Environmental Causes
Portrait photographers share their best solutions for making great environmental portraits in bad environments. By Jay Mallin
October 02, 2006
By Jay Mallin

It was a situation straight out of "Worst-Case Scenarios: The Photographer's Edition." James Patrick Cooper, on assignment to photograph actress Jessica Alba, arrived at the St. Moritz Hotel in New York City. A flak showed him where he was to make the photo.

"It was a big, empty room," says Cooper. Big, as in one of those massive hotel ballrooms. Empty, as in nothing but the light fixtures and Cooper.

Cooper took out his camera-equipped cell phone and took a snapshot, then sent it to his editor with a note: "This is what I have to deal with today."

So that's the scene. Now make your move, photographer. Do you: a) Throw a hissy fit, telling the nearest celebrity handler (trained to respond instantly to emotional outbursts) that you require a better space right now; b) Take a quick snapshot of your subject standing in the middle of a vast empty space, explaining later to the editor that it's irony and it's art; or c) Get moving and get creative?

The correct choice, at least for those photographers who want to continue to earn a living, is of course "C." And for those who do environmental portraiture, it's a scenario they say they face on a daily basis.

"That's all I do," Cooper says of vanilla hotel rooms and dull environments. "It happens to me all the time," says Andrew Hetherington, a top practitioner for magazines. "Everyday," is the comment from Carmine Galasso, a New Jersey newspaper photographer.

Forget images of famous composers framed by grand pianos, or fabulous people lounging in fabulous homes. The reality of environmental portraiture today is cubicles and hotel rooms, beige walls, ubiquitous computer monitors and fluorescent lighting.

So what do photographers do, faced with a short time window and a dull environment? Panic? Sometimes, they admit, that's step one.

But after that response, every photographer interviewed for this story seems to share a common conviction: to get the shot no matter what. "You could either be crushed by that and walk away sobbing, or you could say, 'Bottom of the ninth and two outsgive me the bat!'" Galasso practically shouts.

"Does it scare me? I think it does," says Hetherington. "But I think I've gotten to the point where I know I'm going to get something. And it's going to look like a picture I took."

Their bravado is shared, but their approaches differ. Take Cooper. He likes to shoot down or up at people, to put them on the roofs of the boring hotels he frequents in Manhattan, or at least on balconies or hanging out windows. Billy Crudup once climbed a rooftop water tower for him.

There weren't any water towers that day in the St. Moritz ballroom, but with a little prowling in the adjacent kitchens, Cooper turned up something that struck him as nearly as useful: a big beige tablecloth. He spread it neatly on the floor. Then he prevailed on the hotel to find him a 20-foot ladder.

When Alba appeared, he simply asked her to recline on the tablecloth, scaled the ladder and photographed down at her for what ended up looking like a big-production studio shot.

Galasso, the newspaper shooter, will turn to unusual angles too, though he doesn't usually go as high. He'll shoot through something, even a table, or frame an object in his foreground. Take the ever-popular yet dreaded assignment, "Person with Computer Screen." Galasso says he might put the computer in the foreground, taking up most of the frame. "Editors," he confides, "still think computers are really new and exciting."

Susanna Howe, another practitioner of the art, says that "if the environment isn't interesting I just look for an interesting piece of light." In a recent assignment to shoot an architect, for instance, she discovered that architects now work on computers, same as everyone else, and even black out their windows to avoid reflections. "Now that everybody works on a computer, there isn't any good light at all," she complains.

Howe went looking for the light, walking to an adjoining warehouse where architectural models were made. It had dramatic windows. "I opted for the light rather than the environment," she says.

What about when there's nothing like that to be found? Howe brings lights and "crazy little McGuire shapes" that she can use to create the feel of an imaginary doorway shining light into a room, light that perhaps seems to have been filtered through a big shade tree.

Light often provides a solution, agrees Brooklyn-based photographer John Midgley. Take the time he was assigned to photograph a Harvard scientist for Wired magazine. The scientist was adamant that she be photographed in her lab. Midgley found the lab just wasn't going to work at all, especially with the 4 x 5 camera he uses. So he stood the woman in front of a blank wall.

So far, so bad. Very bad. But her work involved using multicolored lasers. Midgley reached for the gels and put the woman in multi-hued beams that added up to white where they overlapped.

"There are technical ways to deal with the problem" of dull environments, he observes. "You bring a background with you. You light the subject. There are always ways around any ugly background."

Of course light can also be the enemy, particularly when it is dull, flat and greenin other words, fluorescent. San Francisco-based Timothy Archibald has perhaps the most extreme approach here. He embraces the enemy, actually taking a geek-grade overhead fluorescent light with him on location.

Archibald says that for a while in his career he "was the go-to guy for mundanity." He did a job that required a fluorescent light overhead. "It was so neutral and so boring" that he decided it had properties he liked. He started taking it on editorial assignments and hanging it over his subjects.

"They'd think you were out of your mind. It looks like it came out of Home Depot. Which it did."

Archibald has also had bad experiences with modern-day labs, which evidently lack the sort of cracking lightning bolts and flashing control panels mandated in any good sci-fi movie. He'd done some shots of science enthusiasts with projects that won him a prime annual report job, photographing scientists in Rochester for Kodak. But when he and the art director got to Rochester, they scouted around and found all the scientists worked in little offices on computers.

Surprise, surprise.

They went back to the hotel and worked on step one, panicking for a bit. Would the whole job be a complete bust? Should they fly out at midnight and not answer their cellphones for a few weeks?

But as it happens, they had also scouted a local elementary school they had access to. And the school could provide the kind of homey, colorful environments that Archibald is adept at putting to use.

Still, first things first. They had to convince the client that a schoolan elementary schoolwas going to provide a suitable setting for those brilliant company scientists. That night, over a long and painful dinner with their client, the photographer and the art director decided to resort to symbolism: "This school is a metaphor for how we're all learning all the time."

When the pitch worked, they went through Polaroids of the school and thought about simple styling. Here was a basement room with a pink tablecloth and curtainhow about asking one woman to show up wearing a pink sweater to match? Or how about this spacemaybe that other scientist would look great here if we asked him to wear his name badge.

It may sound tenuous, but Archibald says the shots worked and the project was saved. It helped, he says, that the scientists were interesting and personable. In an environmental portrait, "the person is the key," he says.

Of course it's nice if you can associate the person with the environment in a meaningful wayeven if it takes metaphor to do it. Galasso, who photographs for The Record of Bergen County, New Jersey, says that when he heads to a portrait assignment, "I try to have as much information going in as I can. I think that's a real help." He'll talk to the reporter on the story, because he figures, "even the least visual reporter" may unwittingly hand him the clue he needs to make an image.

Like all the photographers interviewed, Galasso is also very aware of the various environments that are available. A few weeks before this interview he was in Chicago, shooting for a personal book project. Doing interviews for this project as well, he wanted to tie the photos with his subjects' stories.

One woman wanted to be photographed next to a particular building. It just didn't work photographically, says Galasso. On the drive out, though, he'd noticed a downed tree in some woods. A photo of the woman posed behind the tree was the answer. (Yes, he's got a metaphor to explain the tree. But it was also a nice-looking photo.)

Hetherington, doing environmental portraiture for magazines, says that when he arrives for a shoot, "I'm very nosy. I poke around a lot." Photographing a family one day, he asked them to show him around their home. He noticed a photo of them at Disney World on the mantelpiece, wearing the traditional Disney tribal headgear. "You don't still have those [mouse] ears, by any chance?" he asked. They did indeed, one each for Mom, Dad, and daughter. The photo of the three sitting on their couch in mouse ears is hilarious.

Or how about a much more difficult case: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He was the worst kind of subjectone who doesn't want to give any time and who just doesn't care about the photo. "That was a subject who really didn't want to be photographed," recalls Hetherington. "But he was going to give me a photo, a frame, and I had to recognize it and take that and be happy with it."

The photographer did his usual nosing around, then asked the mayor to step into the office breakfast nook. "That was kind of the most interesting thing in the whole office," Hetherington reports. He had time to shoot just two rolls of film with the mayor holding a mug of coffee. "He gave us a moment by lifting the cup. I took it and realized that was it."

"That's your biggest enemy, someone who just doesn't care," observes Howe, who's had her share of them. But she points out each environmental portrait involves "maybe five or six elementsthe person, their looks, the environment, the amount of time," and so on, and not all of them will go bad at once.

The strategy, she says, is to find the ones working in your favor and use that to make the picture. "Usually not all of them suck. So you have to highlight the things that don't suck," she says. "Just like life."