Shots from the English National Opera’s incredibly beautiful new production of Tchaikovsky’s opera, The Queen of Spades.
The show opens on 6 June and runs for 9 performances.
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Production and publicity shots for actress Kate Cook’s (super-intelligent, super-demented and super-amusing) one-woman show, The Invisible Woman, coming to the Edinburgh Fringe this year.
Shots from the revival of director Calixto Bieito’s extraordinary production of Bizet’s Carmen at the English National Opera.
The show opens on Wednesday 20 May for a 14-performance run, with Justina Gringyte in the title role.
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After last week’s post, I was looking around for what I could put up that’d provide a suitable tonal shift and stumbled across the publicity shots for Arion Productions’ 2013 revival of the first AIDS play, As Is.
It’s hard to describe the piece other than to say it completely avoids the (pretty miserable) clichés of the genre and features go-go dancing. And, ably assisted by irrepressible costume designer Pippa Batt, we wanted the advertising work to reflect that.
Production shots from the sobering and unmissable I Wish to Die Singing at the Finborough Theatre.
The play, which looks at the Armenian Genocide, runs to 16 May.
So last week the LSMT were spreading grunge anarchy through the Bridewell Theatre. This time it’s the indescribably mad combination of waxworks, Victorian serial killing and spacious jail cells in Redhead.
The show runs to Saturday 2 May.
So how do you shoot hip-hop choreography? By drinking two litres of water the moment you get home, as it happens.
Shots from the London School of Musical Theatre’s phenomenal and utterly anarchic take on Green Day’s American Idiot at the Bridewell Theatre.
Note that if you’re intending to see it there’s only tonight and tomorrow night left of the run.
How do you market a play about a genocide?
It’s not a question that comes up every day but when the Finborough Theatre asked me to shoot the advertising images for I Wish To Die Singing — a highly unconventional play about the Armenian Genocide — I knew I’d have to do a bit of thinking.
As a photographer, your job in marketing work is to create images that make people want to go to see a play (and they need to be the right people — there’s as little point in showboating by producing smoke-filled horror imagery for a jolly-hockeysticks musical as there is in shooting massively stylised, massively toned chiaroscuro portraits for a play about a boy’s love for a hedgehog; you’ll just end up engaging with the wrong audience).
The shots need to capture the beating heart of the piece. While they do that, they need to make people look for more than the usual microsecond. So you need to let your imagination take flight. And, if you possibly can, you need not do the same thing — or the same thing as everyone else — over and over again.
Usually, there are a couple of things that get in the way.
The first is cast availability. Unless it’s a very big show, the publicity shoot may not be that far away from the start of the show itself, which means whatever you do is eating into rehearsal time and not everyone you might want in the shots may be available to sit for them.
The second is, as you might expect, resources. It’s all very well fantasising about shooting fashion magazine-style with ten assistants and Marrakech as your backdrop, but the chances are one-and-a-half costumes will be ready and your location is a broom cupboard.
So you work with what you’ve got.
But things get a bit more complicated when you’re dealing with a real, historical event that resulted in the deaths of well over a million people (by almost every estimate) and the creation of a diaspora of Armenian peoples around the world. There is a paramount (and obvious) need, while creating shots that engage people, to remain absolutely respectful.
So we were left with, broadly, three options:
With a brave client behind me and a brave and exceptionally patient cast, we went for option three, using long exposures and hand-held lights to try to illustrate with optics just how unsettling, chaotic and horrifying the period of world history with which I Wish To Die Singing deals was.
The show opens at the Finborough on 21 April.
Some production shots from the radical reworking of Gilbert and Sullivan’s controversial Princess Ida at the Finborough Theatre.
The (extremely entertaining) show runs until 18 April.
For a while, now, I’ve been searching for a chance to do some theatre advertising shots using a really, really classic look that doesn’t get seen much beyond magazine editorials these days because it’s a bit retro.
So when I was asked to shoot the publicity for Gilbert and Sullivan’s seldom-seen Princess Ida at the Finborough, and was told that all I had to work with was a headless and limbless torso and a big room, I jumped at the chance.
Simon Butteriss and Bridget Costello were my wonderfully in-character victims.
The show begins previews on 24 March.
