INT: You\u2019ve photographed so many stars. What\u2019s your process for capturing them authentically?<\/p>\n
JB: Getting to know them relatively quickly in a very short space of time! Letting them feel the relaxed energy from me and then hopefully I get a part of their persona that they may not have shown to somebody else \u2013 that\u2019s something I learned on the job. I\u2019ve also trained my mindset to always have an alternative at the back of my head.<\/p>\n
For example, there\u2019s a shoot with Nas. Illmatic had just come out, and he was talking about the streets and so on. He\u2019d come over on his first major press conference and I told Sony I wanted to take him around to Soho, and they agreed. I ended up being the last photographer of the day and it was going to have to be in a basement kitchen. I was like, how am I gonna make it look good? I could see he was tired as well. You\u2019ve got 15 minutes, it\u2019s really hard to get into it, and at the same time you\u2019ve got to be empathetic to them and what they do as an artist. I was young at that point as well, and a lot of the time I actually looked younger than what I was \u2013 if I was 20, I probably looked like 15. I\u2019d carry prints to prove that I could take a photograph, because people would think I was the stylist on the shoot, and not the photographer. So I thought on my feet. In the dark room, I\u2019d already done some imagery whereby I\u2019d superimposed two images on one and that in the dark room, and I\u2019d done it within the camera with multiple exposure too. I\u2019ve given away a few things here, but the final photograph of Nas itself, people think up to this day that it was done by Photoshop. It wasn\u2019t \u2013 it was done in the darkroom by me.<\/p>\n
Some of it is down to soft skills and communication, because ultimately as a photographer, you\u2019re talking to people on many different levels, and are having to navigate difficult situations. Sometimes people don\u2019t want to be photographed. I\u2019ve had scenarios where I\u2019ve had to give them a quick \u201cWell, actually, we\u2019re helping each other! If you give me the chance to take your photograph, a label might like it, you might like it, and it goes in a magazine. Then your audience likes it, and your fans buy your music, it generates sales, and makes money.\u201d I broke it down like that, and they were like, \u201cShe\u2019s totally right \u2013 we doing the shoot.\u201d At the end of the day, an editor\u2019s only concerned with seeing the actual image that you\u2019ve conveyed, not the difficulties that may have arisen along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"INT: You\u2019ve photographed so many stars. What\u2019s your process for capturing them authentically? JB: Getting to know them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-232984","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}