Lessons

Lesson Info

Victoria's Sundance Experience

To show you sort of how I've stepped out of my comfort zone, I'm gonna show you the last few years that I've gone to Sundance, the film festival. Because it's what I consider my creative bootcamp. So, if you're not familiar with what Sundance is, other than, obviously, it's a film festival, but what it is on the creative side. Similar to those junkets that I described, photographers get asked to go to Sundance and set up a studio in a space similar to this. And during the year, they're other things. They're ski shops and they're t-shirt stores and they're restaurants and they're pet stores, because I actually shot in one that was, the rest of the year was a pet store, but during the film festival, they clear everything out and then they bring in Hollywood, basically. And I set up a studio and down the street is InStyle and, you know, down the street from there is The Hollywood Reporter, and so on and so on. So, the casts of the movies come from one to the other and you have your appoin...

tments and it's, I'm sure, to the talent, it feels a lot like Groundhog Day. It tends to feel like that as a photographer, as well. Because I'm here and they're just coming to me in these 15-minute intervals. In those 15 minutes, I have to shoot individuals of everybody, a group shot of the cast, and then occasionally, you know, the lead and the director. So sort of little bits of doubles. So if I have a cast of seven, I have to jam it in really fast. If I have a cast of two, then I have time to breathe. And I do this for five days, sometimes six. And through, halfway through the first day, I've shot 30 people. So I'm already visually getting bored with what I've set up. And it just starts to go from there. So I'll show you a couple years. This was the first year, in the lobby of a pet store. I decided, you know, a lot of photographers go out to Sundance and these other film festivals, Toronto and Cannes and whatnot, and they do these studios. And I, again, what's my contribution? How am I gonna make this different? So I thought, I thought I had a genius idea, I was going to make it more interactive and so I, this is a chalkboard that I made. And it was a really good idea, except that Kerry Washington is the only actress who could draw. The only actor. No fault of their own, they're really good at what they do, but, (laughing) I can't draw either. So we would collaborate and we'd come up with these great ideas and we couldn't really illustrate it, other than to make little devil horns or tails, you know, and people would step into it. And that worked. But when you have 200 people to do, it was a challenge. And if I did it again, and if you guys take this idea to use it, please do, hire a professional artist to draw things out and make it look really good, and then stick the, your subjects in it. So, here we are, the thing about the chalkboard was, the lesson I learned really was about collaborating and also, sometimes it's okay to put what you need on the subject, and say, do you have any ideas? Do you have a way that you wanna be shot? It doesn't have to be you thinking all the time and coming up with everything and doing all the heavy lifting. So I also shot a lot on Seamless that year. And I would bring, I had a whole bunch of rolls set up and depending on what people were wearing, I would say, go live on the green set, and we'd roll down the green, or go live on the gray, and we'd roll it up, up the green and down the gray. The next year, I decided I wanted much more colorful backgrounds. So I took V-flats and I taped and stapled fabric to them and then based on what people are wearing, I just slide in the backgrounds. I also had a white setup, essentially, in the studio right here, for just very straightforward, clean, and for group shots. But, as you can see, I'm working in a space that's about six feet by four feet. V-flats are four feet by eight, so. And here are some of those pictures. The third year, I wanted to do something a little bit more artful. And I decided on textured canvases. And so these are some of those. I'll go back to show you that room that we were in. There it is. In all its glory. It was a fun room, though. Again, you can make a beautiful portrait in any space. So, go forward. The next year, I decided to go rogue. I was still hired to shoot digital portraits and I was gonna do that. So I showed up at Sundance and set up my digital situation, but I also decided that this year, I really wanted to try something off the grid that nobody had done. So I decided I was gonna do tintypes. So I'd spent a lot of time, actually, from the previous year to then, learning how to do it. In theory. I hadn't actually physically done it. I had read books and talked to people and I had done, you know, I had watched tutorials. But I hadn't actually done it. But the thing was, is that I was there, I wasn't there to do it, so it was, you know, it was sort of a situation where it was like, you can go for broke, here. Because if it turns out and I come away with, you know, 10 plates, this is gonna be great, it's gonna be so fun. What a success. And if it doesn't turn out at all, then no big whoop. You know, no harm, no foul. So this was the studio space that year. During the rest of the year, this is where a ski company stores their skis. And this is the length of it. And here we would do the digital stuff. And in the very, the back, against that black door, was where I shot the tintypes, and that little room was our darkroom. So this was the darkroom. And I'm gonna go back to show you, this is the view of what it was like to be my subject. So you, I'm very close to the camera, that's my beauty dish, and then, of course, you can see behind Arthur there, that that was the space I was doing the digital images. So here are some of those. Now, learning that new process was really amazing. It was also a completely different way of shooting. So I would shoot these digital pictures in a very similar way that you just saw and then I would say, I would put the camera down and say, well, if you don't mind, I think I have this, but would you mind coming to the back for a special treat? And people would walk in and smell the chemistry and they would, they'd go, oh, what's going on? I'd say, oh, my assistant's in the back making a plate. And he was back in the darkroom, working his magic, and I would show them some of the others that we made, and they were like, oh, this is really cool, so let's do it. And so I would sit them in front of that camera. And I had one chance to get it right with each person. Because it's a slower process, it's much more deliberate. So instead of walking, the way I had photographs there, and I was sort of asking her questions and getting her there and I was shooting the whole time, sort of shooting through the process, I didn't have that ability here. So I had to do all of that, without clicking the shutter. And so I'd look in the camera and I would really just, I'd have to think to myself, like, are we here, are we here, do we have it, do we have it? And I would talk to the subject about how they wanted to be photographed. Like, what do you, you know, it'd be definitely in collaboration. And some of them would say, oh, I wanna look like I'm a Civil War wife. And I would say, oh, great, okay. You know, they're actors, they're directors, they want, you know, they were role playing and it was really fun. But it also taught me to be a little bit more deliberate in certain situations, and to not press the shutter until I'm ready. There are, I took that, and I definitely, it definitely has affected the way I shoot some of my portraiture, particularly when I'm shooting with film, a medium format camera. I don't do, I don't necessarily have the opportunity to shoot through the process the way I did earlier. I'm also much more directive. I don't have the time, so I really articulate what I'm looking for and what I need. So this is just a couple more of this year. So, when I came back from Sundance, I got asked to make tintypes all the time. I was asked to shoot them at weddings, I was asked to shoot them at corporate events, and to do portraits for some magazines, but I didn't take any of them. Well, first of all, I think it's a great idea at a wedding. But I'm not the right person to do it. Because I'm not a tintypeist, I'm not a tintype photographer, I am a portrait photographer who chose to use tintype as a medium and chose to do wetplate for a specific project because I thought it fit. What I loved is that these are one of a kind and they're raw. These are recognizable faces that we've seen day in and day out. And this is no retouching, nothing, it's just, it is what it is, and there's something very special about that. And I'm not very interested in being a party favor at a wedding, particularly because I give the plates away. I'm making these things, they're really special to me, so that's why I don't do it, but I do think there is a great market out there for people if that is interesting to you and feels inspired. But I did get a call to do a story for the Huffington Post magazine about a set of Marines that suffered from something called moral injury. And I said, you know, doing tintypes, it's very labor-intensive, and I'm, where are these people and where am I gonna be going? But I didn't care, because it felt like the perfect medium to get a point, to get this point across. And the story was about how veterans struggle with moral and ethical ambiguities during war. They come home, and it's not PTSD, it's something else. And the article was a lot about how we treat PTSD, but we're not really treating this. So this is a story of one of the Marines who, when he was in Iraq, was looking through the scope of his gun, they were being shot at, and, you know, he's searching, trying to figure out where the gunfire's coming from. He finds it in the scope, and it's a young boy. And he has to make the decision. Do I shoot him and kill him for the safety of myself and my fellow Marines or do I not? And he did, he shot and killed the boy. And after his third tour, two in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, I believe, I could have that backwards, he came back to the United States and had a really, really difficult time, struggling with the fact that he'd killed a child. Because you don't do that. Except, again, these ethical ambiguities of war. He ended up, as you can read in the article, which is fascinating, written by an author named David Wood, he turned to alcoholism to really deal with what he was struggling with and was dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps. And it's a very touching story. And that was an opportunity that I thought that this was the practical medium. And the reason I'm telling you this story is because there is a huge responsibility that comes along with our line of work. Portraiture is important and it's a very powerful thing. And that's what I'm gonna talk to you about now.