The Tao of Personal Work

Personal projects are important. I’ve heard many working photographers talk about how they landed jobs on their personal work and not on their portfolio. Don’t get me wrong, their portfolio got them in the door. But when Art Directors are looking at 5 portfolios they like, compelling personal work can tip the balance in your favor.

Personal work can also get you noticed and help you stand above the crowd. Japanese photographer Natsumi Hayashi has had a photo blog for over two years posting mostly photos of her cats, food and occasionally friends. About 9 months ago she posted a picture of someone in mid-leap. Then she posted a picture of herself seemingly ‘levitating’ and started posting more. A few moths ago, she stopped posting photos of her cat and started posting the “Levitation of the Day’ photo. They are self-portraits of her in the air. She is getting more and more inventive and many of the pictures look like impossible levitations. I specially like the ones where she is floating in a crowd of people. Now, a site that was most likely visited by friends and family has gotten international attention.  If she doesn’t get a book deal out of this, she doesn’t want one.

Natsumi Hayashi self-portrait for her Levitation of the Day photo blog.

I recently attended a talk with advertising photographer Mark Laita at the Annenberg Space for Photography. He shoots mostly products for high-profile clients including Apple, Canon, Effen Vodka, Absolut and MARS cosmetics. What you don’t see in his portfolio is people. He has a dual site with his commercial work and personal work. He has a series of dead birds, colorful snakes, another series that he put drops of dye in clear water and photographed the shapes as the colors swirled and, his latest coming this fall, fish swimming near the surface. But the personal project that put him all over Google and landed him a book deal is Created Equal.

The web page for Mark Laita's Created Equal book.

He traveled all around the country photographing regular people being themselves. He stripped down everything that would draw attention away from the subject. Everyone was shot with the exact same set-up: one light (I think), the same background and all in black and white. The choice of black and white interested me because I think many people use it to give the photos a more artistic look. He wanted to strip everything down, including color. He illustrated this point by showing a big guy and said the jacket he was wearing was bright blue and would have dominated the picture. I could see how color could be distracting.

When I talk about personal work, I'm talking about a well-planned, well-thought out project that tells a story or expresses a vision. It's about giving yourself an assignment and sticking to it like it was a paid gig. It took Mark Laita over 6 years and almost half a million dollars in travel and production expenses to complete his project. This is an extreme case but it illustrates the point.

Personal work allows a photographer to branch out and push the envelope beyond what they would do while on assignment. I will also keep you shooting between assignments which, for me at least, leaves me enough time for some significant personal work.

Cultural Destination for Photography

I have found my new favorite place to hang: the Annenberg Space for Photography.  It’s located in Century Park, which is basically the downtown of Century City. There are plenty of tall office buildings with coffee shops and bistros in the area and even Westfield Mall nearby. The building you see on TV shows and movies with the big square hole in the middle is in Century Park.

Climbing up some stairs, away from the grassy knolls will take you to the space. The architecture of the building is appropriately modern; minimalist with and emphasis on function. Proportionately, it is low and square looking a little squat surrounded by the office buildings. It’s a good-looking building, though, with stairs leading up to a deck with some modern outdoor furniture and the main entrance. The façade is polished steel (or zinc) plate with glass, just the way I like it.

I love the modern architecture of this building. It makes me want to go right in.

The interior of the square building was designed with photography in mind with the main part of the exhibit around the edges and a circular center room reminiscent of a lens. The room even has a ceiling textured like an aperture. There are two 7x14 foot hi-definition screens for projecting short films an digital photography as well as smaller screens around the room.

In the center digital media area people are watching a short documentary on 14 foot ultra hi-def screens.

They have two Microsoft Surface tables (which work like giant iPads) for further exploring photos and a reading room in the back full of photography books. Since entrance is free, I could see myself killing a lot of time in the reading room.

Even more cutting edge, along the exhibit, there are QR codes which link to audio programming from any smartphone with a QR reader app. If you don’t have one they will loan you an iPod Touch for free.

The exhibit area around the edges of the interior packed with pictures. Great eye candy.

The current exhibit is BEAUTY CULTURE with hundreds of photos of iconic models from almost equally iconic photographers. They say this about the exhibit:

BEAUTY CULTURE provides a seminal examination of photography’s role in capturing and defining notions of modern female beauty and how these images profoundly influence our lives in both celebratory and disturbing ways.

It deals with how the industry has defined beauty and also how some have challenged the popular notion of what beauty is. There is a documentary film about the industry and it puts a lot of blame on the industry for making these defined characteristics of beauty more or less unattainable for the average person.

While I agree with that part, I don’t think it’s fair to put all the blame on the industry. They do what sells. If people didn’t respond to the looks and definitions of beauty, the industry would try something else. I think the industry is at least as much of a reflection of the tastes of society as it is a trend-setter. I think the industry would disagree. They like being this particular demon that people love to hate but can’t break free from.

Showing how ideas of beauty have changed in the past 60 years. Makes a point that fashion looks forward while Hollywood looks back.

Ok, stepping down from my soapbox, I loved the exhibit. There were tons of photos that I recognized instantly and many that I had never seen. It did drive something home, though. As much as I enjoyed doing fashion photography and appreciate the creativity behind these images, I have no wish to try to make a living as a fashion photographer.

I plan on returning to the space often to look more into the exhibit and attend talks on Thursday nights. If you’re in LA, chances are I will be there every Thursday. Having only seen one exhibit there, I am excited to see the different kinds of photography they will bring to the space. I'll have to wait a little while, the BEAUTY CULTURE exhibit lasts until November.

That's OK, I'll just hang.

Finding My Niche

When I decided to leave New York and move to LA, I had a pretty concrete idea of what I wanted to do here and a vague idea of how I wanted to do it. In the four plus months it took me to get from NY to LA, everything has changed. My understanding of the way things work is part of that change but also my outlook on what I want to do.

With the next generation of digital movie cameras able to generate high-quality stills, the job of stills photographer on movie and TV sets will go away. Which is not a dream-killer because that was just a means to an end. I'd like to shoot promo images for movie posters and TV shows. So portraiture is more in line with what I want to do.

But, for a while, I have been very anti-marketing. I'm getting tired of being incessantly bombarded by advertising telling me I need this gadget or that outfit to be complete. As a photographer and graphic designer, I am part of this marketing machine driving people to consume beyond need and reason. But, right now, I don't see a way out of it without giving both up as a career path. I guess I'm not as sick of marketing as I sometimes think because I don't spend much thinking about giving it up.

The next two posts scheduled for next week deal with fashion photography and personal work. The fashion post is inspired by my recent discovery of the Annenberg Space for Photography and the Beauty CULTure exhibit they have going on. The personal work post was partially inspired by a talk at the Annenberg Space by photographer Mark Laita about his book Created Equal. It just drove home some ideas I've had lately.

I haven't really done any shooting since I've been here and I know I need to change that. If I don't find subjects I need to get out and shoot whatever I see. I have gotten out of the habit of carrying my camera everywhere I go. My iPhone is not a substitute for my camera. I know I won't just start getting jobs shooting movie posters so I have to figure out what I want to shoot as I work towards that and get on it. I think a personal project will get me on the track. I haven't figured out what I want to shoot, exactly, or how I want to shoot it. It's probably going to take some trial and error.

I do know that I want to express love in what I shoot. I have a couple of ideas of how to do this but I need to work it out. One thing I do know is I want my photos be be an interaction between my subjects and me. I thought of doing stealth street photography of couples but that's creepy and there is no interaction. I want to connect with the people I photograph.

Mark Laita said he barely talked to the people he shot before he shot them because he wanted them to be uncomfortable in front of the camera. He wanted to get the shots while they still didn't know what to do with themselves because afterr they got comfortable they started posing. Looking at his pictures, it clearly worked. But, I think that there is a third stage after the posing when many people drop their guard and then you can get a very real connection and a portrait that reflects it.

Obviously, I working a lot of stuff out. I will probably be working things out for a while so stay tuned as I express my ideas and work it all out.