I thought it high time to finally chat about a shoot I did earlier this year with the crew of Techstars / Giant Thinkwell for Seattle Met magazine carried by a great article written by James Ross Gardner.
This project was my final colab with then Design Director Benjamen Purvis who left earlier this year to helm the Creative Director spot at Men’s Journal.
Our collective spitballin’ ultimately led to going toward the direction of re-interpreted business stock photos — those cheesy images of dudes carrying briefcases talking on cellphones mid-gutbusting laugh.
When I read a synopsis of the story and somehow (luckily) mis-read that Kyle Kesterson of Giant Thinkwell had given a presentation in the nude, it set me off on the sketches above. Of course this wasn’t your father’s business, but a super cool startup interested in cultivating a following for their project with the aid of social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, so it held that the images were going to be a little left-of-center.
Above is my favorite image from the series where I re-invented the popular trope of “businessmen talking around water cooler.”
All the companies were super helpful and onboard with doing whatever it took to make the images shine. All of it coming together rather quickly, Kyle quickly became my right hand on the project. He said “you know I’ve got a giant slug that I sculpted” OR “you know, I’ve got this dog if you need one” (I was contemplating putting a big labrador in a suit shaking hands with a “colleague”).
Seen above are the gents from World Blender having a giant cup of coffee and talking shop alongside the impeccable hair of Kareem Amin of The Shared Web as he talks on his wireless keyboard. For me though, the real high point of the project was the boardroom shot above.
Kyle and I had been talking about how best to pull it off, and after some back and forth, we finally decided that adding one of Kyle’s giant nose sculptures was the way to go.
With the generous support of Josh Mullineaux — founder of Highlighter – and his hands, we transformed the scene into a giant talking head (or nose rather) drilling in quarterly sales performance or something of the sort.
Had a great time working on this and look forward to shedding more light on some other fun projects for Seattle Met and their current Design Director, Andre Mora and his right-hand man, Chris Skiles.
The image above was one of many great BTS shots from the Techstars project, but I like it for it’s symbology about the end of 2011 and beginning of 2012. What does the future hold? How will I get there? How will I turn random thing “X” on it’s ear?
One project I’m very excited about is a colab (kind of a theme with me: collaboration) with the very talented man mentioned above, Mr. Kyle Kesterson and his new venture EW Awesome. Their first offering, called Marc and Marvin, is currently tearing up the startup battle scene. While my involvement in the project is growing, guess I could share with you one sketch that will get your inquisitive minds churning.
2011 has rocked! Going to try and get a few more posts in the tubes here, but stay tuned for what should be a banner 2012 year! More always loyal readership!
Yours in the war,
Clinard
Blake Trask for Seattle Met
I recently had the great fortune of shooting Blake Trask, Policy Director for the Bicycle Alliance of Washington state, for Andre Mora over at Seattle Met for their Quote Unquote section.
The above is an outtake with this super-attuned gent who wrestles daily with the magnitude of responsibility his job carries. He’s essentially the guy that’s trying to make biking safe for everyone here in our state given the fact that three bicyclists were killed this past summer in automobile collisions.
Andre and I knew that whatever we chose to do photographically with Blake could be construed in any number of ways from a camp of ‘white-knuckled-Audi-I’m-gonna-teach-you-a-lesson’ type drivers OR a faction of ‘plugged-out-on-your-left’ type bicyclists forever immortalized in Portlandia and played so perfectly by Mr. Fred Armisen as seen below.
Our questions back and forth to each other read like so:
What if we put him on a bike next to a car?
What if he’s facing the car? Is this confrontational?
What then if the guy/gal in the car is giving him a cross look?
What if he’s giving the driver of the automobile a cross look?
Andre had this awesome idea of recreating the ET poster, and believe it or not, I even kicked around the idea below but timing just wasn’t on our side:
. . . was thinking another direction would be to construct an old bike thing like the image below but with like one regular car tire in the back and one moster truck tire in the front. . . (from the ALWAYS back and forth concepting emails Andre and I share)
Seen below is the final select, but in a nutshell, we knew whatever we went with could be (and was) construed in any number ways as in the case of this post over on Bikehugger where the blogger claims that we were flippant in our depiction of Blake.
Part of the reason why I write this post now, is to show that both Andre and I DID AND ALWAYS DO wrestle with how best to show a subject. It’s not just Andre and I, but really any photo editor and his/her photographer. After I read the Bikehugger post, I sent an email to Blake, Andre and Matt Halverson. Below is the latter portion of my email explaining my intent behind the imagery.
it’s hard, but the things i focused on in blake’s comments were the fact that he had a 10 month old daughter and that people should exercise empathy for one another. i kind of saw the tricycle as looking at how we get around by taking it all back to jump. getting at the elements and nuts and bolts of things, where it all started and spreading the word again on sensible transportation. look, the guy’s doing work and it just so happens that it involves tires and phones and helmets and xerox copy machines. maybe some folks would have you be mel gibson in braveheart: chain grease for battle paint or something.
my real desire with the image was to have made something that causes one to pause. an image that makes the white knuckled bro/bro’ette in the audi AND the ‘on your left’ portlandia-type bicyclist guy stop and look at their role in this thing. maybe chuckle and not take themselves so seriously. . . everybody should take it easy out there.
on the other hand, if it furthers the conversation and it gets people thinking and talking about the fact that people can die then that works, too.
More always,
Clinard