Portraiture
TIme Magazine: Vocational Education
Last week I photographed an assignment in Northern Arizona and Phoenix for Time Magazine. The article is in this weeks edition spanning 4 pages (34-37). Nice to see a great layout featuring some of my favorites from the assignment.
UPS: Shipping Survival Guide
Back in January, I photographed the UPS: Shipping Survival Guide for UPS Compass. We explored several different concepts about simplifying shipping for clients with complex shipping tasks.
Family Circle: Origami Owl
I recently photographed a feature for Family Circle Magazine on Moms who run successful family businesses. I photographed Crissy and Isabella Weems who own Origami Owl a Chandler, Arizona based business that sells custom-made lockets.
Below is the print version of the magazine that is out this month and you can read the entire article on the Family Circle website here.
Police Chief Jeri Williams for Pine Magazine
I recently photographed Oxnard, California Police Chief Jeri Williams for a feature for Pine Magazine. Pine is the Northern Arizona University Alumni magazine based in Flagstaff, Arizona.
From the magazine:
Oxnard Police Chief Jeri Williams, was the first person in her family to enter law enforcement. More than two decades later, she became the first African-American woman to head a police department in the history of Ventura County, Calif.
Fast Company: How G3Box Turns Shipping Containers Into Clinics
In February I photographed an assignment for Fast Company here in Arizona. The story is about Arizona State graduate students Gabrielle Palermo and Susanna Young and their efforts to convert shipping containers into mobile medical units for use in developing countries. The article is in the April edition of the magazine, here are a few setups that we did that didn’t make it into the print version.
Below is the print version of the magazine and you can see the article on the Fast Company site here.
Project Update: Interacting with My Past
Early last year I introduced a new personal project called “Interacting with My Past.” Over the past 18 months I have returned to the midwest four times to continue work on this project. This is an update of where the project is now with a new project statement that focuses more on memory and an underlying restlessness.
Project statement:
I am fascinated by memory. I find it to be simultaneously perfect and imperfect. You remember what you choose to remember and how you view your past is relative to what memories you keep.
This project is an exploration of my memory and how I remember my past. I have gone back to photograph the places and people who had an effect on me growing up in the midwestern United States. Having spent my formative years in Michigan, Missouri, and Kansas, I share a common bond with many other people who grew up between the coasts.
My memories of youth are mostly of an idyllic place in a midwestern setting. The landscapes that composed this land shaped my existence, whether it was the Great Lakes that touch Michigan or the endless wheat fields of Kansas.
While growing up in the Midwest, I also remember struggling with a restlessness. I had a constant desire to get out and pursue “something else.” I felt suffocated by these same midwestern landscapes and an attitude that this was “good enough.” As I got older I realized that many of the people around me felt the same way. Over time I felt I had to leave the Midwest to outgrow those feelings, but it lingers in my mind and has left an indelible mark on my character.
Going back today, I find that many of those same people I grew up with continue to struggle with this restlessness on a daily basis. I have found that when you go back to explore your past, the perfect, idyllic memories fade into a new imperfect reality. Time overtakes memory, as the places and people have evolved with growth and change. These images are part perfect memory, imperfect reality, and portraits of an ongoing restlessness. This is my experience Interacting with My Past.
After a year and a half of shooting, I realize that the project isn’t done yet. I still have some history to explore and places to visit before it will be complete. Since introducing the project on the blog early last year Project debut, March 2011, the project won a Photo District News award for the Faces contest for environmental portraiture PDN contest August 2011.
If you would like to see a more complete edit of the project please view it in the ‘Projects’ section of my website: Interacting With My Past.
Womens Health Magazine: Weight Loss Success Story
Over the summer I photographed a Weight Loss Success Story for Women’s Health Magazine in Tucson, Arizona. The article was recently published in the November edition of the magazine.
I wanted to show a sample of shots from the assignment that show a health/fitness feel to my portrait work, slightly different than some of the work that is currently on my site. Below are a few photos from the shoot and the article from the magazine.
Weight Loss Success Story, Slim-Down Strategies - At age 12, Loida Fraijo moved with her family from Hermosillo, Mexico, to Tucson, where she discovered fast food. “I supersized everything,” she says. “My sister and I would each eat a foot-long sub and then split a third one.” By the time she was 19, Loida was carrying 173 pounds on her 5’7″ frame. She dabbled in crash diets while attending Pima Community College in Tucson, but she could never commit. “I’d get upset and start eating again,” says the 30-year-old aesthetic laser technician.
THE CHANGE - Although Loida was a size 14, she squeezed into the short skirts and tight tank tops her thin friends wore. “I didn’t feel comfortable or pretty,” she says. Then, at a party in the summer of 2000, she overheard a guy announce that the “chunky girl”—Loida—was leaving. “When I realized that’s how people saw me, I knew I had to change,” she says. “I wanted to transform my life more than I wanted a hamburger.”
THE LIFESTYLE - Loida replaced fast food with fresh spinach salads, grilled fish, and chicken, and treated herself twice a month to veggie-loaded pizza or bunless burgers with a side salad. Setting foot in her college gym the first time, Loida says, “I felt like an alien.” She had to stop and throw up after 15 minutes of walking on the indoor track, but she managed 25 more minutes after the nausea passed. “I knew if I left then, I’d never come back,” she says. In three months, she was power-walking four days a week. As the pounds gradually peeled off, she busted plateaus by adding strength training and Zumba, cycling, or kickboxing classes to her routine twice a week. After five years of small changes, in August 2005, she was down to 125 pounds.
THE REWARD - Now a size 4, Loida is thrilled to wear the cute clothes that felt too tight in college, and she has more confidence too. “I love bikinis—and I look good in them!” she says. “With my body in better shape, I finally feel at peace with myself.”
LOIDA’S TIPS - Think (and cook) ahead. “If I know the next day is going to be hectic, I’ll prepare healthy meals the night before so my diet stays on track.” Surprise yourself. “I switch up my routine every few months by hiking, running, or climbing the bleachers at a nearby school. That way, my muscles never get in a rut.” Auto-tune your workout. “I listen to up-tempo music at the gym. When you move to the beat, your workout is easier and flies by.”
Wired: Paul Davies, Putting Scientists on Mars
I photographed scientist and Arizona State University professor Paul Davies for Wired recently. Here are a couple of photos and an excerpt from the article.
Eminent physicist Paul Davies has a proposal for you: a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. As it’s typically conceived, a round-trip Mars mission would take about two years and cost at least $80 billion. But you could cut 80 percent of the expense, Davies says, by nixing the return and initiating a permanent Mars colony. The hard part, he says, isn’t subsisting in a hostile environment millions of miles from home but changing the Space Shuttle-era culture of timidity. That’s starting to happen, though: The NASA Ames Research Center teamed up with Darpa to put $1.1 million into a study of manned interstellar travel. Even so, no one’s going anywhere, Davies argues, unless we can bring the price down. To do that, the ticket has to be one-way.
Read the whole article online at Wired.com
People Magazine: Looking for absent royalty in Gila Bend
In late September an assignment for People Magazine took me to the small town of Gila Bend, Arizona. The premise was to photograph where Prince Harry would be staying during his visit for military training in October. Gila Bend is a small town in the desert off Highway 8 between Tucson and San Diego. It is home to a United States Air Force Base and is a regular training place for Allied Foreign troops.
Other than the Air Force Base there just isn’t a whole lot there. The town only has three restaurants, one bar and doesn’t even have a grocery store. It has several hotels including the somewhat well known Space Age Inn that carries a UFO theme throughout.
Most of my editorial work involves photographing people and places but rarely empty spaces. This project was about showing how different the area is than where Prince Harry comes from in England and capturing the personality of the town.
We spent the day on base and around town gathering photographs and some on camera interviews with the local people. Many of whom were very friendly but seemed unconcerned with a visiting celebrity who would be third in line as the king of England.
University of Arizona Medical Center campaign
In August I photographed an advertising campaign for the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson. I worked closely with the creative team at SPM Marketing and Communications in Chicago to create six different ads over two days on location at the hospital.
Above is the first of the series of ads that has been released this fall for the rebranding campaign for the hospital. The concept for the campaign was to show the duality of the doctors: 1)in action during surgery 2) interacting with patients in a more clinical setting. As the other shots get released I will ad them to my commissions section of my site.
I’ve also included a few shots that I took on set each day with my phone:
We were working in operating rooms between actual tramas and had to shoot quickly in case a room was suddenly needed. Here is a portrait of part of the crew in the operating room during a break in shooting.
