Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Location shoots have their advantages but so do studio shoots. The photographers whose work I admire, from Andy Warhol to Mario Testino, from Fred Goudon to Terry Richardson, Bruce Weber to Wolfgang Tillman, Juergen Teller to Steven Meisel, all do some of their best work in the studio. Four-fifths of the photos on the Major Model site are studio images, over half against a white background. Beauty in images follow trends and the successful photographer not only has to know his craft but also create images that shine above those of his competitors, that grab you by the collar and make you pay attention. In most instances, the media in which it is portrayed determines what constitutes an effective image.

Jay Meisel started out renting a three-room apartment as a studio for $53. A photographer nowadays could spend ten times that just for rent while pay for photographic work has only doubled. And then there are the expensive equipment, computer and software that modern photographers employ in an increasingly competitive field. Jay calls his lighting technique "very unsophisticated." He uses available light which to him means light that he has "experienced" naturally and that he will duplicate if that is what he wants for his photograph. In an interview for a Smithsonian photography series, he says photographers just starting out nowadays have to have mastery of the technology just to get a foot in the door but then there is still the competition with equally skilled other photographers.

With on-location indoor or outdoor shoots atmosphere is easier to create but lighting is easier to control in a studio. My aesthetics are still evolving. Not only am I learning the fundamentals of the craft but I am also still exploring what market I want to break into. Right now I want my images to be high-resolution but just about everything including degree of resolution itself is negotiable and can run the gamut.

I want to do more atmospheric images. White background to me, above and beyond other solid backgrounds, tests the photographer's art the most. It is like playing a Mozart piano sonata without using the pedal as the piano was just emerging in Mozart's time. Without pedal, without the modern-day studio enhancements, the music the pianist plays is transparent, relying solely on his mastery and feeling for the music. Every mistake is glaring but the subtlest nuance is clear too as rain. Here are the top male models according to models.com: http://models.com/model_culture/50topmale models/index/cfm.

I do want to experiment some more with lighting. I've identified a couple of details from my shoot with Brandon that I think I can correct. I still want to do just indoor shoots with white backgrounds but I also want to use parts of my living room and bedroom as setting. Right now I am thinking of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. First performed in 1949 when the Great Depression was transitioning into the high-consumer age of the 1950s, it was a "caustic attack on the American Dream." We're at a similar point today. My hope is that as a society we reconsider the so-called American Dream and what that really means. A house for every family, according to President George W. Bush when he first took office. Maybe the dream is not what it has devolved to today - overly ambitious and greedy corporations, fantastic use of fantasy capital, devaluing old-time saving for a rainy day, excessive wealth display. Maybe we need to cut back on the excesses that have bankrupt our faith and trust in government and our financial system.

I envision a modern-day documentary much like the photographs sharecroppers that Walker Evans collected in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and his other pictures of the Great Depression. I want to create images of the man in the street, the archetypal "young man" facing his future in terms of the current financial debacle, the updated version of Miller's Willy Loman in his many present-day guises.

I still want to try shooting with a green screen so I can replace the background with other scenes, perhaps from my travels or manufactured from sets I'll create later. This amplified equation should give me greater flexibility in composing images. Notice I write of "images" not "photographs." I think the future of the photographic image lies in our ability to manipulate the pixel bits captured by our digital camera sensors with software, in much the same way that movies today, even those not involving fantasy or science fiction rely heavily on CGI and SFX. David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button took over a year and a half for post-production to allow technology to catch up with the vision of the director.

As much as I enjoy software and computer manipulation I acknowledge that photography is at its heart about light. It is the art of capturing light, for crying out loud! But in a highly competitive field a photographer's vision, his idea of what constitutes photographic substance is what will make his work stand out. In staged people photography, the model and his relationship with the photographer are crucial. The successful photograph surely is the product of two minds working hand in hand.