The thing I like best about a photoshoot is not the finished product, it’s the process. It’s the never-ending evenings we spend dreaming up concepts; it’s the long days and late nights prior to shooting, which are engulfed in finding the appropriately transformative wardrobe and making the props and booking the cast and choosing the lights and the location ~ but most especially it’s those magical moments on set. It’s communicating with my photographic collaborators, working together to achieve the perfect shot. It’s connecting with the hair and makeup artists and the models, bringing them into the dream, helping them believe it too. Every member of the troupe must put on the same play. And so in the end it’s all of us, working together, believing in the vision and figuring out how to execute it and how to make it magical and beautiful and inspiring and transportive and worthwhile. It’s carving out a gateway through which an eventual viewer may find an escape.
What I really loved about shooting the commission for Lincoln was that it wasn’t an ad campaign or even a fashion editorial. It was just a story, and I had the chance to tell it with a few of my favorite fellow raconteurs.
|PHOTOS| by Carly Piersol for Ann Street Studio
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