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| © Anthony Mandler |
| Click photo for more images. |
How film influenced his photography, and how photography influences his filmmaking
The beautiful woman in the tight sequined dress is Beyoncé Knowles, on set in a large Los Angeles sound stage to shoot another music video. Lights are blazing, and the cameras are rolling. But the director's chair is empty. Instead, Anthony Mandler has a $300,000 Panavision camera perched over his shoulder, and as Beyoncé dances he's moving around her, shooting from low angles, from high angles, and from all sides.
"It's a unique way of working," says Mandler. "I will direct multiple cameras, but the main camera is always on my shoulder. I'll step forward, turn, move the camera a little higher or lower. That's how you start to find your angles. Working that way brings me closer to the subject, closer to the action. That's how you work in photography, and that's exactly what I do in motion."
Mandler, 34, is best known today as the director of a string of high-budget, award-winning music videos, including Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable," Rihanna's "Shut Up and Drive," and Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry." He made the dark, compelling video for "Tranquilize" by The Killers. And he's worked with a number of hip-hop artists, including Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent. He's also directed commercials, including the recent "Beautiful Monster" project for Nike. And soon he will begin directing his first feature film, Allegra, from a script by Gregory David Roberts, the bestselling author of the novel Shantaram.
But while most directors learn their craft at film school and by apprenticing for other filmmakers, Mandler took a different route. He spent a decade as one of Los Angeles's top celebrity and commercial photographers, shooting for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and a host of advertising clients that included several Hollywood film studios.
"I essentially threw away a career that a lot of photographers would dream of having," he says. But Mandler, who grew up in Hollywood in a filmmaking family, always wanted to be a director. He studied film at the University of Southern California and once worked for famed Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. When a movie project of his own fell through, though, he grew frustrated with the business. "This was before the video era," he notes. "It wasn't like now, where everyone has video cameras and computer editing software and can show their work on YouTube. I didn't have that kind of outlet."
Instead he took a page out of the playbook of directors like Stanley Kubrick, who once worked as a photographer for Look magazine. "Photography became my means for expressing myself visually," he says. He taught himself photography on a trip to Europe. "The great thing about photography is that you can take pictures every day and look at the film and learn, learn, learn," he says.
At first, he admits, his background in film influenced his photography. "I lit everything like a movie set and used still images to tell little stories," he says. "I preferred shooting horizontals to verticals because it looked more cinematic." Later he began to "loosen up, do more handheld work." And when he began transitioning back into film, those photographic instincts remained. "When I got into video, I was working with the best DPs in the business, but my understanding of light and exposure was as good as theirs because of my photo background," he says.
Today Mandler has his own production company, called Les Enfants Terribles, and he packages commercial projects that combine both film and photography. "For me photography and film complement each other," he says. "Studying photography teaches you how to see and how to organize the world in your head and your eye. And that carries over into all my work." -David Schonauer
Brian Storm
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| © Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times |
| From Luis Sinco's photo essay The Marlboro Marine on MediaStorm, which recounts the experiences of Iraq War veteran Blake Miller. Click photo for more images. |
The power of combining sound with vision
As founder of the innovative Website MediaStorm.org and a former multimedia director for Corbis and MSNBC.com, Brian Storm is a seasoned pioneer in Web-based presentations that combine photography with video work. But Storm believes a key step for photographers in the digital era is capturing audio. "One of the most important tools is the process of gathering audio and combining sound with still images to create a cinematic package," Storm says. "A still photographer already has the visual component -- and it's a very compelling one. But gathering ambient sound and interviewing a subject are the perfect complements to a documentary photograph or essay."
Storm says this holds true for print-based photography as well as Web presentations. "The act of interviewing can lead a photojournalist to important picture opportunities," he says, "and it will add extensive detail to captions or to a full text story. Detailed captions are the key to syndication in what is now an all-digital, metadata-driven search universe." And, he adds, "audio provides the narrative spine necessary for linear media productions in broadcast and on the Web." A case in point: Los Angeles Times photographer Luis Sinco's MediaStorm photo essay The Marlboro Marine, in which an Iraq War veteran's difficulties after coming home are movingly recounted in interviews and still photos.
Storm acknowledges the photojournalism trend toward capturing stories in video and then pulling still frames from the video, but he says this practice can be problematic: "There are a couple of reasons -- one is resolution. Stills from video are good enough for the Web but not for print. That's not going to last forever; there are already cameras out that have amazing resolution. But they cost around $17,000, and they are huge cameras. For the kind of work photojournalists do, where they're often trying to be a fly on the wall, that gear is obtrusive. But don't bet against technology -- it will keep moving, and equipment issues will be resolved."
Meanwhile, Storm advises, a photojournalist can tell compelling stories with a still camera and an audio recorder (he prefers digital units that capture to CompactFlash cards, such as the Marantz PMD660). "There's a big difference between pointing a video camera at somebody, asking questions and getting into their personal space, and being very intimate with just a still camera and a microphone," he says. "If we can get really good at gathering interviews and understanding the power of ambient noise and the layering between the two, we can combine that with stills in multiple platforms -- on the Web, in broadcast, in a podcast, whatever. Then when we make a move to a full-on, video-based tool that's capturing everything, we'll be more prepared for it."
Storm's main advice for photojournalists centers on the art of storytelling. "The transition that we should be thinking about is becoming narrative storytellers -- to think more in cinematic terms in the way we shoot pictures," he says. "The power of the moment is always going to be a compelling way to communicate. I'm still bullish on the impact of a still image, and I've never really cared what kind of camera it's captured with. I care about whether it inspires and educates and informs. It's not about the tools -- the tools will continue to change -- it's about telling stories." -Jack Crager
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