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ARC Presents David Joseph Perez

Some of the best photographers and filmmakers in the world walk through our doors every day. ARC Presents is our series highlighting their work.

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great artists are always restlessly searching, experimenting, reinventing. The inability to be satisfied with one’s work is perhaps the most useful quality for development of a unique style. David Joseph Perez is always searching, and what a search it is. Each series on his site offers its own painstakingly envisioned world, which each succeed at his stated goal of  ”sharing a moment on a level where people get inspired to live life and be beautiful and share experiences with each other… by looking at a picture.”

I had a chance to sit down with David recently to discuss his work, his career path and his goals as a photographer.

Nathan Lee Bush: How long have you been shooting?

David Joseph Perez: I’ve been shooting seriously since I got to New York, which is about five years ago. I assisted for the first two years and freelanced as a photographer for the past three years.

I really got into it my senior year of college. I studied philosophy at Arizona State University, which is the biggest party school, and I don’t know if it was the beautiful women that changed mind from going to law school to being a fashion photographer. Nevertheless my senior year of college I made a decision to become a photographer and never looked back.

Actually, my first job when I came to New York was at Adorama Rentals. I thought it was the perfect place to come to learn about equipment, because coming out of college with no knowledge of the ins and outs and nuts and bolts of the equipment involved, wouldn’t even get you taken seriously.

After that I started working at The Space, which is a studio right down the street on the weekends to further my knowledge of the equipment and how everything worked behind the scenes, and then I was able to position myself as an Assistant.

NLB: How’d you get into assisting

DJP: Just calling people, reaching out to agencies – when I got to New York I didn’t know one person. That’s how I got the job at The Space, I just walked in there and talked to the owner and he hired me that day. And just meeting people from there.

NLB: Seems like you have strong visual ideas going in. How do you develop them before the shoot? How do you prepare?

I try not to think in a certain style or put myself in a box. I’m sure other people will look at my work and categorize it, but the way I go about creating, I try to let it happen organically. I have such a strong appreciation for all different types of women, for example. My taste, aesthetically, for Fashion photography is the same. It would be very hard for me to say, “I just like this type of photography – just ‘glamour,’ fashion photography or ‘edgy’ or ‘underground’ – there’s a lot of different types of styles.

I can personally identify with styles ranging from Juergen Teller to Mert and Marcus and those are very opposite. I’m not going to worry about my work not looking consistent. I don’t approach a shoot in that way. I do approach a body of work and think: “what am I missing? What could I use that’s not here? And then I go from there. Three years solo dolo into photography is really not that long of a time. I’m still exploring

NLB: It seems like you’re really experimental…

DJP: Yeah, I’m not afraid to try… I’m very grateful to have my commercial clients to keep enough rolling in to keep me doing what I like to do, which I don’t even think about making money off of. More like a kid.

NLB: Playing…

DJP: And it really comes down to that, just playing. As far as my personal fashion work goes, I’m not trying to succeed at anything, I’m just playing.

NLB: Is your site mostly tests?

DJP: Most of it is unpublished work, but I wouldn’t call it tests, because a lot of tests are a girl against a white wall, with white t-shirt… So I try to take it a little bit further than that. But I haven’t really published a good 50% of it and the other 50% have been published. I don’t really care about being in any magazine. If and when that time comes, great. But right now I’m blessed to have commercial clients to keep me feeling successful at the commercial end enough so where I can have a fashion editorial side.

NLB: What’s your commercial stuff like?

DJP: My commercial stuff revolves around e-commerce. They have a look, they know what they want, they don’t expect me to come in and creative direct anything. I just have to go in and give them what they want, which I equally appreciate. It balances it out for me. If I was only doing my own thing I wouldn’t appreciate that. Even though it’s not my personal aesthetic, just knowing that I can do it makes me feel more confidant as a photographer.

NLB: Going back to your inspirations…

DJP: Within fashion photographers? Definitely Steven Meisel.. I hate to be the cookie cutter newbie photographer, but that’s who got me started. If it wasn’t for his work, I wouldn’t be here. I don’t know him personally, I wouldn’t really care to, but I like his work alot. What his team has put together – the consistency is just mind-boggling. And it’s not just everything that he does that I’m a fan of, but more of his work ethic and consistency in putting out work. Not getting caught up in the hype of the fashion world, he just stays focused on his work.

I like Juergen Teller… I like photographers who have a definite, unmistakeable style. That’s Steven Klein… photographers who I can see their work and know it’s them. That’s not to say their work is predictable, but it’s at a level that no matter what they do, you can tell that they shot it. They made a brand out of their aesthetic and point of view. And that’s amazing, like staring a pseudo-religion. The Terry Richardson Religion…

NLB: Yeah, I see some of his influence in your work.

DJP: I used the flash 580 for a year and a half, mainly. Mixing that with other lights.

NLB: Seems like you’re into gels too.

DJP: Yeah, for the first couple of years I strayed away from it, trying not to fall into a cliche of new photographers who want to gel everything up. But after a year of not doing it, I realized, that’s another box you’re putting yourself in of what you can and cannot do. So if I feel right about it, that’s all that matters. And trusting my own instincts, even if it means falling into a box. So what? Gel it up if I feel like it looks good. And color adds so much emotion, you’d be a fool not to. I feel like there are so many photographers nowadays that are trying to be ultra cool, where they don’t even use color, it’s just all black and white. You’re that cool that you don’t like color anymore? Color is such an expression of life.

The color temperature of most fashion photography is daylight. And if you look around the natural world, you’ll rarely see that color temperature –  everything is being reflected off a surface, or shining through something – there’s very different hues around. And if you’re aware of that as a viewer, just walking through the world, you want to translate that through your art, or at least I do.

NLB: What’s your creative process for getting an idea for a shoot.

DJP: Honestly, it’s a matter of being in a good mood, for me. When I’m in a good mood, it’s hard not to be inspired by your surroundings. Somedays I feel like I’m more aware than others, and the days I’m more aware, I’m more inspired.

NLB: I feel like you get good responses from your models.

DJP: I try. I mean, you only see the work that I want you to see (laughs). I’ve had models cry on me because they thought I was too hard on them. But at the end of the day, it comes down to me doing what I need to do to get (within limits, obviously) to get what I want out of it.

NLB: How do you work with models, generally?

DJP: I’m very verbal. I wouldn’t be able to handle myself on the other side of the camera. I’m very talkative so when I’m creating there’s no real separation between me and the model. I like to aim for that. Because she’s just like clay to me… with all respect.

That’s one scenario. Another scenario, which I love, is when a model essentially understands what I’m trying to get out of her and where I’m trying to go, so she can help the process even more. So it’s even better when I don’t have to say anything. Or when I do it’s just making it even better, because she’s already giving me what I need. It’s very tiring talking non-stop for an hour-and-a-half, two, three hours, shooting a girl, because I want her to move… and plus, at the end of the day, those shoots don’t really look natural, because she doesn’t get it. And you can’t fake it. Seasoned eyes know when something is authentic or not.

So that’s another thing about fashion photography is that everything gets on a schedule and expectant for things to happen. And that’s the hardest thing to do in the world. It’s like trying to make magic happen.

NLB: …While someone’s got somewhere to be

DJP: Yeah, catering and all that. So imagine being the one in charge of all that. Even the Art Director, who’s supposed to be in above in the heirarchy on a photo set, looks at the photographer and puts the pressure for the most part on the photographer: “Give me this. Give me that.” That’s a bad Art Director. A good Art Director helps to produce and make that magic happen and allow the photography to capture technically on film, which is what my passion is. I’m not an Art Director. I try to art direct sometimes. Most of the things you see on the site are my Art Direction. But I love working with Art Directors that know what they want… have a clear vision of what they want and how to achieve it, outside of the photography aspect of it.

It’s not all me on the shoot in working with the model. The model is affected by everybody on the shoot. Especially new models, they don’t know how to block everybody out. You can feel their self-consciousness about all the eyes on them. Supermodels have the ability to block everything out, which is really mindblowing to see them work, the focus. And that, in turn, allows the magic to happen. It’s all about the vibe on the shoot.

Over the years I’ve learned how to push people’s buttons, I’d like to think in a good way, to help them to let go.

NLB: What do you shoot with?

DJP: I started shooting with Canon for a long time. I shot with the Contax G2 for a couple years. Now I shoot with Nikon, digital.

NLB: And what would you shoot with ideally, without budgetary restraints?

DJP: Ideally, Hasselblad with digital back. Why, you gonna bless me with that? (laughs)

NLB: What are your long term goals as a photographer?

DJP: I love making money, but I realized that making money there’s a gap at feeling fulfilled as a photographer. And that gap really just just comes with sharing a moment on a level where people get inspired to live life and be beautiful and share experiences with each other and travel – everything that life has to offer – by looking at a picture. I’ve got that experience from looking at pictures. I just want to be able to invoke that experience in other people, even people not interested in fashion photography. I think women are the most beautiful thing that I ever, ever, ever laid eyes on. And to be able to take that feeling and translate it through my work, that’s my ultimate goal. But I like making money too! (laughs)

The Restless Artist: ARC Presents Timothy Saccenti

Some of the best photographers and filmmakers in the world walk through our doors every day. ARC Presents is our series highlighting their work.

The current wisdom among self-appointed photo industry “experts,” the advisors and consultants that populate portfolio reviews, is to make your portfolio “predictable.” Your potential client, so the thinking goes, needs to know exactly what they can expect when they hire you, so your work should represent a consistent, homogenous vision. This has resulted in a lot of boring, repetitious portfolios. Sure, you can gauge exactly what you’re going to get, but what fun is that? All the greatest artists in history regularly pushed themselves out of their comfort zones and into new creative territory. Kubrick worked many styles in 22 different genres, and that was just during his second career as a film director, after many years as a photographer!

Which is what makes Timothy Saccenti’s giddily diverse portfolio so refreshing. If there’s one thing you can be guaranteed when booking Saccenti, is that there are no guarantees. In both his still work and videos, he approaches each project like a blank slate, and with a fervor for experimentation, seemingly drawing on no specific tradition. Black-and-white and color, studio and location, strobes and natural light, stills and video, smoke and…lasers? Saccenti is a restless artist, vacillating in and out of aesthetics, never satisfied to settle down into one ‘saleable’ style, and that, in this age of focus-group marketing safety, is refreshing.

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Nathan Lee Bush is a fashion and fine art photographer and filmmaker in New York City. His work is on his site and blog.

The Tension of the Unknown: ARC Presents Sam Nixon

Some of the best photographers and filmmakers in the world walk through our doors every day. ARC Presents is our series highlighting their work.

Ambiguity, the tension of not knowing, is a fundamental frustration of the human psyche. Who hasn’t experienced the building anxiety in the waning chapters of a page-turner, the growing suspense near the climax of a film, the impulse to find out?

And yet, there’s a simple pleasure in not knowing. Being tantalized, teased with hidden knowledge, pulls us in. Photography can exploit this impulse because, while seemingly offering so much in terms of descriptive accuracy, a frozen moment in time is inherently enigmatic. What lies outside the frame? Why is the subject making that strange gesture? So much of the story is filled in in the viewer’s own mind, and often, the more potential interpretations there are, the more intriguing the image becomes. Great photographs can thus be discovered over and over again.

Fashion Photographer Sam Nixon understands this tension, and working within the confines of the genre, manages to capture this ambiguity with his models. His spare, simple scenarios and enigmatic poses are satisfying in their lack of the clean finality we often see today. It’s getting easier and easier to make technically correct images, and the ‘mistakes’ in Nixon’s work: motion blur, soft focus, light leaks, double exposures, serve as an repudiation to the considered perfection of much modern digital photography. It feels like we’re witnessing a brief glimpse of a moment slipping through the stream of time.

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Nathan Lee Bush is a fashion and fine art photographer and filmmaker in New York City. His work is on his site and blog.

ARC Presents: Steven Laxton

Some of the best photographers and videographers in the world walk through our doors every day. ARC Presents is our series highlighting their work on our blog.

If every photographer had a musical corollary, Steven Laxton‘s would be Trent Reznor, the brooding creator of Nine Inch Nails. Laxton’s work, like Reznor’s, projects an epic seriousness and monumental gloom. A smoldering, apocalyptic weight pervades his images, even when they are not necessarily about a dystopian future world (though one project is specifically so). Harsh white lights frame the subject from a distance, strong micro-contrast accentuating their every pore, while green or purple or yellow casts fill the thick smoke around them.

His editorial and personal photos have a cinematic scale and narrative feel, and could easily be stills pulled from a modern epic by Michael Mann, David Fincher, or early Ridley Scott. In his series on Australian Rules Football players, he paints them as heroic, almost mythic, modern gladiators (not too far off, actually: when I traveled in Australia I became convinced this is the toughest sport in the world). His Urban Forms series has a similar grandiosity, with distant and cold skyscrapers creating monumental, jagged geometries

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Nathan Lee Bush is a photographer and filmmaker in New York City. His work is on his site and blog.

ARC Presents: Rebecca Greenfield

Some of the best photographers and videographers in the world walk through our doors every day. ARC Presents is our series highlighting their work on our blog.

Gary Winogrand once said:

From the photograph… (a) piece of time and space is well described. But not what is happening.

I think that there isn’t a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability. Any of ‘em. They do not tell stories – they show you what something looks like. To a camera. The minute you relate this thing to what was photographed — it’s a lie. It’s two-dimensional. It’s the illusion of literal description.. Photography, despite physically describing the has always had a dishonest quality.

Editorial photographers must come to terms with this reality. The seemingly impeccable descriptive qualities of a photograph can only show you how light looked on a surface to a camera at one exact moment from one exact perspective. Each step closer to real experience – putting photos in succession to create motion, adding recorded sound, adding 3D illusion, (however controversial, this follows the trend toward more descriptive quality) – gives the viewer more information to interpret correctly. Photography, from this perspective, is relatively primitive as a descriptive form. Almost everything the viewer interprets from the images is, strictly speaking, all in his or her head. But in tis enigmatic quality lies its magic, allowing the viewer to project their subjective experience onto this supposedly objective object.

The best editorial photography, ostensibly the pinnacle of narrative, acknowledges this limitation, and Rebecca Greenfield embraces the inscrutable quality inherent in the medium. On the surface, her photos appear matter of fact, but they often pose as many questions as they answer.

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Nathan Lee Bush is a photographer and filmmaker in New York City. His work is on his site and blog.

ARC Presents: David Byun

Some of the best photographers and videographers in the world walk through our doors every day. ARC Presents is our series highlighting their work on our blog.

James Thurber once said, “There are two kinds of light — the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.” Looking at the fashion photography of David Byun, it’s clear he understands the difference.

His mastery of light is in a class of its own, with wide-ranging work. Each scenario, while deceptively simple, presents its own lighting challenges, and each time, he resolves them with thoughtful precision to strike just the right emotional tone for the project at hand.

He’s also a one-stop shop for creatively demanding clients, who increasingly expect the complete package. He scores his videos himself with haunting, atmospheric electronic music, and is accomplished with 3D Computer graphics. In fact, before entering photography, he had a fruitful career as a designer.

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Nathan Lee Bush is a photographer and filmmaker in New York City. His work is on his blog, site and Vimeo.

ARC Presents: Jonathan Mannion

Some of the best photographers and videographers in the world walk through our doors every day. ARC Presents is our series highlighting their work on our blog.


Celebrity portraitist Jonathan Mannion‘s photography resists pat stylistic categories. He approaches each subject anew, with a willingness to work in a variety of formats and styles. Yet each portrait feels completely appropriate to the subject, and projects the singular qualities that defines their public persona. While often including simple metaphorical objects, he never overcomplicates the scenario, and never distracts from the subject.

Andre Agassi, clutching his tennis racket with a grimace, projects the pain so well-captured in his recent memoir, Open, where he revealed his lifelong hatred of the game that was his livelihood. The portrait of rapper 50 Cent, sipping bourbon and smoking a cigar at the edge of the pool he’s in, typifies his obsession with the idealized ‘good life.’ Dr Dre leans leisurely back in his studio chair, the master of his domain. Besides being technically immaculate, all of the photos understand the narrative nature of photography, which is a single instant captured and imbued with meaning by the viewer. Mannion’s work allows the subject to represent his or her own self-concept, and imply an entire life story with the most minimal of clues.

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Nathan Lee Bush is a photographer and filmmaker in New York City. His work is on his blog, site and Vimeo.

ARC Presents: Ben Baker

Some of the best photographers and videographers in the world walk through our doors every day. ARC Presents is our series highlighting their work on our blog.

Photographers and filmmakers love control. Predictable, good light and longer days are, after all, major reasons most American films now come out of Hollywood. The seemingly endless supply of artificial light sources and modifiers and expensive studio spaces point to the obsessive desire and endless lengths photographers will go to escape the fickle whims of natural light and complications of location shooting.

But some photographers have another erratic variable thrown into the mix, and it walks on two feet and talks like…well just talks. A celebrity portrait photographer has the unenviable task of making people look good. And not just any people, but celebrities, the size of whose egos are often matched only by the brevity of time they have available. Besides technical and aesthetic considerations, the portrait photographer must also finesse the person before him, setting the tone with all the subtle cues any social interaction involves, all while adjusting the factors that contribute to an aesthetically compelling image. Ben Baker performs admirably on all these fronts, giving us fresh perspectives on the most known people on the planet.

Ralph Lauren, his weathered face hidden behind sunglasses, bounces a basketball with a teenager’s vigor. Obama, pre-office, points directly into the camera with a confidence and coolness that reads “Presidential material.” Architect Richard Meier peers through a tangle of buildings reflected through a window, with an architectural model of his own swallowing the foreground. Donald Trump and his progeny practically interact in a tetraptych of portraits, implying a family drama worthy of a Greek Tragedy.

Whatever his method, Baker clearly understands, besides composition and lighting, how to get people to open up and show a lesser-seen side of themselves to him, and by extension, to us.

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Nathan Lee Bush is a photographer and filmmaker in New York City. His work is on his blog, site and Vimeo.

ARC Presents: Fiorenzo Borghi

Some of the best photographers and videographers in the world walk through our doors every day. ARC Presents is our series highlighting their work on our blog.

Many photographers depend on the model to give them interesting lines and shapes, but Fiorenzo Borghi takes no chances. With the attentiveness of a choreographer, he experiments with the human form, while never distracting from the clothes. The bizarre and intriguing scenarios expressed in these poses lend the images a mysterious, oblique quality.

Forget the magic hour, Borghi prefers shooting, by the looks of it, at high noon, where sharp shadows contribute starkness to the clothes and background.

Borghi manages to take simple setups and invest them with a startling beauty. Take, for example, the beach shoot, in which massive colored flags modifying the harsh sunlight to create an utterly alien effect. Or take the street shoot that takes advantage of the simple bold colors outside a standard NYC construction site.

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Nathan Lee Bush is a photographer and filmmaker in New York City. His work is on his blog and site, and on Vimeo. He’s also on Twitter.

ARC Presents: Sebastian Mlynarski

Some of the best photographers and videographers in the world walk through our doors every day. ARC Presents is our series highlighting their work on our blog.

Sebastian Mlynarski is an photographer and filmmaker with an experimental temperament and restless desire for new aesthetic modes of expression.

In the music video for the trance-inducing ”Helium,” by MAYa, cloaked figures with broad hats wander the desert, dragging large nets behind and between them. Within this simple motif, Mlynarski is constantly experimenting.

He underexposes much of the footage (which was shot on the RED One), reminiscent of day-for-night techniques of classic westerns. The sky is matted black in some shots. In others the landscape glows with a radioactive haze. Some shots are static, some violently handheld. Some distant, some alarmingly close. Some night, some day, some under blinding sun, others cloudy skies, seemingly at random. Whenever a narrative seems to be forming, it dissolves. Even the choice of framerate, which looks to me like 30fps rather than the more commonly used (and more “cinematic”) 24fps, shirks convention. Some of the shots are stunning and some, in my mind, don’t quite work. But this willingness to keep pushing in new directions, even within the same video, is something I admire greatly.

In Interpol‘s “Barricade” music video, shot on Canon DSLRs, Mlynarski introduces a few simple yet effective motifs, which take us through the song. In the main scenario, band members, contained in borderless square video screens almost matching the larger “real” backdrop, play their instruments isolated in an abandoned field. This effect (more…)