The Lounge is a virtual Art Gallery, updated weekly. This space will showcase emerging or underutilized photographers; or just people who I think we all need to have a look at. A bit of Eye Candy for Monday.
I included a couple of Lee Towndrow’s images a few weeks ago in a post about art happenings in Toronto and I couldn’t help but notice that many of you clicked through to see more of Lee’s work. Keep clicking through by all means, but here’s a little sampling for this week’s Lounge.
Lee shot this first series for Lush magazine. The portraits accompanied interviews with 23 actors and directors appearing at the Toronto Film Festival last September. Lee explains his approach to this unique assignment:
They were done in hotel rooms or restaurant lobbies, usually in under 7 minutes with a little lighting kit and backdrop that I had modified to be set up and torn down very very quickly. I actually did time trials in my apartment the night before the festival began to try to shave seconds off the setup time here and there to allow more time to work with the actors and directors.
Another Canadian got a crack at portraying personalities at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006. Mackenzie Stroh (lives in New York) shot stars over 3 days at the 2006 Festival for a Life Magazine article. The actors were asked to select from a stack of outlandish costume pieces and disguise themselves. Mackenzie is a fantastic people shooter and this was a fine enough assignment (be sure check out Mackenzie’s book of polaroids from the shoot and her interesting personal projects on her site) but the idea itself is a bit derivative of Peggy Sirota’s camouflaged celebrity book, Guess Who.
Mackenzie’s:
Peggy’s:
We’ve digressed. Let’s get back to Lee. Working under extreme time constraints, Lee’s Film Festival portraits are less staged then Mackenzie’s but feel more choreographed. In the absence of props, he uses more of his sitter’s body in the frame to help with his storytelling and it gives an interesting tension and beauty to the image. Much more abstract than the Life assignment, these seem more in the vein of fashion than portraiture.
Here’s some more of his work:
Mayoral candidates David Miller and Jane Pitfield, cover of EYE Weekly:
Margaux Williamson, Teenage Hamlet:
Lee’s journey into photography intrigues me as much as his images do. Photography is still relatively new for him but his background in conceptual art and the heavily technical film post-production world plus his ongoing collaboration with artists and filmmakers will no doubt inform his work. I’m excited to see where he goes. But first, let’s talk about where he came from.
Where did you come from- school? assisting?
Straight out of school I started a graphic design company doing album covers (Sloan, Flashing lights, World Provider, etc.) and I used to do some of my own photography. Around 2000 I had an epiphany after seeing Bjork’s All is Full of Love music video. This led me to learn Flame* (a visual effects system) and then I worked on a lot of ad campaigns and music vids for years. Soon I wanted to leave post production for a while and become a better photographer. I thought I needed to go to a completely different place and speak another language and that this would help me improve. So I moved to Buenos Aires and learned spanish. I soon fell in love with a woman there and ended up staying for two years, working on large scale conceptual art projects (www.darkroom.org.ar for example), some personal photography and some design. I still do Flame work through Relish/567 but I decided to make photography my principal career around the middle of 2006.
How long did you shoot for EYE (Toronto entertainment weekly)? What was that experience like- was it a heavy volume of work for you?
I shot covers fairly regularly for EYE when Tyler Clark Burke was the art director there. The budgets were very low but I had lots and lots of creative freedom. The experience was very fun in that it felt like putting on a Max Fischer school play half the time. We made pretty much whatever we wanted, the pictures were kind of awkward, and we had to do everything ourselves in a small scale way. There weren’t many celebrities or they were more minor celebrities. That helped I think because we never worried much about making people look beautiful. We just had to make them look striking and have some fun.
Tell me about your commercial work?
I’ve shot three ad campaigns. The first one was for Solo Mobile/Vice Magazine and involved a club kid training for a series of parties they were holding in different cities. 100 parties in 100 days.
This seemed to me like a good use of Lee’s style and a nice little campaign to get so early on in his career especially given there are a few other photographers who spring to mind as options for this job. So I asked Lee about how he thinks he bagged this job. He told me about a big 30th birthday party he threw for himself. The Creative Director of Youthography happened to be at the party, and was impressed enough with Lee’s set up (which included an interactive photo projection component and great party art direction) that he approached him for the Solo campaign. Thus began Lee’s tightest allegiance yet in the ad world.
And now, let’s talk about the future:
You just signed on with Kathi Z- what do you hope that she can do for you?
For many years I resisted becoming involved in commercial work because I loved photography so much I wanted to keep it protected like a spoiled child. Over the last few years I’ve been excited by the images that can come out of a larger scale production and the access to interesting people and subjects you have when you do work for a great magazine or ad agency. Kathi convinced me that she could help advance and shape this phase of my work. Although I’m primarily targeting advertising and editorial clients at the moment I was also excited by Kathi’s experience in fashion and hope to enter that realm at some point. I’m also happy to now have someone to help negotiate fees and handle production.
Where do you want to be- editorial? commercial? fine art?
I’d like to continue to do editorial portraiture, and I have many things I’d like to try with advertising. Personally I prefer working in mass media, but I love collaborations with fine artists; for example I just shot a feature film with a painter named Margaux Williamson called Teenager Hamlet, and I’m about to do a project involving nazis in Chile with the conceptual artist Judi Werthein. Lately I’ve been thinking about ways to combine portraiture with fashion and weave in a subtle narrative/theatrical element.
I really love what Gareth McConnell does, for example. He’s been able to combine reportage with portraiture with fashion and make it really soulful. In fact there’s a recent story of his in the New York Times Style magazine that illustrates an aspect of what I’m talking about. Tim Walker is obviously firmly in the fashion world but uses set theatrics to create a marvelous effect. Jurgen Teller and Olaf Blecker are two of my favourites and they manage to bring an incredible humanity to otherwise very slickly produced portraits.
Thanks Lee.
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