Copyright 2013, David Harry Stewart. Oliver Holzmann for RedBull
Sometimes I like to shock myself.
Revisits
I tend to change my thoughts on the edit of my pictures with the passage of time. This series was originally shot in 2010 and presented in color. Last week I decided I was just not happy with them, something bugged me. It’s not that the images were no good, it was that my point of view on the project had changed. This happens often, my feelings on images are voluble. It is often related to the distance I have between what my intentions were in taking the picture and what the actual results were. With time, the intentions recede and only the images remain.
Quite often I will make an image that I find compelling, but have no idea how it fits in. I will hold it to the side, sometimes for several years. If the path that the image is on is a good one, other pictures will show up there, and after a while, it may show up as a new direction revealing itself to me. Or it may prove to be just a silly novelty that remains an orphan.
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Photographs explain almost nothing
“Photographs explain almost nothing. This is not a defect but a virtue. The ambiguity of photography can be one of its great strengths. A photograph is untranslatable, it says something that can’t be said in speech. The photographer resists explaining himself because he does not want to smother under a pile of words that that special, poetic ambiguity that makes a photograph beautiful”
Taken from Aperture, Spring 2013.
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I LOVE PHOTO EDITORS
Winogrand at SFMOMA. I will leave the review to my friend and much better writer Jonathan Blaustein, who I am sure will get to it before it closes.
This is what interests me: Winogrand’s editing methods, or lack there of. He sort of sometimes edited his contacts, but not with any regularity. It was often people like John Szarkowski, the director of photography at MOMA who did that for him. The last 8 years of his life, he never looked at them at all. We are talking thousands of sheets that he wasn’t interested in looking at. Then the last couple years of his life this accelerated to the point that he stopped even processing the film. At his death there were several thousand rolls of undeveloped film that had to be dealt with.
Here we have a great master photographer who didn’t edit his work, or felt that he wasn’t very good at it? Who knows. What I know is that I am terrible at editing my images, just awful. I will shoot a few thousand images, then knock it down to a few hundred which I then send to my editor Marshall. He reduces it to a few dozen, which I then add back in a few gems that I feel he missed, then this group gets sent to the magazine. With advertising, they always want to know what my favorites are. This make sense in a certain way, but with a temporal distance of 24 hours, there is no way I can separate out intention from image. My function in this case is more of reviewing their top picks and letting them know if there is something in there that bothers me.
I LOVE PHOTO EDITORS. I will say it again: I LOVE PHOTO EDITORS. Can you imagine a writer without an editor? No way. In book world, it is often the editors that are the stars. In movie world, the studio execs are the constant editors of the story line. Why is it that photo editors get so little respect? I don’t get it. It is completely impossible and a total destroyer of the creative impulse to be both creator and editor. I am a great editor, 8 years away from taking the image. It is just too schizophrenic to get caught up in the intention vs actual image internal dialogue to make any good choices. Thank you Garry Winogrand for validating that.
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DHS #2 featured in Computer Arts
DHS #2, in Computer Arts with Public Library
Congratulations to my wonderful designers at Public Library on their profile in the most recent copy of Computer Arts. It was featured in an issue profiling studios doing the best type work internationally. Great guys, awesome work, always up for something new. Give them a shout if you need someone inspired to collaborate with.
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J+J Global Branding Campaign
Johnson & Johnson 1 by David Harry Stewart
Johnson and Johnson 4 by David Harry Stewart
Johnson and Johnson 5 by David Harry Stewart
Johnson and Johnson 6 by David Harry Stewart
Johnson & Johnson 2 by David Harry Stewart
The J+J Healthy Essentials Campaign shot for LBI, New York, Catherine Grey creative director.
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Gillette Global Kiss and Tell campaign for BBDO NY
Gillette Kiss and Tell. for BBDO NY, by David Harry Stewart
I was hired last month to do the global Gillette Kiss and Tell campaign through BBDO NY. The job was 4 couples of mixed ethnicities each telling the story of how a scratchy beard is maybe not so good for kissing. As with all my commercial work, this was a controlled shoot that was cast, scouted and lit, but it had to look realistic. First off was the lighting. It needed to be warm, to be glowing and flattereing, but still based in reality. The mistake to avoid here is to make the image too glam. Next were the models and their interaction. It is a bit tricky when all there is to tell the story are the very slight variations in expressions from the model couples. Directing the mood here were key. Initially I tried coaching them pre-set and then from behind the camera. But what I found was the slightest change in angle changed the message. So for most of the shoot I stood directly in front of models giving them micro direction on the feeling and the angels that I needed. My assistant Mike worked the camera, with me calling out shoot when I thought the position was perfect. When I have someone like Mike whom I have worked with for 10 years, I have no problem not being the one pushing the shutter button. Its all about problem solving, whatever works best on that day to get us to where we need to be.
I have an amazing job. I get to work with some incredible people day after day. Thanks on this one to Cindy Pardy, Kostas Karanikolas and Monty Pera from BBDO for being such a joy to work with.
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Welcome to My World
David Harry Stewart is a photographer and director. He comes from a small town in western New York. He started taking pictures at the age of 8, first with a plastic Kodak 126, then a Polaroid Swinger. He did his first national ad campaign at age 23, then moved on to Paris to work for fashion magazines. Returning to New York he has a successful and award winning career, working for magazines like Interview, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, New York Magazine, Time and The New York Times Magazine. Agency work includes Saatchi, Deutsch, BBDO, Leo Burnett, and Ogilivy, for clients such as American Express, Nike, Coke, Corona and Bank of America. Awards include Communication Arts, The Art Directors Club, Photo District News, The Living Photograph Motion Awards, and American Photography. He splits his time between Los Angeles and New York.
