: Don’t come back.

It was a now-or-never moment, and, Carucci says, “those are the things that are really hard to do later in life.” (Happy ending: She gave it six weeks, during which she landed a show and representation with the Ricco Maresca gallery, and a career was launched.)

The magazine world came calling when her personal work started to be acknowledged in the art world through gallery shows and her publications: the debut monograph, Closer (Chronicle, 2002) and Diary of a Dancer (Steidl, 2005), her documentation of her day job as a belly dancer when she first moved to New York. (Her most recent book, Mother (Prestel, 2013), is the third installment in her decades-long, highly personal deep dive into the human experience.

“In the beginning I actually turned down some editorial jobs because I was so insecure,” she says. “The way I work allows for mistakes and for bad days where nothing comes out; it’s very private and very sheltered—it’s hard to make a good picture, and even harder to make a body of work that’s meaningful and complex. I was afraid that I didn’t have the technical ability to do editorial work.”

Around that time, George Pitts (then photo director at Life and current faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design) offered some valuable perspective. “He was like, ‘So you’re an artist, you’re not shooting for magazines?’” Carucci says. “What he heard was a kind of arrogance. And god knows I needed the money. So I did take an assignment.”

After those first assignments, Carucci noticed that her personal work brought editorial assignments, and those assignments sat right in her wheelhouse. Stories for Wired, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine focus on families going through difficult times. The roundabout marketing anti-strategy suits her just fine: “You can’t have all the world,” she says. “You have to have a focus and know what you’re putting most of your effort into chasing after.”

At the same time, she says, seeing other people’s pain never gets easier. At one point while shooting a family grappling with the complexities of having a son with pre-psychopathic symptoms, she was moved to tears. “There was something about the father and son that was very emotional for me. Suddenly they hugged in the living room, and I was choking down tears,” she says. “The whole story was heartbreaking. I’ll never forget this story.”

How does that deep empathy translate in the classroom? “Teaching is interesting because as a teacher you also have to be tough,” she says, stiffening her upright ballerina-like posture and faux-karate-chopping the coffee table. “You have to say when the work is not good. Sometimes it’s easy with students who are very open. I would much rather come to class and tell all the students what they do is wonderful, but this is not what they really need all the time. So there is a balance.”

All told, seeking connection through the camera—whether as photographer or subject—is at the heart of what she does. “When I share my insecurities and flaws, they share theirs with me. Then I feel that everything is OK,” she says with a laugh.

While she believes that being vulnerable is an important part of creativity, Carucci knows that hers is not the path for everyone. “Find your voice,” she advises students. “Find out what to keep fighting for, and when to let go. Find a way to make an art career be a positive thing. Endure the negative times and try to find what’s right for you. It’s easy to say, but a lifelong challenge.”

When she needs to, Carucci says, she takes a break—from the networking that goes with building an art career, and even sometimes from making pictures. It may be for a few weeks, a few days or an hour for a mug of tea. Follow her advice, and you may find that your voice has returned.

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Living Room West View

An ordinary kitchen in a ranch-style home, light diffusing through a window and reflecting off the mirrors over scuff-marked, aging wallpaper. A note to self in red lipstick on a mirror. The contents of a closet, half a dozen or so items at a time: dresses, shoes, gowns, furs. The golden statuettes. Photos of friends and family on practically every surface. A pile of red AIDS ribbons. A diamond and emerald necklace dissolving into the sun.

Emeralds

Zooming in on the objects of a life, from reflections of an inimitably public image to the mundane, Catherine Opie constructed a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor without ever meeting the legendary actor in person. For the project that ultimately became 700 Nimes Road, the photographer was granted access to Taylor’s Bel-Air home in 2011 after their mutual accountant made the connection—and although Opie never intended to photograph the star, the project shifted gears on March 23, 2011, when Taylor died of congestive heart failure. The resulting series gave Opie time to explore one of many questions that have motivated her to make photographs over a celebrated career: What is a portrait, really?

Jewelry Box #6

“It’s trying to extend the definition of how we begin to define what a portrait is,” says Opie, the fine-art photographer whose rigorous explorations of portraiture and landscape have produced some of the most lauded images of the past 25 years. “Somebody as iconic as Elizabeth Taylor—we know exactly what she looks like. So through the still lifes, my question was … does it give us even more information about [her] than just having her sit for me for a portrait?”

If Opie is about anything, she is about asking questions. From American Cities to Freeways to her most recent portraits, the photographer has been especially interested in asking questions about American culture and its politics. Her aim, she says, is to “really use my lifetime, my ideas, and questions that I put forth to the world…to try to make bodies of work in relationship to that.” Opie has set her prolific and technically exacting work on tableaux such as Tea Party rallies, President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, high school football, San Francisco’s bondage community and natural and human-made landscapes such as the Los Angeles freeways and Yosemite National Park. Each image peers into its subject and points to the context in which it sits.

Kate and Laura

As William Eggleston did with his still lifes of Elvis Presley’s Graceland in 1984, at Taylor’s home Opie constructed a similar mosaic and she takes care to point out that by fitting disparate images together, we get to know the person, not her stuff. “It’s the simple idea of what bearing witness does,” Opie says. “You bear witness to a home. You construct something in relationship.”

For Opie, those relationships extend not only into Taylor’s own life and our cultural history in relation to her, but into the whole history of portraiture. Start with her photo of Andy Warhol’s portrait of Taylor. “It’s about me the artist looking at Elizabeth, but also there’s a relationship to artists or history having a look at Elizabeth,” Opie says. “There’s a kind of layering…that begins to create or designate the notion of portraiture for me.”

Peel back more layers of relationship—between artist and subject, art and audience, artist and history—and the audience is pulled into a conversation with artists who came centuries ago. In a recent series of portraits Opie’s friends and associates sit in poses reminiscent of Renaissance portraits: emerging from an inky background, their faces more illuminated than lit. Idexa kneels inside the frame gazing into the distance, allowing us to gaze back at her elaborately tattooed body. Author Jonathan Franzen sits with his back to the camera, inviting us to read over his shoulder. The chiaroscuro-style portraits have a strong relationship to painting, especially to the portraits of Old Masters such as Hans Holbein, Rembrandt and Caravaggio. Opie looks at that relationship both conceptually and technically.

Ron

“The question that I’m asking…now [involves] lighting and the way one would think about Renaissance lighting,” Opie explains. “Are we able to hold the person longer, to think about portraiture vis-à-vis the fact that social media has taken over in relationship to the selfie? By using an older trope, do I have people actually standing before the work longer?”

To achieve that seductive effect, Opie uses ProPhoto lights with a fresnel over the strobe. (She shoots with a Hasselblad H2 and Phase One Q180 back.) “Then I’m able to control the light on the subject,” she says. “None of the light manipulation has happened post-production; it’s all done at the time of photographing. So I’m treating digital, for the most part, still as a platform, like I would treat a negative.”

Oliver in a Tutu

In the Portraits and Landscapes Opie’s landscapes sit like space bars amid the portraits’ rich allegorical text. They preluded a six-story mural of Yosemite Falls that was installed in May at the new L.A. federal courthouse. These images, too, invite pause. They stop the viewer as the brain tries to decipher the details. Then the gaze softens, as if staring long enough might make the image drift into focus.

More questions. “How do we keep people looking at images?” Opie asks. “Why are images still important in this completely saturated image space, a culture that has been created through social media?”

Kaine

As UCLA faculty, Opie advises artists to follow their passion, understand their work in context and to ask questions. “That’s the cool thing about being an artist, right? You get to ask a lot of questions and try to figure them out by making work,” she says. “Be passionate, and where passion alone doesn’t answer everything, allow complexities to come in within your work [that] allow you to understand, really, the language that you’re working with.

“And don’t stop,” she continues. “That’s the beauty of being able to express, of knowing one’s medium and history of art in depth—to really explore the complexities of ideas of representation. I never run out of questions, and that’s really 
a nice thing.”

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Look at Michael B. Jordan. Don’t you just wanna be him? Look closer. That cool cat with more swagger in his pinky than any of us will have anywhere ever? See the kid underneath, the one who still uses his old dime-store comb? Or fierce, fabulous world-class MMA fighter Ronda Rousey: Is she going to hurt you, or hug you? Arizona Cardinal Patrick Peterson serenely accepts an anointing of water. Bill Gates appears affably WYSIWYG. Condoleezza Rice is undeniably tough, her chin jutting forward, but her eyes are full of introspective depth.

Robyn Twomey has made portraits of performers, athletes, and other noteworthy figures for dozens of publications including ESPN, Forbes, Fortune, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine and Wired. She dove head-first into photography as a student at George Washington University (she backed up a Liberal Arts major with a minor in Photography), but the seeds of her career as a portrait maker were planted years before, at her mother’s beauty salon. She would study the women looking back at themselves in the mirrors and the faces in the predictably salonish magazines, and soon she was taking her own pictures—of herself, of friends, family, whomever. But it wasn’t until 1998 when an internship at Wired opened her eyes to the possibility that photography could be a career. Assisting for the likes of Dan Winters, Jeff Minton and John Midgley inspired her “to take seriously the idea of a life as a photographer,” she says. We asked her to share some of her secrets with us, and she did so happily.

“The performer is a master of emoting on cue,” says the New York City–based editorial photographer. “They often take the shoot beyond your direction and allow their personality to shine because they are so comfortable in front of the camera.”

Ronda Rousey

So when making portraits, performers make terrific subjects—to a point. That comfort in front of the camera makes the photographer’s job easier, especially when it comes to dealing with the lights and gear that attend a studio shoot or the unpredictable nature of an outdoor shoot. But it can also mean the subject is giving you a performance rather than the genuine article.

“It’s still important for me to push the envelope beyond the base of what is given. That goes for both the subject and myself,” she says.

Patrick Peterson

For Twomey, a meaningful portrait is one that reveals something human and relatable. Often that means drawing outside the lines of the formulaic editorial portrait. “There is a sweet spot of confidence and honesty I look for in a portrait,” Twomey says. “It is often challenging to find and show both strength and vulnerability.”

Similarly, in 2009, an assignment for Fortune magazine about California’s then-new medical marijuana business led to Medicine, a portrait series of cannabis clients in Oakland in the act of inhaling. Though many of the faces are shrouded in a haze of smoke, the images are heavy with vulnerability. The photographer seems to access a quite private moment: a person engaged in a still-taboo activity in a quest to relieve deep pain.

Vernon Davis

Achieving these balanced visual moments requires equal parts craft, determination and lens-side manner. “Technically, it can be a challenge to capture a spontaneous moment with a slow camera or recycle time,” Twomey says. “But I take a lot of pride in fulfilling the assignment, no matter what it takes. Allowing the undirected elements to enter is essential—it’s those factors that reveal the magic that can never be directed.”

As for rapport, Twomey advises, research gives you a solid point of reference to start relating to your subject with honesty and substance. “I do as much research as my prep time allows me,” she says. “It’s one of my favorite things about my job. Engaging in authentic conversation shows the subject that you care about what they do and gives them a chance to relax a bit.”

Bill Gates

Knowing something about your subject then sets the stage for developing a genuine rapport with your subject that Twomey says is the critical piece of making an interesting, meaningful portrait.

“Authenticity is palpable and will not only provide better pictures but will provide for a better experience,” she says. Her pro tip: “If you are feeling self-conscious, study up. Have a list of general things to always ask, as well as a more specific list of questions for the person you are photographing. Keep it next to the camera so you can reference as needed.”

Condoleezza Rice

The other benefit of doing the homework on your subject is that it frees you to improvise. “Listen, both to your inner voice and to your subject,” Twomey advises. “Read cues and follow your intuition, but remember, it is always a collaboration. Be confident in your own vision while allowing elements of the environment and [input of] others.”

If you’re new to making portraits—or just heavily introverted—that may all sound daunting. But no worries: Like every other skill, these only come with practice—but they will come, Twomey says. Just make a lot of portraits, and be conscientious about it.

“Sometimes one’s voice is revealed through practice, so I’m an advocate of shooting and practicing a lot,” Twomey says. “Slowing down is challenging, but can be very helpful. Back in the day when I was shooting film, I would shoot 30 rolls for a typical portrait shoot—about 10 rolls per scene. I had a German magazine hire me and tell me I could only shoot five rolls total. That day I learned how to slow down and be efficient. It reminds me to pause and practice with intent, even when shooting digital.”

Kerry Washington

The post Celebrity portrait photographer Robyn Twomey gets personal appeared first on Popular Photography.

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