Collaboration

Several years ago my friend Nancy Dobbs Owen and I conspired to do a shoot with her jewelry. Nancy brought along make up artist Jackie Yost. Jackie and I have been working together ever since.
Just over a year ago I got a call out of the blue from Chrysta Giffen who wanted to talk about the photography business in San Francisco. She has been doing digital post, printing and compositing work for me ever since.
In a business where most people work alone, where projects range from requiring one or two people to scores of talented contributors - having a team is critical. Knowing who to call when there is a client is one part of the equation, having relationships with people who share your vision is also key to the constant effort of making new work. So, when I have an idea I know who to call; it works both ways.
At one point while we were working on some portraits for a pharmaceutical client Jackie told us about her interest in a creating beauty images with funky eyelashes. I put her and Chrysta together and we all started looking for talent. Chrysta found Laurie and Allison on the website Model Mayhem.

This is Laurie.

This is Allison.

My work is focused on a real authentic look, so these images a outside of what I would call my style. However I am a portrait photographer and I think there is plenty of space for the "beauty portrait" in the work I'm interested in. Plus my health clients are interested in skin care so I'm happy to have samples of work that are all about beautiful skin. Images that showcase the team it takes to make an image with the look of beyond perfect skin.

Family Portraits

My parents were here in SF visiting over Thanksgiving so I used some of my precious and aging supply of Type 55 to make some portraits of them. Being that they are my parents they are willing but not necessarily agreeable portrait subjects.
This was a happy Gowlandflex accident. My finger slipped while cocking the shutter. I was going to dump this but instead made a second exposure and processed it out. I caught my dad smiling and looking tough on one piece of film. He always wants to look super serious in photos.
I don't think my dad will like this picture but hopefully he won't be too mad that I posted it. I love shooting this close with the Gowlandflex. It's a challenge because the parallax adjustment on the camera can't compensate at this distance, so the composition is always a guess. Seeing how well the Rodenstock 150mm lens performs this close you know it's worth fussing a bit with the camera to make it work.
While I'm talking about my parents I should give them a little blog shout out. They are fantastic artists you can see their work here and here.
This last photo is also with the Gowlandflex but it's on Fuji 160s not Type 55. You can see why so many people loved the Type 55. It's just as sharp as you can imagine but with an incredible soft tonality and the Polaroid x-factor that is hard to match.

Beijing Street series

A few months ago we had the time and opportunity to visit our cousin Andrey in Beijing. Since I don’t truly understand the concept of a vacation I arranged a ‘fixer’ so I could do a couple days of street portraiture while we were in town. Since my work is all about real people, any pictures I would make there would require a translator, one who understood the culture, languages, photography and production. That’s what a fixer does, more on this later.

It’s hard as an American not to have wildly inaccurate preconceptions about China, most of understand that they make our stuff, own our debt and have some challenges on the human rights front. All I can really report from our brief time in Beijing is, whatever you expect to find there you will be surprised. At this moment progress change in Beijing is, and has been, so fast that even the locals can’t find there way around. Seriously, some of the roads are so new the cabbies don’t know where they go.

The result of all the new building (they’ve had the best architects in the world working overtime) and the rapid cultural and economic development is a duality between new and old that seems present in every aspect of life. This uneasy and very rapid mix of the new into a very old place manifests itself physically in the streets and buildings, culturally in the art, politics and clothes and psychologically in the outlook of young and older generations

Heading to Beijing I knew my ability to make images in China would be limited, I was traveling light I had two days to shoot maybe a half day to scout and no special access. Given those limitations I feel that this shoot was a successful effort for two reasons. I know what I do and we’ve done this kind of street portrait project before. So my scope was narrow. I immediately found one thing about Beijing, the mix of old and new, to be interested in. So that was the assignment I gave myself: Real Beijingers showing elements of new and old China. Does it sound too simple? I think one of the biggest challenges photographers run into with their personal projects is they bite off more then they can shoot. If you assign yourself to photograph “Cultural Change in Neocapitalist China” you best have some time to commit. Finding something you can do well with the resources available is just as important as finding the ideal project.

The other critical element for this shoot was the ‘fixer’ Lin Jing. We really got lucky finding her. She was amazing. Her tireless energy and willingness to approach strangers on our behalf really made the shoot work. I ended up finding her through my old college friend Kay Chin Tay in Singapore who knew a guy named Tobie Openshaw who was in Beijing who knew Noah Weinzweig a Canadian ex-pat and producer extraordinaire who hired Lin Jing for us. If you need a Red camera in China, Noah is the guy to call. Noah also produced for Edward Burtynsky. When he told me this I was honestly a little skeptical. There are lots of people who will tell you about how they assisted for Nat. Geo or whatever. Well I just saw the documentary on Burtynsky, “Manufactured Landscapes” and there’s Noah translating, rallying people and loading 4x5 – he is the real deal.

Well the work is finally online here: winokurphotography.com I hope you will take a look. One last step for us, sending prints to everyone we photographed. As always a BIG big up to my crew on this project: Iana Simeonov, Lin Jing and Chrysta Geffin.

-Michael

Paris Rendezvous and American Jesus take prizes from he IPA Lucie Awards

This was my first year entering the IPA Lucie Awards so I'm happy to have received honorable mentions in 2 categories for the portrait project American Jesus and in 2 categories for the digital project Paris Rendezvous. A big up to my team for all their help on these projects especially digital artist Chrysta Geffin.

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

Artist Portrait

This simple portrait represents for me what I love about using Polaroid Type 55 (and the quality that started this absurd foray of mine with the Gowlandflex). The tonality and detail this film produces is just delicious. I'm not a technologist and I can't quantify what makes this medium special for me but what I keep coming back to are silky smooth midtones and the unpredictable nature of the emulsion (that's a nice way of saying developing flaws are part of the fun).

For those who care about this sort of thing, this image was made with the Gowlandflex and Rodenstock 180mm f5.6 wide open. The lens was synced with two Hensel heads in soft boxes, powered by a 1500ws Vela pack.

Cheers,

Michael Winokur