Lighting Designers and Photography
On World Photography Day, I’m thinking about one of the creative relationships we don’t talk about.
Photography has been the cornerstone of my creative process as a lighting designer for performance for the longest I can remember. My engagement with it is always to some extent passive, using the photographic work of others to spark inspiration for my own work.
I’m not sure where I’d be right now creatively without the great inspirational weight of artists like Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Margret Durow, Tania Franco Klien and Cristina Coral to name but few.
However, the magic of the production photographer is all too easy to forget. I’ll admit that there is more than a little trepidation when the dress rehearsal rolls round. There is something completely fascinating about what the role of the production photographer is––on one hand, I’m sure there is a need to take images to ‘sell the show’. However, sometimes there appears to be another interesting inquiry going on––one that seeks more to document and engage with the liveness of the act of storytelling. Lighting designers by nature are absolute adrenaline junkies, penned in by time and physics they are forced to weave together a visual world out of nothing. Production photographers then–– must be crack addicts by comparison.
I do not always light places and people in ways that are pleasing on camera, so the abject fear that is struck into my heart when the production photographer begins is unreal. We as designers often see production shots as one of our key currencies, they allow others to gain an understanding of our sensibilities, our ways of seeing, or simply if our work is ‘any good’.
I’m certainly very guilty of not appreciating the true artistry that goes into being able to shoot a show, to sense the dynamics at play, and get good shots––all, most of the time going in completely cold the production. That’s a sensational skillset that I could only wish to possess.
The beauty of production photography in my mind is the sudden close-up nature of the interaction. The fact that the work takes on a different form allows me to learn so much about the way my creative eye works, why I instinctively light the way I do. Having work reproduced through the eyes of someone using a different medium is a gateway to a different dimension of hypothetical mind-farts and I could continue this mini-essay but I shan’t…
Anyway, this has been a production photographer appreciation post…below I’ve included some of my fave’s of my work from the last 5 years or so, that have brought me great joy in one way or another.
