American Jesus

My specialty is finding the right real people to photograph for my client's campaigns. The preference of working with real people has developed over my career but it comes down to finding people with great character and personality. Since I have just released my newest series of real people portraits titled American Jesus I thought this would be a good time to talk about one of my techniques for finding great people to photograph. We have tried and are willing to try any approach. We street-cast, post ads online, search for specific looks, recruit our friends...

The method that has worked the best over the years is taking the studio on the street and photographing people as I meet them. This eliminates all the vagaries of scheduling. The drawback is the loss of the control we get in the studio. The big upside is we often get to borrow characters, energy and emotion from an event going on around us. American Jesus was photographed during a wild Easter event in Dolores Park. We heard about a Jesus look-a-like contest that was going on and went to see how people would dress up.

Here is San Francisco it's often windy - backgrounds, light stands, soft-boxes and flags don't do well in the wind. I've been refining my tools over the years and I've been learning what works along the way. The recent shoot went really well thanks to a cube we built out of steel pipe and Kee-safety corners. With Matthews silks to diffuse the natural light.

Here is the cube:


My assistants might not love this idea as much as I do, all that pipe is heavy but we have been hauling around hundreds of pounds of sandbags so its kind of a wash. The cube is just as heavy as all that sand but it has structural strength that light stands don't offer. The other great thing about the cube is we can clamp strobe heads right to it reducing the number of stands for people to trip on.

Setting up:


Photographing a Jesus impersonator:


As with all of my projects the tools are just a bunch of gear, it's the team I work with that makes the pictures happen. I couldn't have done American Jesus without my Iana Simeonov producing, my brother Stephan helping with logistics, my assistant Michael Blumenfeld and Chrysta Geffin who loved up the photos in post.



-Michael