LA Photographer Magazine - Issue 2

The Best Photographers from Los Angeles and around the World

LA PHOTOGRAPHER

magazine

Issue no. 2 - April 2016

WICK BEAVERS SYLVIE BLUM ELISABETH CAREN FORMENTO+FORMENTO ETHAN PINES MELANIE PULLEN RYAN SCHUDE 1

IN THIS ISSUE

04 ELISABETH CAREN 14 RYAN SCHUDE 23

MELANIE PULLEN

34 FORMENTO+FORMENTO 46 SYLVIE BLUM 56 ETHAN PINES 66 WICK BEAVERS

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FROM THE EDITOR In this issue we feature great photo artists from Los Angeles and around the country. Why are we featuring artists outside of LA you may ask? Well while our focal point is Los Angeles we encounter amazing artists from around the worlld and want to feature their work here as well. This is an appreciation for photography from an LA point of view, as opposed simply to content derived only from our fair city.

Make sense? Well, we’re justing winging it so that’s the best we could come up with.

In this issue we feature a non-LA photography team, Formento+Formento. Foremento+Formento are a husband-wife team who split their time between New York and Miami. We found their body of work powerful, compelling and full of narrative which was the driving influence for us to bring them to our fold.

As you read through the bios and commentary of our photographers you will once again come across a common theme of artists on a constant road to discovery. Many started as portrait or commercial photographers and found that they could combine commercial work with their artistic impulses.

Which essentially is what sets great photographers apart from the herd.

It is when the artists finds their voice and follows it that they then produce great work. Sometimes that is an evolutionary process, other times it comes from collaboration and in others it s finding a way to incorporate elements of technique from photographers or artists that inspired them to be photographers in the first place.

COVER PHOTO “WELCOME ALIENS” BY ETHAN PINES

Editor In Chief Paul Granese Associate Editor Natalie Lytvak LA Photographer Magazine Copyright LA Photographer Magazine 2016

Free Digital Verson available on Issu and Magcloud Print Version available on MagCloud.com

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ELISABETH CAREN Her belief in the significance of image paved the way to a transition into entertainment publicity and marketing. Yearning to be behind the lens, Elisabeth finally decided to pursue her ultimate passion: photography.

As she always felt connected to cinematic storytelling, Elisabeth started as an on set photographer for film and television

A native 2nd generation Los Angeleno, Elisabeth Caren’s passion for storytelling began at six years old when she started dressing up her brothers and cousins and producing “plays” for her family.

While she did pick up a camera and spent time in the dark room in high school, her primary passion for the arts started in childhood with theatre.

Her dedication to the arts lead Elisabeth to being accepted for both acting and costume design at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts but midway decided to study film as well and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre and film. After graduating, she moved back to LA and began working in film production and then in development for acclaimed filmmakers Barry Sonnenfeld, David Friendly and Kathryn Bigelow.

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becoming a member of The Cinematography Guild for production stills as well as entertainment reportage for the Associated Press, all the while making portaits and creating personal work. After meeting actors on set of the films and tv shows she was working on, she started shooting their portraits which led to editorial work.

Her first cover was a celebrity portrait for Viva Magazine and has since shot 35 covers for the Canadian magazine. Other editorial credits include The New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Emmy Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, People, Elle, and InStyle.

Her advertising clients include Sony Pictures Entertainment/NBC, MTV, Lionsgate Entertainment and Atlantic Records.

She was very lucky to study with and learn from some of her photography heroes: Mary Ellen Mark, Frank Ockenfels, Greg Gorman and Art Streiber through the Los Angeles Center of Photography.

Elisabeth’s fine art work was recently shown at Photo Basel as a finalist of Photo LA’s Focus Competition and at The LA Art Show with The Cynthia Corbett Gallery. She was on the short list for The Young Masters Art Prize 2014 and exhibited in the Young Masters exhibition tour in London, New York and Los Angeles. Elisabeth has been recognized with over 50 multiple honorable mention acknowledgments by the 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012 International Photography Awards (Lucie Foundation), the IPA One Shot 2014 competition and won PDN’s Faces 2014. Her fine art work was also featured on the MTV show “Awkward.”

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“One of the things I love about photography and is the seemingly unlimited diversity in terms of assignments and projects.

As each shoot is unique with it’s own set of opportunities for exploration and creative and practical challenges, I approach different kinds of projects differently.

My process begins with determining what story I want to tell and asking myself what I want to say.

Then I start thinking of how I want it to look. Sometimes I have a vision in my head, sometimes I don’t.

What really helps me is research. I am constantly looking at images, saving them and pulling them for references for shoots. I create mood boards for each shoot to illustrate and clarify the look and feel to everyone involved - wardrobe, hair, make up, lighting assistants) and to help me focus on what I want to achieve. Other sources of inspiration are costume and prop houses, museums, art galleries, and of course, books, tv and film.

I love collaborating with other artists and am happiest and feel I am truly in my element when I have the opportunity to work with talented actors, art directors, make up artists, hair stylists and create something beautiful and dramatic.

I love brainstorming and although I plan every detail of every shoot, I also love taking advantage of those magic moments where you are expecting it to be one way but something surprising happens and it’s better - or at least different - from what you have planned.”

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RYAN SCHUDE

Ryan Schude is a photographer living and working near downtown Los Angeles, California. After finishing high school in 1997 outside of Chicago, Schude moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend university. Upon graduation, he began freelancing and moved to San Diego to work as a photo editor in 2003 and eventually in L.A. in 2006.

For the past 10 years Ryan has focused on a staged, narrative, style of work that has a cinematic nature and a wry sense of humor.

Set against many Americana inspired locations, the photos favor a detailed production design, dramatic lighting, and unique characters.

From the side of the frame that we stand on, Schude’s pictures are all about this—our minds struggling to find some Rosetta stone, crawling out on increasingly precarious limbs, and eventually resigning themselves to some deluded sense of understanding. He plays with us. The places are tangible: fastidious interiors, architectural curiosities, big, bucolic landscapes that dwarf the characters all Where’s Waldo’d within.

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“It’s that building you drove by once and couldn’t quite put your finger on what exactly, but something needs to happen there. You stop the car even though it’s rush hour and you’re starving and have to use the bathroom and you’re still a million miles from home, but you have to grab a quick snap to make sure you remember the place and how to get back there. Could be months or even years later until just the right set of events occur which provide the necessary motivation to move forward,

maybe you see a grandma belting her son over the head with a flower printed duffle bag at the train station and for some reason this makes sense transposed in front of that same building.

Nearly impossible to catch in the moment, these recollections are stored to be recreated at a different time and place, not necessarily the way they happened, but an impetus for a new story to develop.

Each given their own life, the narrative evolves through many transformations and must remain flexible as the characters and their actions take shape. Only when the cast is assembled and directed according to a specific preordained storyline can we see how they physically interact with each other and allow the real moments to transpire within this constructed framework.

The marriage of fact and fiction becomes organic and fluid amidst a seemingly rigid atmosphere. Anything goes and everything is possible as we are able to create a new reality based only loosely at this point on a collection of muddled memories.”

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MELANIE PULLEN

Melanie Pullen born 1975: was raised in New York City’s West Village. Her family consisted of writers, publishers, poets and painters and her childhood home was frequented by the likes of Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and Shel Silverstein. Pullen at this age occasionally performed in Washington Square Park with Philippe Petit (Man on Wire) in his neighborhood shows.

Pullen is noted for her series High Fashion Crime Scenes which consists of over one-hundred photographs based on NYPD and LAPD crime-scene files created over the span of 21 years.

To create High Fashion Crime Scenes (1995–2016), Pullen employed the services of up to 80 crew members and models per picture, with each image taking up to a month to create.

Her photo shoots often resemble movie sets in their production and scale. Additionally, she is known for her performance art which explores violence against women and they psyche of the criminally insane.

Pullen’s work highly focuses on exploiting with tongueand-cheek undertones: society’s desensitized depiction of violence against women and the commercialization of drama.

Pullen has exhibited internationally and in Los Angeles with Ace Gallery since 2005

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I was accidentally born in Phoenix, Arizona, while my parents were passing through on their way back home to NY’s Greenwich Village where I spent my childhood.

I knew I was destined to become a professional when I was a preteen and my grandmother was judging a photo contest for Audubon Magazine (for which she was an editor). During the contest, I was surrounded by incredible photos of animals and when I asked her the photo that had won she pulled out a giant photo that was entirely white, just a blanket of snow, absent of any wildlife. Shocked I asked her how that could win this contest. She told me to look closely at the snow, and said “see, do you see the small foot prints in the snow… and look closer do you see the place where the wings of the owl came down and the footprints disappeared? This photo won because it told an entire story”…. For me this was the magic moment that I decided I loved photography. I set out to tell a complete story. High Fashion Crime Scenes tell a story in that way and open the viewer up to the question of the circumstances of the victim and leaves the mind to ponder the beginning and middle to the obvious ending. In a way, these recreations became my perfect story.

My work is heavily influenced by my grandmother, the great photo-journalists, documentary photographers such as early NYPD, LAPD photographers and the film makers of the French New Wave, Kubrick, Orson Wells, Hitchcock, etc. Other big influences are the great cinematographers such as: Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist), Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane), John Alcott (all Kubrick’s films), Earnest Haller (Gone with the Wind and Rebel Without a Cause), Gordon Willis (The Godfather, Annie Hall, Zelig), Bill Butler (Jaws) and the list could go on and on.

My work has evolved over the years primarily because I’ve become more adept with the camera and lighting. I think in turn this makes for better stories and ways to depict scenes.I’ve been fortunate enough to exhibit my work internationally and to travel around the world with my shows. Currently in Los Angeles I’m planning my next exhibition with Ace Gallery.

My work has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Esquire, ELLE, London’s Sunday Independent, Spin Magazine, W Magazine, etc I’ve also published a large book titled High Fashion Crime Scenes with Nazraeli Press 33

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FORMENTO+FORMENTO

BJ Formento was born in Hawaii and grew up in the Philippines.

After studying photography at the Academy of Arts and UC Berkeley , he moved to New York and worked with Richard Avedon, Mary Ellen Mark,Annie Leibovitz, Eugene Richards Arnold Newman. Since 2001, he has shot for a host of publications and advertising clients while developing his art photography work.

Richeille Formento was born in London and attended the prestigious Central St. Martins College of Art be- f!ore working as an art director in the fashion industry.

Formento & Formento entered the Fine Art scene in 2009 with their first series, Circumstance: American Beauty Down on Bruised Knees. Embarking on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles, the Formentos travelled through twenty�five states, photographing the women they found along the way, often recruited the same day as the shoot. Referencing classic American paintings and cinema, Circumstance embodies the combined American visions of both BJ and Richeille. Capturing a country during uncertain times, their dramatically lit subjects are transform!ed into heroines and femme fatales caught in intense moments of emotion and reflection.

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Formento & Formento come out of the hybrid lineage of art and fashion. You might call them third Pictures Generation artists. Their work conjures the sensibility of an art film and extends it through lengthy series. Although their work is usu-ally not explicit fashion, they tend to observe high fashion standards in casting, hair and makeup, which invariably injects a frisson of glamor into the scenario.

Their locations and their lighting are first rate, giving a genuine cinematic sensibility to the photographs in the way Crewdson achieves big screen values, but Formento & Formento are a duo that travels light and manages to achieve soundstage quality without Hollywood budgets.

Richeille Formento, a former graphic designer, styles and art directs the pictures, while her husband BJ Formento lights and photographs.

In their first major body of work they created a dramatic portrait of the American West, traveling in a mobile home and finding locations and casting on the fly.

In the Japan Diaries they arrived as outsiders, bringing with them rich impressions accumulated from Japanese art and cinema, but possessing keen fresh eyes hungry for the exotic aesthetic contrarieties of this ancient yet ultramodern culture. They move between traditional geisha looks and pop and punky fashions, between the rigorous formality of temples and the neon lit pop of commercial streets, between the serenity of Zen gardens and the tension of kinbaku or rope bondage, between ikebana and commercial packaging.

Formento & Formento have come a long way in a short time, but they have shown that they live for the journey and it will continue, leading wherever it takes them. They are professional tourists, bringing expertise, imagination and an almost alien gift for absorbing and rendering the spirit of a time and place. William S. Burroughs, who loved to collaborate and who created “the cut up method� with painter Brion Gysin, said that when two minds work together they create a third mind. Here we see that two eyes can create a third eye, and everyone knows that the third eye can see through time and space, showing us things otherwise invisible.

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SYLVIE BLUM

Austrian-born Sylvie Blum started a career in modeling prior taking the helm as a photographer. She grew up in Germany. Throughout her life, she has been traveling the world.

Asia, Africa, Australia, the middle East, Europe, South America and the US. As a child she already knew that she wanted to become an artist.

Sylvie’s interest in art, fashion, architecture, design, pop art, music, movie making and photography became lifelong passions.

During her school days she started modeling and became a well known art and fashion model.

In 1991 she met legendary artist and photographer Guenter Blum and became his favorite model and muse‌and in 1995 his wife. He was her mentor and teacher. Sylvie learned everything about lighting, composition, darkroom techniques and photography from him.

Sylvie also worked with other international known photographers such as Helmut Newton, Jeanloup Sieff, Jan Saudek, Andreas Bitesnich and many more.

Sylvie took care of Guenter Blum through a terminal illness until his death in 1997. Heart-broken and devastated from the loss, she left their shared atelier in the German countryside. She moved to an old factory building, which she changed into a photo studio and started working on several photographic projects.

In the following years Sylvie published several art books and her work became international known.

Today she lives and works in Los Angeles in her WhiteBox studio.

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ETHAN PINES

Ethan Pines grew up on a small L.A. ranch where animals came and went (i.e., died), local kids got injured, and fences and sprinklers seemed, to a 12-year-old, chronically broken. He developed his masochistic work ethic shoveling horse manure. In 1988 he headed east for college (U. Penn, English) and graduate school (Columbia, journalism), worked as a copywriter in New York, returned to Los Angeles, and stumbled on to photography.

Having never articulated his influences before being asked for this article, he realizes that they are, among others, Mary Ellen Mark, Irving Penn, Stanley Kubrick, American Modernist painting and architecture, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, the American Southwest, Monty Python, Viz comics, Primus and vintage hot rods.

Ethan had never set his camera to M, didn’t even know what aperture meant. And after three years at Santa Monica College, he began his photographic career in 2002. With film.

That is to say, the intersection of humor, sadness and truth; the artful use of color, shape and negative space; people in relationship to their environments; the absurdism in the everyday; and the raw beauty of the best consumer culture.

Which he still often uses for personal work. He has a 200-pound drum scanner at home. Since those early days, he has moved beyond how an image looks — still crucial, of course — to what it says, to its ideas and content. Does it show a burst of expression? Does it stop the viewer with a relatable moment? Does it question or illuminate some aspect of being human?

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His commercial and editorial clients include Solarcity, Dolby, Just Dance, Universal Studios, Casio, Forbes, Wired, The New York Times and Los Angeles Magazine. His images have been honored in Communication Arts, American Photography, the International Photography Awards and American Photo’s Images of the Year. He is an Eagle Scout and a Nitrox-certified scuba diver. He lives in Topanga Canyon with his wife, their cat and a bunch of weeds.

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There’s a writer’s room in my head. Voices pitching ideas to each other, whatever they find ironic or poignant or compelling or absurd, each riffing on what the other guy just said.

It eventually funnels out to the real-life me, who writes down the best stuff in a thick folder. Some of it becomes personal work, some finds its way into jobs. Even when there are specific parameters and comps, I try to bring my sensibilities to every shoot I do. My feeling is, the world has enough god-like athletes and impossibly aspirational scenes. Someone needs to show the other side of human endeavor — the misguided attempts, the how-did-we-get-here moments, our hubristic ability to stand proud and oblivious in the face of failure. Creating a shoot, whether personal or commercial, for me is like staging a one-scene play. Everything — talent, props, wardrobe, styling, sets, lighting — should help flesh out this temporary world. Who is this, I ask.

What’s happening. What am I trying to say.

Take the Welcome Aliens image, shot with my nephew in my brother’s back yard. A kid obsessed with aliens, and one night they actually show up. Foil antennae on his head, space pajamas, homemade banner, empty house, telescope in the playhouse, galaxy mobil outside, TV antenna on the roof — all deliberate choices. We strobed every surface to emulate suburban night light, allowing us to shoot with definition in the sky just after sunset.

At Home with Ra: This Solarcity campaign had the Egyptian sun god doing menial chores for a suburban family. A Hollywood effects shop made the headdress. Its eyes glowed, its beak moved, it had video inside so the actor could see. It was a work of art. The house had barely changed since the 1960s. It’s a transcendent moment when all these elements come together.

Lost Boat: This incubated in my head for years before being shot. Collectively these passengers remind me of modern leadership — a few get the mess we’re in, and the rest are either unaware, indifferent or soldiering on like good-natured madmen. That’s Rose McIver, star of “iZombie,” on the right.

Triathletes: In my original vision, the guy in the sand had a fish in his mouth (which we did shoot). But once he was down there, disoriented and run over, goggles and face askew like he’d been punched, I was laughing so hard I could barely shoot. That’s why I love working with actors. We didn’t even need the fish.

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WICK BEAVERS

I was born in NYC and left.

I’ve been around the world and shoot all over the place, now mainly editorial portraits for $ or conceptual stuff for myself and others. I honor the mind’s eye and love photographers who do, too. There’s a reason your ocular nerve is the largest nerve you have.

I shoot deliberately. Usually, with a plan. I am god when I shoot -and that’s a big reason I do. More often than not, it’s my light or the highway, buddy boy.

So, I’m a fan of great gear that gets out of the way and of small Honda generators. I take my studio into the woods.

Contradiction has always interested me. After all, it implies a duality like light and dark, good or bad. And I use it to make my pictures.

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it,” Ansel said.

That is true. What would en eye be without a brain behind it? I strive for 4 dimensions in my pictures and that is well knowing the print is commonly considered two. I’m a proponent of using light for separation (and mood, of course), techniques like overlay high pass sharpening, LAB Curve color processing and high dynamic range.

I pity those who restrict their photographic experience to black and white abstractionism- so last week! In the general scheme of things, photography is just a bit older than we.

It reconnects us with the past.

Presently, it’s here to stay and I celebrate it has a long way to go.

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I begin each shoot with a concept that develops into a script. The central idea emanates from a moving experience I’ve had or dream I’ve had about something. Something I can’t shake. Images intrinsically contribute to and are intertwined with my emotions. Like seeing a dog get hit in the street in front of me, like coming on Rodin’s statue, “The Thinker”, or Michelangelo’s, “La Pieta”.

I think of Cartier-Breton when I’m walking in Paris. I think about Botticelli when I am in Rome and Homer when I’m in Greece.

Those guys really knew their places. They put it all together. I find it compelling- this process of ruminating, digesting, regurgitating. What is happening between me and this? Why do I feel emotional about it? Why do I want to pull out my camera and snap it? This stuff interests me. The process isn’t complete until I finally shoot it. I am lucky, too, because I’ve had a lot of poor instruction; and was taught by somebody smart enough who told me to use it.

Who doesn’t question their ability, their purpose? I enjoy wondering about that, too. Sometimes I use a conglomeration of feelings and ideas for the central theme of a photograph. Like images of the 911 jumpers. And sometimes those mental images blend with something else that’s ruminating, like Ed Weston’s nudes/wives in the dunes of Monterey. That’s how I get my images like, a “911 Jumper meets Ed Weston’s Nude” at White Sands (Missile Range).

You have to be alive, receptive, questioning, wondering. I think somebody who makes a good photograph, especially one that involves collaboration with other people, has to be a great producer- organizer, director, coach, visionary, creator. And generous enough to share in the creative process of your work.

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