"Work is Love Made Visible." --Kahlil Gibran
Before my recent lecture at the B&H Event Space, David Brommer took me in for a fun interview where we discussed everything from how I use light to what I’d do on a deserted island. Watch it below:
The other day I almost cried while shooting. Now, I’m not a weepy guy, but that’s not unheard of. You have to be something of a softie to be successful in this business, and there have been times I’ve been glad for autofocus because a beautiful moment was clouded by tears in my viewfinder.
But this was different: I wanted to cry simply because I was shooting, and it felt so good.
It takes a certain kind of personality to be a wedding photographer, to have done around 250 weddings and love the job more each time. There are certainly ways to spend your photographic talents that are more fun to talk about at cocktail parties — photographing celebrities for magazine covers, documenting the atrocities of war. Unlike the former, though, we do something that has inherent value from the start — you can make celebrity portraiture important, but it doesn’t start out that way. Does the world need another photo of Jack Nicholson grinning? War photography, ironically perhaps, is much closer to the give and take of a wedding, but there are far more pitfalls there than just getting shot. I like to use my life and my work to remember that as a people we do more than just shoot each other. We love and we laugh and we dance and we drink until maybe we regret the rest morning, but have memories and moments and connections that last us the rest of our lives. It’s life, but more so. Life is messy and chaotic and confuses the heck out of me sometimes, but that’s exactly what makes it beautiful. The unsurprised live is not worth living.
And it feels so good to take this chaotic world in through my viewfinder and make some sense of it — just enough order to be dynamic, to show the chaos and surprise pulsing against the composition and flow of a story. Moments just happen, but by the time we remember them they have become part of a story. We traffic in these memories, and shape them.
But it breaks down further. There’s something that feels so right about being good at something, about complicated tasks becoming part of your nature. There hadn’t been more than a few days in a row since March that I didn’t have my camera in my hand, and yet here I was after the holidays, after weeks of relative break and separation from my work. The camera was in my hand again and I felt whole. It was like looking down and realizing where you misplaced your kidneys. I compose photos as I look around, all of the settings and composition set before I raise the camera to my eye. I’ve developed a little shrug that, with almost no movement, can make a camera jump into my hands from its position hanging on either shoulder. I change settings as I walk, not looking down, not thinking. My thumb dances around the camera body, 1/250th becomes 1/80th, the ISO shoots up, the flash goes off, or back again, and I’m not thinking about this any more than I’m thinking about putting my right leg in front of my left. By the time I see the jumble of chaos resolve itself in my viewfinder, everything is the way I want it. It just makes sense.
And this is my life, because of you. Because of all of my amazing clients, because of my readers, because of my family, my friends, people who push me forward, who share in my joys when life is easy and keep me going when life is hard. You have gotten me here, and for you I’m going to do things in 2012 that will push it even harder. And for me, because that just makes sense.
The Catholic Guardian Society is a wonderful agency staffed by people dedicated to helping needy children, young mothers, the developmentally disabled and others in the New York are. I have photographed fund-raising efforts for them for years, and while I don’t have the exact numbers, they’ve told me their related fund-raising has taken a big boost since I started photographing for them. It’s a great feeling to meet the people that they serve and know that I am helping them in a small way, too.
This year we changed the formula and went to the group homes and private residences of some of those served, which took us to every corner of the Bronx, from Co-Op City to the neighborhoods rendered almost unlivable by the construction of the Cross-Bronx. I met kids and adults, clients and those helping them, who were funny, outgoing, ambitious (one member of a group home had logged 900 hours in culinary education!) but also with tales of the incredible costs of care, especially for conditions such as cerebral palsy.
I am saving the vast majority of the shoot for the fund-raising, but here is a taste.
I’m good at being uncomfortable, so I can’t stop changing all the time…
I like to keep my work evolving, which means I go through a lot of equipment, and I leave a lot more in my wake behind me. This doesn’t work so well when you live in Manhattan, so I’m doing a summer house-cleaning sale on some equipment I have lying around. I want to be done with this and ship everything before I go to California next week, so even though the pieces retail for as much as $2,000, I’m putting them all on eBay starting at 99 cents, no reserve.
This is what’s called faith in the system.
I still have a few things I was on the fence about, but here’s what’s on the chopping block. Everything is described as honestly as I could in the listing:
and … last but not least…
my Version 1 Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8.
Killing my children, but onward and upward….
Here are some other places you can follow my work and see what I’m getting up to next. Don’t use any of these services? That’s OK, it all comes back to the Web site you’re already on.
The good folks at PDN have published my work and interviewed me again with a nice update about the business side of gay marriage. I should have mentioned that I’m in Manhattan proper these days, not Westchester, and that I don’t know whether or not my phone has been ringing with gay-wedding inquiries because during peak season my assistant handles most of the initial inquiry e-mails, but it’s a great piece and I’m always happy to be featured there.
I try to maintain a “dinner-table atmosphere” in my public dealings these days. Growing up in an Irish family where no one was shy about voicing their opinion, you soon learned that there was lots of stuff you could talk about and have a grand ol’ time, even in your disagreements. Then there were things that would lead to anger and hurt feelings … and then there were things that would lead to conversational Armageddon (like making fun of the Jets). I have friends, family, and fantastic clients along all points of the political spectrum, and have always sought meaningful conversations instead of point-scoring, because let’s face it — talk to anyone long enough, and eventually they will say something that you think is downright looney-tunes. But I have never been shy about my belief that gay people should have the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else.
Or, in other words: Dear awesome gay couples. There is only one NYC photographer who has been featured for gay marriage in PDN and the American, international, and Japanese editions of Newsweek. Let me document your awesomeness.
Anyway, even though I tend to avoid controversial subjects, this is something that is not only near and dear to my heart, but central to what I do as a documentarian of people and relationships. While it doesn’t take the same sort of courage to be pro-gay marriage when you’re running a business out of Manhattan as it does in, say, Alabama, we are at a strange point where self-publishing photographers are minor-but-international public figures. Google Analytics tells me that one of my biggest fan bases is in Malaysia, for example, and one of my previous gay-marriage postings was viciously attacked by a government official from the Sudan.
When I first shot a gay wedding, I expected the experience to be similar to any other great wedding. There are slight differences in what sort of poses will look good, but that’s true from couple to couple as well. But there was an extra intensity to the emotion throughout the room, and I think I know why. I always try to let people’s history inform the shots I take. I fight for that perfect mother-son dance shot even if I’ve taken 200 before, because I know that she has spent decades thinking about just this moment. Well, for a while at least, when you shoot a gay wedding you are photographing people who grew up thinking that this whole wedding thing could never happen for them. That all the connection, the public displays, the meaningful vows, the celebrations, everything I adore about weddings — that these things could only happen to other people.
And then, finally, the doors opened to them.
That is what makes me an ardent supporter. That is why I’ve made sure to have a gay-wedding photo in my front-page portfolio ever since — because I’ve talked to gay couples about their shame and anger when they meet a photographer who photographs gay weddings but won’t display them proudly out of fear. Sometimes things are worth a little courage.
I was shooting a wedding when New York passed the gay marriage law. My fantastic (and gay) assistant Erica had been following the news closely, but while the state Senate was in deliberations, the reception was hopping like you’ve never seen, so we lost track. I mean, we’re talking three inches of wine sloshing on the floor and no one cared — I can’t wait to show it to you. When we got a quick break, I pulled her aside and said “Hey, what happened with the bill?”
She pulled out her Blackberry. “It passed. IT PASSED!” High fives and hugs. Thank God for autofocus, because her eyes filled with tears.
She tapped a gay couple on the shoulder. “It happened. Gay marriage is legal.”
They stared, “What … just now?” More celebration.
I mentioned it to another guest whose wedding I had photographed, and we high-fived. It spread like a ripple of excitement in an already raucous reception.
I don’t care about the politics. I don’t care about trying to score points and argue with someone who believes differently from me — my grandfather is one of my greatest role models and favorite people, and let’s just say he felt differently about the issue. What I care about is that feeling, that joy, that incredible connection. That is what I seek to capture and I’m so glad that so many more people can experience it now.
A Fordham University employee tells stories about her 9/11 experience in an interview to mark the upcoming 10th anniversary.
Whether it’s just the time I’ve put in or that, according to back-of-the-napkin calculations, I’ve crossed the threshold of taking more than a million photographs for professional jobs, I feel like I finally have reached a mature understanding of what I do as a photographer. It’s been a long process of simplification. When you start out, what you do, basically is point your camera at stuff, push a button and hope for the best, so you rattle everything that applies to: “I specialize in portraits and weddings and photojournalism and sunsets and flowers and families and dogs and babies and sports and travel and macro and did I mention sunsets?”
And then you look back and say, “What do I actually like? What am I actually good at? OK, maybe I do weddings with a photojournalistic aesthetic and portraits with a bias for dynamic light and emotions.” Or whatever.
But then you realize that’s both too complicated and too simple, and the real question as a long-term professional is what is it that beats through your heart? What keeps you going, keeps you from calcifying, keeps you from that death knell of photographic careers … déjà vu and boredom? A bored photographer is doomed for mediocrity or professional failure, and generally both. Why do you think wedding photography has such a high turnover rate? Too many people didn’t understand how to make their 100th or 1000th wedding as exciting as their first, how to keep pressing themselves forward when improvement is slower and harder than figuring out how your flash works.
Maybe that’s when you become an artist, and keep chasing your aesthetic down the rabbit hole. But I don’t know much about that. Too subjective. Once you take a photo, in my opinion, you are merely the first viewer of it. Your opinion about whether it is art or good is no more important than anyone else’s, except if it makes you happy or excited. But I know what I can do: Tell stories and solve problems. Simple as that, but also complicated and challenging and exciting to keep my blood pumping until I can’t hold a camera any longer.
Here I faced a problem long familiar to me from my days as a photographer for Columbia University — how do you take a bunch of people sitting around a conference table and photograph them in a way that’s in any way as visually exciting as the words they are saying? You could go down the artistic rabbit hole (“I call this set … “All Of Your Ankles”), but that’s not a great way to serve your clients. Here I solved the problem as simply as possible but no simpler. I put an SB-900 on each side of the room, bouncing toward the wall and ceiling, but close to it, so the light surface isn’t as huge as your traditional bounce. That allowed me to get the contrast and clarity I wanted wherever I stood with my 70-200, lighting what I wanted enough to bring out the reflections, and not lighting a distracting background. Even the water glasses — the bane of event shooters everywhere, serve a purpose with crispness and perspective, and setting the scene with a handy logo.
It’s not a fantastic wedding in Aruba (keep an eye out in November for that), but it keeps my brain churning with “How can I solve this problem better?” And that’s always exciting to me.
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Lens: Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II
Camera: Nikon D3s
On a gorgeous September day almost ten years ago, I had just started my morning as the editor-in-chief of an upstate newspaper when one of my reporters told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Five minutes later, he told me about the second one, and I knew everything was about to change. Every impulse in me in a reporter told me to drive the 300 miles and be in the thick of it, but I had to manage everything, including an afternoon edition, so I sent out someone else.
Now, I finally strapped on a camera and headed for Ground Zero, but I was met with a site of raucous celebration, not despair. Osama is dead; we even have the body so there won’t be Osama sighting for the next 50 years, and New Yorkers were in the mood to celebrate. Given that it was 1 a.m., most of the ones really ready to celebrate in public were the college kids who were ready to go anyway, which ensured the atmosphere would be of revelry, not contemplation, though we were among the graves of Osama victims.
But if any city is ready for an impromptu rally at 1 a.m., it’s this one. And I’m glad to call it my home.
UPDATE: I wasn’t there to do video, but here’s a quick one I took to just get a sense of the crowd. Also, my friends at B&H Photo asked how I did this technically, given that it was 1 a.m. under low and very tricky lighting. Images have very little editing as befits photojournalism, but I knew I’d have to capture action in near-darkness, so I brought my “night vision” set-up: Two Nikon D3s‘s with the Nikon 24mm f/1.4, 35mm f/1.4, and Sigma 85mm f/1.4. Under sodium-vapor streetlights, white balance gets truly wacky, so I used Nikon Capture NX2 to process, as it has the best white balance control of any program I’ve used.
Otherwise, the main skills were things I learned in years as a newspaper photographer, such as how to politely elbow your way through a surging crowd and get where the action is.
Students, including a girl on her 21st birthday, use street poles to show their patriotism.
Revelers spray champagne onto the crowds below
After spraying the crowd, he enjoys some of the champagne for himself
Who knew New Yorkers had so many spare flags?
And the crowd goes wild for the cameras
A woman walks past a one-man candlelight vigil
Nothing says pride like face paint
The crowd chants for peace
Marching past the 9/11 memorial
Scaling Mount Patriotism…
“Lady, do NOT go up there! You are wearing a DRESS!”
City worker takes it in…
Moments like these are more important than car hoods
The only time I have ever seen a New Yorker happy to be stuck in traffic.
The sign of the night…
Let your colonial flag fly…
Tossed toilet paper hangs above as the crowd surges
Texting in the USA…
I can’t get enough of these guys.
Carried above the crowd
Vigilant.
UPDATE: There’s a lot going on in the comments, some of it I find quite distasteful. Here’s my view as someone who was there, in it if not of it:
I would prefer Osama have come quietly, but, he didn’t. I don’t really trust these events to be related truthfully given the value of propaganda, but the whole “firing back and using a wife as a human shield” thing, if true, makes me pretty comfortable with their decision to fire back.
One thing I was VERY proud of. Nowhere in all of the NYC revelry that I saw in person or on the news was there the scarcest bit of anti-Muslim sentiment. A guy with an “I’m a Muslim, don’t panic” t-shirt was cheered everywhere he went. No one denigrated or desecrated Islam except for OBL himself. (Online and in some other parts of the country, yes, but that’s not what these celebrations were about)
What’s hard to understand if you weren’t there is that there’s a very simple reason for the atmosphere … it was 1 a.m. These were 90 percent college kids who decided to hook a left instead of heading to the bars. No hatred, no burning people in effigy, just good news meaning an excuse to hang from a light pole on a day where the cops would cheer you on for doing so. Does it really make sense to set a car on fire because your team won a basketball game? Sure, if you listen to your id.
I didn’t think it was the tone I would have wanted, but the more I see people give high-handed criticism of a bunch of people gathering in the streets just to sing songs and share a sense of glad togetherness, the more protective I feel.
I mean, dude. I saw a hippie go up to a military offer and say “Do you mind if I just … give you a hug?” And they hugged. I saw police officers laughing gleefully at people committing (victimless) crimes, yelling “just don’t get hurt!” And 400 people cheering on a Muslim guy waving an American flag I saw New Yorkers not caring about a traffic jam. No hatred, but a sense that we did something right, something we said we’d do, and brought him to justice. (And if the raid went down the way they said, it seemed to have been handled justly).
The atmosphere was joyous and inclusive. When someone shouted “Hooray for the troops!” everyone cheered, then chanted “Bring them home!” The chant merged into “End the wars!” and someone responded with their own chant: “Don’t get greedy!” Everyone laughed. This is how it felt. While the wars aren’t funny, while death isn’t funny, and while the people here took their convictions seriously, even when they opposed each others’, you laugh when anything happens that relaxes your tension just a little bit. You put 1,000 people together who are happy about anything, and it becomes a party.
Do you think none of the celebrations would have happened if he’d come along quietly? If the announcement was “We’ve got him!”
I think there would be countless debates later about what to do with the guy, but I think there would have been just as many people in the streets, and if so, then they weren’t really there cheering for death, and sanctimoniousness must be tempered.
We did the conga when Hitler died, but we also went out into Times Square and kissed nurses when Hirohito … didn’t die.
Personally, I am cheering one of the most successful, precise military actions in history. It would have been easy, but terrible and a disaster, to just send in a Predator and destroy the place. We finally made a series of right, difficult decisions after a series of incredibly competent intelligence gathering. I mean … incredible effective government decisions? Incredibly competent intelligence agencies? And it all worked together to absolutely minimize any impact on civilians? That’s a stopped clock worth cheering.
In short, Americans aren’t particularly obsessed with death — we’re absolutely obsessed with WINNING. And in asymmetric warfare, the events of May 1, whether he had come quietly or not, is as close to a win as we can possibly come.
This story, about Japanese earthquake survivors looking for their photos of friends and family, got me thinking. I try to remember the inherent importance of what I do, of why I’d rather shoot a wedding than spend all day shooting rockstars and celebrities, and it comes down to this — I have a lot of photos. I’m performing a catalog sync right now on 200,000 photos from last year. But there are some photos that are actual treasures to me, some that I would throw all my camera gear away just to save a single one. All of these are of moments with people that I can never get back, but when I I look at the photo, I remember them, and I remember how I felt. They’re treasures, and if I can create at least one photo at a wedding that would make my clients feel the same way, then I’ve done my job.
I’ve seen this sad story before. The only place I’ve lived outside New York state was New Orleans — I’ve traveled back and forth there so many times over the years that it felt like a second home, and so Hurricane Katrina brought a personal sense of shock. I did a number of stories about people who had taken up refuge in New York, and I went down as soon as I could to survey the city and work with the people putting it back together. In particular, I remember every word of what a principal in a Jefferson County parish school said to me:
“People around the country and the world have been wonderful — they’ve sent us so much help. They’ve sent blood, they’ve sent food, they’ve sent clothing. But we don’t need blood or food now. Please, send cameras. All of these people, they’ve lost their homes, but it’s even worse because they’ve all lost their photos. They’ve lost their history, their memories — and it’s devastating them. They can get a new home, but now they have to start piecing their history back together. Send cameras.”
Please allow me a moment of tourist photography here. Wendy and I went down to Atlanta for about 36 hours in a quick “before the insanity comes” getaway. While the goal of finding some warmer weather utterly fell to 35-degree mornings, we did have an amazing time swimming in this very tank, including whale sharks, the largest fish in the world. There also was a Hammerhead in the tank that came awfully close, but we were promised it wouldn’t eat us … much.
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Lens: 35mm f/1.4
Camera: Nikon D3s
Thanks to the magic of scheduled posts, if all has gone well I should at this very moment be taking off from La Guardia airport, bound for San Antonio, where I will be the first speaker at the 2010 Digital Wedding Forum Convention!
The last time I was in San Antonio was on a magazine assignment, writing and photographing the remarkable Maybelle Montgomery, who was 109 years old at the time — born before J. Edgar Hoover and Buster Keaton! She had retired in 1945. She came from another world — half of the things she loved to do in her youth are impossible now — visiting the old Penn Station and the Battery Park Aquarium, climbing into the torch of the Statue of Liberty and watch immigrants stream into Ellis Island, among others.
I carted studio lights and a softbox all the way down there, and then made the wise decision that she would be far too bothered by the bright lights. Sadly Maybelle is no longer with us, but she lived a fuller life than most of us ever will.
Lens: Sigma 30mm f/1.4
Camera: Nikon D2X
Tuscany is as gorgeous as you’d think. This is basically straight out-of-camera; that’s just how it looked.
You can always count on the Adirondacks for a White Christmas. I’m spending Christmas Day the way I spent my year — travelling and processing photos, since there are some fantastic end-of-season weddings left to show you. 2010 was truly a fantastic year, blessed with a wonderful girlfriend, my fantastic friends and family, and sharing so much with so many wonderful clients. Also, I’m more than a little thankful that tomorrow I am headed to spend the New Year in Tuscany and Florence.
And there are good things to come in 2011, such as a big lecture at DWF in San Antonio, something fun I’m throwing together for WPPI in Las Vegas, and finally having time to do some personal work that I storyboarded way back in June.
Have a great rest of the year!
Wendy and I were in Boca Raton for a wedding, and, given how freezing it is in NYC these days, we wanted to take as much advantage of it as possible. So we went for a long, long walk along the beach, watching the sandpipers run along the waves, making up stories about the owners of the other footprints in the sand. It had been raining all morning, but that didn’t stop us. As we finally reached the point where we realized how far we’d walked, and that we’d have to walk all the way back, it started to rain a bit more, even though the sun was out.
“Look!” Wendy said. A rainbow seemingly began to grow out of the ocean. “I’ve never seen one right on the horizon before!” (We are not oceanfaring people).
It grew fast enough that you could follow its progress with your eye, first one band, and then a second. while behind us was a fantastic sunset.
You’d better believe we started shouting “What does this MEAN?”
And that’s why you always bring your camera with you. Regular ol’ panorama, 13 frames with the Nikon 35mm f/1.4.
Something that deeply informs the way I shoot weddings is to always think about the kinds of photos that really matter to me. I know what kinds of photos I love to take as a photographer, and what sorts of photos I like to look at when the frames are filled with strangers, but it can be a very different thing when it’s me in the photo, or my friends and family. When I’m shooting the sorts of photos I like to look at as a photographer, I’m trying to be clever, to see angles other people might not see, to do things that I and other people haven’t done a thousand times before. But as a normal person with my own feelings and connections and history, the photos I hold most dear, the ones that I would cry and scream over if I ever lost, aren’t very tricky at all. And I know I’m not alone, since I’ve asked this of many other photographers — exactly the sorts of people who would be into deeply artistic shots — and I hear the same thing.
My Aunt Lita took one of my favorite photos of the past couple years as my mother surprised me with birthday cake after Thanksgiving dinner:
Not the most flattering angle of me, and I was unshaven, full of turkey, etc., and of course taken with a point-and-shoot. But I love everything about it, because of how real the moment was to me. I didn’t even know the photo was being taken, or care. My family is very musical, while I am sort of a Bizarro anti-musician who destroys every note I come near. But they love me, so when my cousin and uncle started banging out the last few songs of the Beatles “Abbey Road” on the piano, no one ran off screaming as I joined in. It was fantastic. I don’t get to see my family very much because I live away and work such grueling and strange hours, and here was a moment of intense connection and joy. And then, right after the last bars of “Hery Majesty,” my cousin Jay seamlessly transitioned into Happy Birthday.
And I started singing it. For my uncle Jim, whose birthday was later that week. Quite honestly, I’ve been so busy that I kept forgetting that my birthday was coming up. But when my mother brought out German chocolate cake (my late father’s favorite and thus, of course, my favorite too), I realized that it was all planned for me. And I was overwhelmed. And FLASH went the camera.
Thank you Mom, and my family. And thank you, Aunt Lita, for being there, for the memory, and for another reminder why I do what I do.
