Behind the Scenes « Winokur Photography

Behind the Scenes

San Francisco’s African American Churches

Reverend Williams, Ms. Williams and Sister Josephine - Mt. Herman Baptist Church May 2010

This is the very beginning, on Sunday we started up a new long-term project. Its a moment of unrealized possibilities mixed with all the harsh reality of making the right decisions in order to get where we are going. The project is about San Francisco’s African American churches. When we lived on Lyon street our neighbors were Mt. Herman Baptist church. Kind and interesting people who commute into San Francisco every week to attend the church they’ve been running for 34 years. Iana and I are fascinated by the idea that this community has left San Francisco but the city still their spiritual home. We decided back then that there would be some kind of portrait project we could do about the churches in the Western Addition – NOPA to the hipsters. I see this as a portrait project and also a historic record. Like everything it took us some time to get started but now we are on track and I hope we’ll be making some major progress over the next few months.

Sister Shirley - Mt. Herman Baptist Church May 2010

The current plan is to do the studio on location portraits I’ve done successfully before, this time using both Type 55 black and white positive / negative film and digital (insurance). I have a very small cache of Polaroid Type 55. It’s hard to use it up because there will be no more but it can’t sit much longer either, so this is the project and i’m going to use the 8 boxes of film I have and see where it takes me. If anyone is holding onto some Type 55 they would like to sell or donate to this project, we’d be quite appreciative. In addition to the studio-style portraits I’ll also be photographing church services to set the environment for of the portraits. I expect I’ll get more churching this year then in my previous 39.

Brother Dennis - Mt. Herman Baptist Church May 2010

I don’t usually talk about a project from the beginning, a habit of not wanting to get scooped from my journalism days, but I’m taking a chance here and making this a somewhat public process. I plan to post a few pictures after each shoot and then edits as we get to that stage. Here are the first 4 type 55′s from Mt. Herman Baptist and a snapshot of the film drying in our bath. Also, if you have connections to SF churches that would be helpful to this project I’d love to hear from you.

Brother Dennis - Mt. Herman Baptist Church May 9, 2010

-Michael

So, the magnetic white-board is about to be cleared off and once again the process of shooting and editing and shooting and editing and editing begins again.

Type 55 drying in the bath.

Behind the Scenes / Large Format and Alternative Process / Portraiture / The Foundry Studio / Winokur Photography — 1 Comment
25
Mar 10

The Montages

Inspired by David Hockeny's Pearl Blossom Highway, this is one of a new series of montages I've been shooting here in the studio.

Since we moved into the new studio I’ve been exploring and really enjoying the new space. Right away I started a new personal project making portraits of freckled people. That series is now online here. Since I had cool people coming to the studio to sit for me I figured I could try something even more experimental then the freckles project. This series, which was inspired by David Hockeny’s Pearl Blossom Highway allows me to explore each subject through a series of detail images, this one of Ria Murphy is comprised of 69 individual photographs. I used an old Apple Box which I inherited when I moved into the studio as a unifying element in the series, it and the space itself are the only consistencies in these montages. Because of the nature of this project, you can’t tell if you have something good until you assemble all the parts, it has some of the magic and surprise that we all used to love with film.

Behind the Scenes / The Foundry Studio / Winokur Photography — 2 Comments
3
Feb 10

Change of Address

I’ve been so busy getting the APA/SF Blog going. I’ve neglected posting the biggest news from Winokur Photography. We moved. I’m very happy to tell you about The Foundry Studio, Winokur Photography’s new home. This building, erected around 1907, as the home of Pelton Water Wheel’s foundry. It has also been a studio space for a succession of talented photographers and other artists. Read about Pelton on Wikipedia, it’s fascinating. I’m proud to work in a place which was once the home of a company combining craftsmanship and engineering to make a cutting edge product. After all, photography is a juncture of art and science.

We’re located in what has been called Media Gultch, a part of San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood. We have great resturants as wells as Calumet, Left Space, Figureplant and JCX Expendables as neighbors. It’s pretty convenient.

That barber’s chair (left) has traveled with me from Philadelphia to San Diego to Palo Alto to San Francisco. I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be doing any more traveling for some time. This is the first time I’ve had a studio of my own. Even though my work is very location oriented, this studio is a great HQ. It will be an environment to experiment in, build sets, fine tune lighting setups and otherwise make a big mess.

Just because its an old warehouse doesn’t mean it can’t be homey. Come and visit sometime.

-Michael

Behind the Scenes / Large Format and Alternative Process / Polaroid / type 55 / Winokur Photography — 3 Comments
28
Jan 10

Shopping for a bit of photo history

I’m on the lookout for a pair of 8″ Petzval portrait lenses. If you know of a source for these please send me a message. These lenses were made starting in 1840. They are characterized by extremely sharp center of focus with a quick falloff to a swirly bokeh. My plan is to try to adapt them to fit on the Gowlandflex, so if you have any experience with this also please let me know.

-Michael

Behind the Scenes / Collaborations / Personal Work and New Images / type 55 — 1 Comment
26
Aug 09

Beijing Street series

A few months ago we had the time and opportunity to visit our cousin Andrey in Beijing. Since I don’t truly understand the concept of a vacation I arranged a ‘fixer’ so I could do a couple days of street portraiture while we were in town. Since my work is all about real people, any pictures I would make there would require a translator, one who understood the culture, languages, photography and production. That’s what a fixer does, more on this later.

It’s hard as an American not to have wildly inaccurate preconceptions about China, most of understand that they make our stuff, own our debt and have some challenges on the human rights front. All I can really report from our brief time in Beijing is, whatever you expect to find there you will be surprised. At this moment ~~progress~~ change in Beijing is, and has been, so fast that even the locals can’t find there way around. Seriously, some of the roads are so new the cabbies don’t know where they go.

The result of all the new building (they’ve had the best architects in the world working overtime) and the rapid cultural and economic development is a duality between new and old that seems present in every aspect of life. This uneasy and very rapid mix of the new into a very old place manifests itself physically in the streets and buildings, culturally in the art, politics and clothes and psychologically in the outlook of young and older generations

Heading to Beijing I knew my ability to make images in China would be limited, I was traveling light I had two days to shoot maybe a half day to scout and no special access. Given those limitations I feel that this shoot was a successful effort for two reasons. I know what I do and we’ve done this kind of street portrait project before. So my scope was narrow. I immediately found one thing about Beijing, the mix of old and new, to be interested in. So that was the assignment I gave myself: Real Beijingers showing elements of new and old China. Does it sound too simple? I think one of the biggest challenges photographers run into with their personal projects is they bite off more then they can shoot. If you assign yourself to photograph “Cultural Change in Neocapitalist China” you best have some time to commit. Finding something you can do well with the resources available is just as important as finding the ideal project.

The other critical element for this shoot was the ‘fixer’ Lin Jing. We really got lucky finding her. She was amazing. Her tireless energy and willingness to approach strangers on our behalf really made the shoot work. I ended up finding her through my old college friend Kay Chin Tay in Singapore who knew a guy named Tobie Openshaw who was in Beijing who knew Noah Weinzweig a Canadian ex-pat and producer extraordinaire who hired Lin Jing for us. If you need a Red camera in China, Noah is the guy to call. Noah also produced for Edward Burtynsky. When he told me this I was honestly a little skeptical. There are lots of people who will tell you about how they assisted for Nat. Geo or whatever. Well I just saw the documentary on Burtynsky, “Manufactured Landscapes” and there’s Noah translating, rallying people and loading 4×5 – he is the real deal.

Well the work is finally online here: winokurphotography.com I hope you will take a look. One last step for us, sending prints to everyone we photographed. As always a BIG big up to my crew on this project: Iana Simeonov, Lin Jing and Chrysta Geffin.

-Michael

Behind the Scenes / The Foundry Studio — No Comments
14
Jul 09

American Jesus

My specialty is finding the right real people to photograph for my client’s campaigns. The preference of working with real people has developed over my career but it comes down to finding people with great character and personality. Since I have just released my newest series of real people portraits titled American Jesus I thought this would be a good time to talk about one of my techniques for finding great people to photograph. We have tried and are willing to try any approach. We street-cast, post ads online, search for specific looks, recruit our friends…

The method that has worked the best over the years is taking the studio on the street and photographing people as I meet them. This eliminates all the vagaries of scheduling. The drawback is the loss of the control we get in the studio. The big upside is we often get to borrow characters, energy and emotion from an event going on around us. American Jesus was photographed during a wild Easter event in Dolores Park. We heard about a Jesus look-a-like contest that was going on and went to see how people would dress up.

Here is San Francisco it’s often windy – backgrounds, light stands, soft-boxes and flags don’t do well in the wind. I’ve been refining my tools over the years and I’ve been learning what works along the way. The recent shoot went really well thanks to a cube we built out of steel pipe and Kee-safety corners. With Matthews silks to diffuse the natural light.

Here is the cube:

My assistants might not love this idea as much as I do, all that pipe is heavy but we have been hauling around hundreds of pounds of sandbags so its kind of a wash. The cube is just as heavy as all that sand but it has structural strength that light stands don’t offer. The other great thing about the cube is we can clamp strobe heads right to it reducing the number of stands for people to trip on.

Setting up:

Photographing a Jesus impersonator:

As with all of my projects the tools are just a bunch of gear, it’s the team I work with that makes the pictures happen. I couldn’t have done American Jesus without my Iana Simeonov producing, my brother Stephan helping with logistics, my assistant Michael Blumenfeld and Chrysta Geffin who loved up the photos in post.