This past spring I was fortunate enough to have worked on one of the most creatively rewarding project of my professional career. I was contracted by the progressive and award-winning branding agency, Co-Op to work on the branding campaign for the soon-to-be developed City Point, a high-end mall in downtown Brooklyn. The concept of the campaign was to cast real Brooklynites to represent the future shopper at the mall, and to shoot them in real Brooklyn locations. The project was right up my alley.
I was very involved in the casting and in the location scouting. Having co-authored the book, The Brooklynites, where I photographed over 300 real, live Brookynites, and having worked on several Brooklyn-centric projects over the years, I can confidently refer to myself as an “expert” on the borough where I was born, raised and proudly reside.
I culled potential subjects from my virtual rolodex of fascinating peeps from Brooklyn, and threw them into the mix of potentials collected by the agency and my agents and the dozens were narrowed down to 24, including; singer/songwriter Maya Azucena, poets Caits Meissner and Tishon Woodcock, stylist Belinda Martin, DJ Jason Jinx and many, many great subjects including some old friends and even my god-daughter.
My approach for these photographic portraits were a bit different from my usual. The look was to be very “open and clean” so I went with a near shadow-less lighting approach and a very wide-open lens aperture to achieve a shallow depth of field, allowing the subject to stand out from their Brooklyn surroundings.
The photos were designed with real quotes from the subjects, as seen below. They were used for trade show displays and for the just launched City Point website, CityPointBrooklyn.com.
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