In Situ - Shane Great

In 2005, years before I first picked up a camera, a photographer + visual artist named Raph released a photo book on Ginkgo Press - Behind The Beat: Hip Hop Home Studios. I was a budding beat maker at the time, still learning my way around sample chopping and sequencing, and in the total fanboy stage of many of the producers that were featured in this book, including my all-time favorite producer, J Dilla—so it was a must have, as it allowed me to peer behind the curtain of my heroes, so to speak.

Raph’s photographs, shot in medium format on a Hasselblad, served as a double-edged source of inspiration for me. This was one of the first works that aligned with my interests as a music-lover and maker - maybe outside of Francis Wolf’s Blue Note album covers - where I took notice of the photography. Suffice it to say that Behind The Beat was one of the first projects that piqued my interest in making photographs. As began to learn the medium, I told myself that one day I’d approach this concept with my own camera. 

Fast forward to earlier this year. I’d been teasing out the idea of photographing creative friends in their workspaces and studios for some months - finally attempting to follow through with the inspiration from Behind The Beat - and I worked up the nerve to start reaching out to people, getting them interested in the idea, and setting up dates to shoot. The first person I reached out to was the homie Shane Great, a brilliant producer, and to my delight, he was down for it. After a few months of scheduling conflicts, we locked in dates and I made it out to Jersey to shoot him. 

Shane is soft-spoken, thoughtful, and kind. He speaks glowingly, and often, of his fianceé. He pauses his beat-making session to take a call from his mom, who lives close by. I quip that he’s a good son. He laughs and responds “She’s the only one I got.” He’s a gear nerd like me, and a dope photographer in his own right. We reminisce on the first time we made acquaintances, trade hip-hop war stories, and geek out about film cameras.

Shane’s production kit is a model of simplicity - a Technics SL1200 turntable flanked by two MPCs, an MPC 2500 and an MPC One, an SP404, and an SSL 12 audio interface. The monitors of choice are Yamaha HS7s.  Behind him is a small but choice selection of vinyl. He clearly squeezes every bit of juice out of his setup - he played banger after banger for me, and I had constant thoughts of “I wish I made this” in my head. 

My time with Shane reminded me of the importance of getting out of the creative siloes I often place myself in. In a few short hours, I felt more inspired and alive creatively than in many months prior. Creative fellowship is massive for me - the struggles I have with doing it notwithstanding.

Over my career, I've developed a deep love for environmental photography, especially of people in their workspaces/studios. I’m setting up a few more of these to shoot before the end of the year and will be branching out to artists outside of the music space too.

Check out the rest of our shoot below.

Offscreen Issue 13

I've been meaning to do a full post about this for months now - I think I got my copy in the mail sometime in March. Better late than never, right?

So, the opportunity to shoot for Offscreen was very unexpected. I'm not really sure how the editor, Kai Brach, usually selects photographers for each issue, but I was fortunate in that Jamin - the subject of this interview - and I had worked together numerous times previously, and he was familiar enough with my work to recommend me. Also fortunate that Kai was down. 

The brief was pretty simple. Offscreen has a fairly standardized aesthetic for their photography, the only real directive was to match that as closely as possible, keep things as ambient/naturally lit as possible and get him in as many different scenarios as possible. 

I only decided that photography was going to become my primary focus a few years ago. As the possibilities with that career decision started to crystallize, I realized that a huge rite of passage for any photographer is to get their work in print - especially now, as digital mediums tend to rule the day. You can certainly have a full career in photography without having your work reproduced in a physical medium, but it's an achievement I think we all want under our belt. I didn't know how it'd come about, definitely didn't know when, but it was a goal I set in front of myself. To have it happen in one of my favorite mags, a magazine I've been reading since it's inception (2012), was the icing on the cake. 

I've also been doing a lot of photography for Killscreen's print magazine as well - really looking forward to seeing and sharing all of that. These first few forays into portraiture for print are still about me defining my style, so I'm really hungry to do more, and get it honed down a bit. 

Next up, I gotta shoot some covers. I have a kill-list of magazines I'd like to shoot for, and a lot of what I'll be working on in the coming months culminates in a big marketing push, to get my work out in front of these publications and see if I can't make clients out of them. 

Baby steps!

Photographer Of The Day - Peter Hapak

I belive I came across Peter Hapak’s work during a random search of photographer portfolios on the popular portfolio platform, Cargo Collective. I like to try to keep abreast of what other photographers are doing and how they’re presenting their work, and this particular time I was also considering making an image-only portfolio with less bells and whistles. Still up in the air about that - trying a few more things here.

Anyway, something about Peter’s work froze me immediately - his portraits were powerful and emotive, simple yet provocative, and extremely intimate: they bring you almost uncomfortably close to the sitter, catching them in a brief burst of laughter, a wry glance, a moment of action - some short conversation between the eyes, mouth and camera that quickly ushers you past formality and pretense, and into a sort of understanding of the subject. It’s really brilliant work.

One of my favorite portraitists (photographers for that matter) is the late Richard Avedon, and he was famed for having mastered the intimate celebrity portrait, stripping away excelsior and retrieving something from a sitting the viewer hadn’t seen before from the subject. It set a very high bar for portraiture for me and I’ve seen few photographers hit that mark consistently. I don’t mean to draw an unfair comparison between Avedon’s work and Hapak’s, but I will say that I feel some of that same emotional strength in Hapak’s portraits.

I’m excited to watch his work over time.

(You can see more of Peter Hapak's work at his site, here. It stretches beyond celebrity portrait commissions, into documentary/photojournalism. There's a nice video/BTS of a project he shot for Time Magazine about protesters here.)

All images © Peter Hapak.