Andrew Southam Photography

Waiting for the crew, standing on Santa Monica Pier at 6.45am.

I mentioned in the previous post I’d been working through a lot of changes. Sometimes this can all feel really exciting. And sometimes like giving birth (though I can’t say that with complete authority). And sometimes the universe seems to give you a nod you’re on the right track. This year began with two amazing jobs for me. The first was my second shoot for M&C Saatchi shooting a Men’s Uggs campaign. The second job, leaving the very next day was to shoot with Gwyneth Paltrow in Paris on the set of a TV commercial she was making. Here’s some snaps from the Saatchi set on Santa Monica pier.

Another beautiful Steve Halterman set in the making.

It seems to me as an artist you’re always starting over. As a much younger photographer I had imagined by now I would have it all figured out, be rich and famous. But it’s not quite like that.

The last year has been a pretty tumultuous one for me. It began with my dear friend Sarah Laird urging me to meet with Beth Taubner who is a branding consultant. That word “brand” made me very uneasy; I liked to see myself as a lone cowboy out there on the range, not some kind of multi-national corporation. But Beth’s work (an intense day long discussion taking you through your life, your parents, your grandparents, shining a light into that dim, damp place; how we got this way, what matters to us, who we are, what our work is when it is most truly our own and not just work for hire, followed by sessions as the work you do, much of which Beth sets for you as ‘Tasks”, unfolds) led me to understand as photographers we have certain “Attributes”. Her word meaning the key components of who you are and what your work is. And that finally to be successful (and not incidentally happy!)  you need to identify what those are. And that your portfolio should clearly show those qualities. For anyone struggling between capitol L Life moments, feeling a bit lost about the way forward, feeling discontented about their work and career, I would urge you to contact Beth for a chat about what she does.

The conversations and subsequent work with Beth led me to reassess a lot of things, my whole approach to my photography, my business and my representation. After many discussions with Sarah Laird we have decided to work together. I am leaving my agent of 8 years, Caryn Weiss. Those of  you that have worked with Caryn will know she is a very decent, honourable person in a sometimes less than honourable field. We had 8 great years together & I owe her a great deal, for her friendship and for the work we did together that I would have otherwise never have got. But in the total career (and life! When you’re an artist one part doesn’t end cleanly before the other part begins) re-evalaution I was doing, it seemed right to reassess everything. And to have a rep in New York City where I hadn’t had one for 11 years.

One of Sarah’s requests in our working together is for me to create new portfolios and a new website. Obviously considerable expense and a lot of time. But also for me, a chance to begin again, applying the work I’ve done with Beth, creating work to promote myself that is most truly my own. Anyone who thinks they can embark on that odyssey without having a good sized existential crisis is happily naïve. For someone who has been shooting as long as I have, to go back through all my work and parse it for some kind of value, for how much it truly represents me, it’s pretty confronting. Every photographer has pictures they are very attached to because they adore the subjects, because we overcame some technical difficulty, because we got the shot in the 3 minutes flat the publicist allowed us, all sorts of reasons that we like pictures of our own that a client may look at and say “so what?”

For this reason I knew I needed  to hire someone to design my new books, to edit them with me, to create a type style and logo for my business, letterhead, business cards, the whole lot. I met with a few people before making this decision. I knew I wanted someone in Los Angeles because I knew this was going to be emotional for me and would need and empathetic partner I could sit down with face to face as often as needed. I found that partner(s) at Perfect Holiday in Bryan Fisher and Sera Burke. I had really admired Deboarh Schwartz’s agency promos which seem to clean up in the PDN promo awards that Bryan has worked closely on with Deborah. But the introduction was made by my friend Walter Smith, a great photographer who was working with Bryan on a promo series at the time. Working with Bryan has been amazing. The process goes something like:

1. You gather any imagery that you like; photos of your own, type samples, books, letters, tearsheets, anything you’ve kept that we photographers attach talismanic importance to.

2. You have a very long meeting with Bryan and Sera discussing this imagery and how it relates to your “brand”.

3. Bryan and Sera send you a multi page pdf presenting options for “Type language”, design, layout, logo ideas, promo ideas.

4. You absorb this and the conversation continues as you zero in on the best approach for you.

5. Simultaneously you present Perfect Holiday with a “super edit” of your favorite pictures for portfolio consideration. They send back a tighter edit from within that. You reconsider what is and isn’t in there, back and forth until you have your book edit.

Also in my case Bryan saw how much the written word mattered to me so worked really hard with me to see how we might incorporate some text into my books. This was delicate work because we all agreed finally this is a photographer’s portfolio and the words needed to be used with great discretion to just be in there, add to the whole but support the photography. Certainly some people will speed right by them when they see the book, others will linger longer and read them. It works well either way.

When time came to print the books (we’ve finished my Portrait book and are now moving onto a Lifestyle book) there was a lot of discussion about how to do it. It seems that what portfolio consultant Melissa McGill calls “big black clunkers”, large leather covered books with acetate pages, are going away faster than you can say “Republican candidate”. And we’re now in a limbo while the industry makes up its mind about what will come next. The iPad which was touted for a while as the next big thing in portfolios seems to have hit a speed bump. The one thing we do know is that in this time where there are so many photographers, when digital photogrpahey has made everyone a photographer, it’s incredibly important to make your work as personal as possible. And that clients are looking for ideas, content, originality, a singular point of view. If you’re hoping you’ll chug along because you’re a good technician who can do a bit of this and a bit of that, good luck!

The approach I’ve taken with Bryan is to print hard bound books at Paper Chase in Los Angeles. There are good arguments for and against the bound book. Obviously you don’t change out the work simply as we did the old style acetate paged portfolios. It is a considerable expense and commitment to a body of work. I agonized quite a bit about it before deciding I would do it for my Portrait book. I’m still thinking I’ll make my Lifestyle book changeable pages. Paper Chase can handle it either way. You will hear conflicting things about working with Paper Chase but I would say my experience there has been very good. They care a great deal about printing, about book design and about photography. Like any relationship you get out of it what you put into but they are happy there to work very closely with their clients and respond to all input. Their printing quality is excellent, and the books they make look fantastic.

For my website Bryan is working closely with Team A, my previous excellent website designers who are handling the design build of the site implementing Bryan’s type and graphic language.  I feel like I’m getting the best of all worlds there; Bryan’s impecable taste with type and design. And the comfort of working with Ashley and Aris at Team A who have previously designed two websites for me (with infinite updates and modifications between) and have always had my back, from my first uncertain steps into the brave new world of electronic media until now when I’m ready to step it up and up.

So, thought I’d share all this as I sit on another launch pad. Not sure who’s reading but I feel like I’m talking to my photographer brothers and sisters. So herewith, a template for career renewal! Use and modify at your own excellent discretion!

In July of this year I had the great honour of leading a discussion at the Annenberg Space for Photography. It was very humbling to talk about what I do and have been doing for nearly 30 years to a large audience in that beautiful space. When the Annenberg’s Photo Editor Lesley Meyers invited me to speak I wasn’t sure I had the stuff, or even how to express my complicated feelings about what I do. But Lesley was kind enough to prevail with me, I owe her great thanks. It was a really great experience and my thanks to all there for supporting me in all kinds of ways. They do a fantastic job and you should try to attend one of their future Iris nights to see for yourself.

A video of the event

Some behind the scenes snaps from The Annenberg’s blog

On my flight today from Nashville, the long 4 and a half hours back to Los Angeles, there was a family seated across the aisle from me, one row up. In the bulkhead seat I always try to avoid. As soon as we were seated, (already there was anxiety brewing when it was announced the flight with unreserved seating was full, “every single seat”), I heard the voice of a child. Not so much a voice as a loud bleat. The elderly woman at my left was berating the man next to her in the center seat (her son? her husband? her assistant?) in a kind of grating, senseless loop, that I could see no exit from. To do with her need for sleep, what she had disagreeably eaten, how uncomfortable she was. Things, it infuriated her, he should already have known. It was a kind of scab picking frequency and the man batted back every 3rd or 4th accusation in a kind of non sequitur’ish way with complaints of his own. Later in the flight I realized the woman was drunk, and finally hung over. The child’s voice penetrated the cabin, sometimes a little louder, sometimes a little quieter. I confess I thought “really, is this how it will be?” and immediately regretted taking the first seat open to me.

It was exciting to work on this shoot for AARP with their incredibly passionate Photo Editor Quentin Nardi. I must confess I wasn’t familiar with the magazine when I got the call. But as Quentin explained, “we’re the last magazine still shooting with big budgets”. Normally when I hear the word “budget” now it’s in the sentence “we don’t really have much in it” so it was fun to be able to have great set designers Tam Reid and Fi Campbell from Still Sets build 2 great sets at Smashbox. And to have the brilliant Keith Leman from OTMFC light the whole thing.

The shoot was to celebrate three actresses; Jamie Lee Curtis, Betty White and Kristen Bell who had just opened a movie together. Quentin and I worked very closely (280 e-mails between us) creating a cover set that worked for all three women to comfortably sit/lean/stand together and a set for inside the magazine where we knew the actresses could have some fun and perform for us.

It was great to see this follow up piece in PDN featuring the work AARP and Quentin in particular is doing, and have our story prominently featured.

And yes, Betty White is just as saucy and hilarious in real life as she is on the screen.

http://stillsets.com

http://www.otmfc.com

My fellow photographer Art Streiber, that paradox of fierce competitor and boundlessly generous friend, proposed my name to the Santa Fe Photo Workshop some time ago. So it was my recent, great pleasure to go out to Santa Fe and spend a week under dramatic summer skies, thunder and lightning, rain and sunshine, leading a workshop I called ‘The Fashion Portrait’. Those two words seem to best describe the work I do now. I don’t exist in the rarified world of fashion, where photographers live and die for the “it” girl of the moment, the shoe, the bag, the dress. But every shoot I do is with a stylist, a hairdresser, a make up artist and what I do know about fashion is called upon every shoot. But finally I hope I am making a portrait. The distinction is a fashion photograph is an image where the model is at the service of the clothes, a portrait is in some way revealing of the subject, and certainly the photographer.

The Santa Fe Photographic Workshop was created by Reid Callanan in 1990 after he’d spent 14 years with the Maine Workshop. He came to Santa Fe, seduced by the beauty of the place, thinking he’d run workshops in the summer and ski all winter. Now the workshops are year round and he tells me there’s no time for skiing.

For several reasons, it is unlike any place I have ever been. SFPW shares a campus with an order of Carmelite nuns. Two externs who deal with the world in any way needed, and 14 women who have taken a vow of silence. They live behind a high and enclosing garden wall and are essentially invisible to the world. Reid told me he occasionally retreats to their chapel during the day for a quiet moment. And on rare times has heard them singing their prayers through the screen that separates the public from the women of the convent. There is no doubt that the rigor and atmosphere of the nuns retreat pervades the feeling on campus. (As Reid, put it, not entirely joking, “they’re praying for us.”) During my week in Santa Fe, though we shot on location in a now closed penitentiary (shudder, how small the cells. I understood how a man could go in ‘bad’, and come out a wild animal), a Masonic lodge and an Arabian Stud horse ranch, and saw the requisite amount of scantily clad girls and model wildness, there is on campus an air of devoutness that cannot be denied.

The first evening the incoming workshop participants and teachers gather, Reid makes a firm point; this will be a week devoted to making photography. And he strongly discourages what we now accept as normal social behaviour, the constant sending and receiving of calls, e-mails and texts via cell phone. And after that first evening, I never saw a phone in anyone’s hand, aside from course assistants calling ahead to confirm locations and handle specific production details. Surely people made calls unseen by me, (who of us doesn’t feel momentarily exempt, “I need to get this!” and succumbs to the pressing needs of the world) but I never saw it. That will give you some notion of the seriousness of the participants and their commitment to a week of their work. I joked about this before presenting the best of our workshop’s photographs at the end of the week. But it was quite seriously disorienting, and finally wonderful, to be living again in a time before cell phones took over the world.

I had 14 students in my class from 25 years old to 60. They had come from as far away as Paris, Hawaii, Abu Dhabi, Peru. I came to love them all. Each day began with a discussion of topics I had prepared to give my class an overview of my approach to work; my list of the ‘Masters’ of Fashion Photography, Lighting with different equipment in different circumstances, the influence of Cinematography, Creating a “story”, presenting your story to clients, promoting your work, choosing a location, working in the studio, finding inspiration and the never ending challenge of remaining inspired.  We met every day at 8am after a dining hall style breakfast for the entire workshop, I critiqued their work from the day before (which they had edited down to their 8 favorite images late in the evening or earlier in the morning), I led practical demonstrations on finding my way into a shot, lighting it, developing a rapport with a model, furthering the point of the photograph, letting technique serve the image rather than dominate it. Then everyone grouped up and shot in teams rotating the photographer, the assistant, the stylist and general helper. Everyone contributed to each others work, heard their partners ambitions and did all they could to help them achieve them.

I loved my class because they succeeded, they failed, they cheered each other on, they listen to me waffle on, we had a lot of laughs and a few tears. I teased Reid at the end of the week that what he was really running was a workshop for personal transformation, thinly veiled as a photo workshop. I had complete strangers approach me in the dining room daily and share their breakthroughs with photographs they had been working on for days, (possibly years!) buoyant as children. Every evening of the week was accounted for but one; formal dinners to begin and end the week, faculty presenting their work to an audience of workshop participants and anyone in Santa Fe who might be curious to see professional’s work and hear them discuss it (a surprisingly big crowd), I had my class over to my place for dinner. Between the class wrapping at 6pm and the event every evening I had long conversations with my course assistants (two incredible staffers of SFPW, Sara Bielecki and Taylor Welch) debriefing after the day; who’d had a good day, a less than good day, how might we help? It was relentless. I’ve rarely worked so hard or had so much fun.

By the end of the week I was simultaneously exhausted and, as Reid had promised “filled up”. I barely took a picture all week but I was totally invested in my students work, so absolutely lived in photography. I did, on occasion hear my own voice and think “hey, that’s good advice, I should follow it.” I must admit my own work only rarely lives up to the lofty standards I held my students to. I really should take someone else’s workshop! Reid, a grey hound thin, gentle shaman of photography, (ably assisted by Renie Haiduk, his Director of Operations) has created a kind of heaven on earth for creative people and a close knit community of Instructors. All you have to do is make stuff.

I thought a lot during the week about what it means to teach and be taught. It is a generous act to really teach another person, to be patient, to care enough to impart what you hold dear. But it’s also an act of generosity on the part of the student, to listen and hear, to be really present to the moment, to allow another person to contribute to you. Finally it’s an act of reciprocity; it goes around and around. Everyone grows by the experience. And each one of us is the sum of all the teachers we have ever had.

This is from a profile in the New Yorker on Mikhail Baryshnikov by Joan Acocella. In this glimpse he has returned to Riga to perform in front of an audience of people he watched dance as a child, people he hasn’t seen since he defected to the west over a quarter of a century ago earlier. Even at the discounted admission rate he has negotiated with the state theatre by taking a nominal fee, ticket prices were beyond the means of the ballet people, whose average salary was around five hundred dollars a month. So he opened his first dress rehearsal to the opera house staff, pensioners and the ballet school. He told Acocella:

“All these people that I saw when I was young, they were some very good dancers or not that good dancers, some of them good actors, or some of them just beautiful women, or some of them were great character dancers, or some enthusiastic performers. I knew them by name, I knew their history. Half of those people are dead already, but the other half in their sixties or eighties, are sitting in that audience. And they’re all of them in me, in my body, in my brain. You know you learn to dance when you’re very young. And in subconsciousness you take pieces from every person. Even worst dancers have two moves, one move and you say ‘What was that? How did he do that?” And already it’s in you. That’s why it’s very moving- because you know, I owe them.”

So, if you love photography and need to reconnect with it, if you want to look again at what you’re doing, if you want to renew your relationship with your work or locate work you might care about more deeply, I urge you to check out Santa Fe Photo Workshops.

santafeworkshops.com

artstreiber.com

photo by Andrew Southam

Dear Occasional and Imaginary reader,

You may recall when I introduced this blog, I had just gone to New York in support of a promo book I had created called (An) American Dream. Though I promised not to be make this a ‘yay for me!’ kind of blog, I can’t resist the opportunity to share this big up I received from PDN Online in their ‘Promos I kept’ self promotion feature. Here, dear reader, is an excerpt from the piece.

How do clients cope with all the promotions on their desks and in their computer mailboxes? How do they decide what to keep? This month, Marissa Serritella, senior art buyer at TBWA/Chiat\Day, Los Angeles discusses her two most recent promo keepers: Chris Buck’s “Isn’t” booklet, a series of portraits of celebrity look-alikes; and Andrew Southam’s “(An) American Dream” booklet, which the photographer calls  “a classic love story of a guy and girl, a car and a highway.”

PDN: What struck you about these two promotions? What qualities do you generally look for in a promo piece?:
Marissa Serritella: I like booklets more than just individual mailer cards because they show more range. I realize this must be pricier to produce and I wouldn’t expect everyone to do something like that, but Chris’s booklet made me stop and think about it, look at it, keep it.  I liked Andrew Southam’s “(An) American Dream” booklet because of the story it told; it drew me in.

Andrew Southam, (An) American Dream

Southam produced the booklet first, then ran the images as a slideshow on his Web site (www.andrewsoutham.com).
The project was conceived out of Southam’s frustration with the limitations of commercial assignments. Over three days, he shot 5,265 images edited down to his favorite 200. He and designer Matt Taylor at Varnish Studio Inc. designed the 30-page, 50-image booklet. His agency, W Reps, created a mailing list of 500 people at agencies, record labels, TV Networks and magazines whose work indicated they would be most receptive to the project.

It paid off: Women’s Health gave him a 10-page fashion story for which they asked for him to write a treatment for the same kind of narrative as his book. Southam also just completed an ad job for a fashion designer who asked him to bring the same sense of story to the campaign.