Rehearsal photos usually look very bright, very white, and very floaty. But sometimes the venue just doesn’t want to play ball and you end up with something rather pleasantly different.
So, publicity shots and tremendously film-noir style rehearsal photos for the forthcoming opera play, Dress Rehearsal, which opens at the OSO Arts Centre in Barnes next month.
Super-saturated publicity and rehearsal shots for playwright Lee Tannen’s I Loved Lucy, based on his memoir of his time with Lucille Ball.
The show, which comes to the Jermyn Street Theatre next month, stars Sandra Dickinson and Matthew Bunn, and promises to be a blast.
So last week I had the pleasure of shooting Sheila Hancock and Jenna Russell for Grey Gardens at the Southwark Playhouse. But with a twist.
The brief was to make it all look like bad 70s snaps. Well, assuming your name’s not Juergen Teller, that’s quite a big ask. The risk is that you don’t just end up with things that look deliberately like bad 70s snaps, you might actually end up with plain bad snaps.
So I got myself a headache, popped a couple of stomach ulcers, worked out what I was going to do, and prayed.
It turned out I didn’t need to. A phenomenal location (Asylum in SE15), amazing wigs, hair and makeup from Diana Estrada, some equally amazing costume design by Jonathan Lipman, and, most of all, two amazing actresses who gamely did in seconds what most people can never do — namely, pull poses and make it look so spontaneous they don’t look like poses at all — did all the work for me.
An utterly brilliant shoot.
I’m having a puns week, so you’ll forgive the title.
Antic Disposition’s wonderful Christmas Carol returns to the Middle Temple Hall next month for a strictly limited run from 22 to 30 December.
We pottered around the Temple with stars David Burt and David Hunter earlier this month in search of climes Dickensian…
When we sat down to talk about the poster for World War I musical The White Feather (coming to the Union in September), we knew three things.
It was going to have a feather in it. It was going to be shot in studio. And we were going to shoot it for real.
Well, sometimes photoshoots evolve as they go on.
As star Abigail Matthews looked gamefully morose-but-content-but-triumphant — which, in case it’s not obvious, isn’t the easiest look to pull off — we tried holding a feather in front of her on a wire, having her throw feathers at herself and flinging feathers at her via a wind machine. But the feathers just wouldn’t go where we needed them and it all risked looking like a comedic farce or — the horror — a little bit arty.
I’m a great believer in doing things practically when you can. But, when you can’t, there’s always computer magic.
So what we ended up doing was showering feathers from the ceiling and taking what we’d intended — Abigail staring at a single feather — and turning it into a feather flock.
All against the backdrop of two skies from opposite sides of the world: Te Anau in New Zealand and the Pointe du Grouin in Brittany.
No sooner do I post about the original run of As Is at the Finborough Theatre than it resurrects for a rather special transfer to Trafalgar Studios.
Poster and rehearsal shots from the forthcoming production, plus a bonus shot of Mr Steven Webb departing just a fraction from the brief during the poster shoot…
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.
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.
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.
I’m lucky enough to have many lovely, lovely clients, but I count Philip Foster among my favourites for two reasons. First, I’ve worked with him since pretty much the first day I set out as a photographer. Second, because in a business full of inspiring personalities he stands out as a very inspiring man.
A large number of people who’ve worked in theatre or music for any length of time will have come across Philip because he wears about a thousand hats, among them producer, director, agent, vocal coach and manager.
Those many hats have led to a need for a variety of different portraits down the years, of which some of my favourites below.
Assistant for rooftop shoot: Jiann Chyuan Ho.
