Photographing the arts: embracing uncertainty

“When I look back at how I got to where I am now, the one through-line that carries on is always theatre. For me, that’s been the great love/obsession of my working life, and so everything I’ve done—since high school, basically—has been about finding my place in that community.”

A couple of years ago, I was interviewed by the wonderful performer Jennifer Trijo (who I met working on Once, and is currently in Hadestown) for her blog about careers in the arts which is, sadly, no longer online. I always intended to republish it here at some stage, as I thought we had a really great conversation about building a career in the performing arts.

So, with her permission, here’s the article she wrote at the time…

Photographing the arts: Different Spaces—wide angles for close quarters

In a previous essay I was talking about the difficulty of going into unfamiliar venues, and working out how to know what lenses might be needed to reach a performer on stage over a great distance. This time, I wanted to look at the opposite issue—how to work with a large production, in a small space.

When there isn’t going to be room to back up very far—if the seating in the venue is right at the front edge of the stage, for example—an ultra-wide angle lens is what’s going to be needed to get the full scale of a very wide or tall set, which can be useful for both publicity/marketing of the production (especially if it’s a particularly ambitious show in terms of scale), and later on for designers’ portfolios as well.

But that can create other issues, even as it’s solving one problem…

Photographing the arts: revisiting a show (or Once, twice)

You could be forgiven for thinking the photo above looked familiar—after all, I did have a very similar one a couple of years ago!

But there’s a reason for that: the production of Once at Darlinghurst Theatre Company has made a return, with half the cast being new this time—so I was back there recently to photograph it for them, ahead of a nationwide tour.

And to be honest, while it’s something I’ve done before (re-photographing a show, I mean), somehow I was more nervous than I was the first time….

Photographing the arts: the poster / promotional shoot

I’ve written before about the range of different ways a photographer can be involved in creating images for a production; and in my other essays on photographing the arts I’ve tended to focus on the actual production stills taken on stage, so it’s about time I looked at the poster / promotional image side of things.

There are a thousand different ways to go about creating a ‘teaser’ or promotional image for a show, so this is just an example of what we did in this particular case; but for me, the overall approach is usually the same: get to know the script, the characters and their relationships, find out about the design & directorial concepts for the production, come up with some visual ideas that underscore elements of what’s being created, and (if necessary) scout for locations that will work for what we want to achieve.

In this case, for the Darlinghurst Theatre Company production of Once, my feeling was that connection lay at the heart of the story - the relationship between Guy and Girl (as the characters are known), supported by the community of musicians they encounter through the course of their story…