Joey L. - Photographing shadow and light: inside the dramatic lighting techniques and creative vision of portrait photographer Joey L.

Copyright 2012 by Joey Lawrence

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Amphoto Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.amphotobooks.com

AMPHOTO BOOKS and the Amphoto Books logo are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

A foreword is included herein by David Hobby.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

L., Joey (Lawrence)
Photographing Shadow and Light: inside the dramatic lighting techniques and creative vision of portrait photographer joey l. / Joey L. with Jeff Kent.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. CinematographyLighting. 2. Portrait photographyLighting. I. Kent, Jeff, 1974- II. Title.
TR891.L16 2011
777.52dc23
2011046721

eISBN: 978-0-8174-0015-6

Design by Kara Plikaitis
Cover design by Kara Plikaitis

v3.1

This book is dedicated to my mom and dad, who put up with my crap for years.

When I began writing the foreword for this book, I decided to avoid the obvious focus on Joey Lawrences age. But as it turns out, I was wrong. We are going to talk about his age.

Not in the Mozart-wrote-a-symphony-at-age-five sense, but more in the context of who Joey is and how this body of work was created so early in his career. For those who dont know, Joey made the photos in this book before or at the age of twenty-one.

To me, the most interesting part of this is not the fact that he was twenty-one, but the fact of when he was twenty-one. Joeys development as an artist has happened since the turn of the millennium. He has never known a world without computers or Photoshop. He is a digital native, and that has had a profound effect on his photography and photographic path. Further, the combination of when he was born and his early success places him at the vanguard of an emerging group of Generation Z photographers.

Members of Generation Z are thought of as having been born in the early to mid-1990s. Although Joey was born in 1989, he understood at a very young age exactly how the new digital environment had changed everything about photography. So in many ways, Joey is a few years ahead of his time. And, in a broader sense, he is whats coming. This book is an example of how the worlds most successful photographers will be thinking five or ten years hence.

Previous generations of photographers grew up in an era when it was assumed that you could get a steady job with a great company and be set for life. For many photographers, myself included, that meant something like working your way up to a great metro daily newspaper. Once there, no worries. Just dont screw up and youll be fine.

Clearly, that time has passed.

For photographers of my generation, our dependable business model has been crushed like a bug. For younger photographers, the digital transition has been a liberation. In fact, the most successful photographers of the future will have more in common with a Silicon Valley garage start-up than with the track of their photographic forebears. Forward-thinking photographers are already becoming entrepreneurs, mostly in the sense that they create their own ecosystems. They dont need printing presses, distribution, or the validation of a large company of any kind.

Joey was born around the same time as the Internet and has grown up alongside it. He is highly motivated and exhaustively self-taught, learning at a blistering pace far beyond that of the typical photography school. Just as important, he is both confident and creatively fearlessa result, I think, of his education outside a hierarchical environment.

When you grow up receiving the validation of your teachers, you learn to depend on that validation. When you grow up on your own, you learn to trust your instincts. Joeys education happened with a camera in one hand and an Internet-connected computer in the other. He learned Photoshop the same way his thirteen-year-old peers were learning to beat Halo: perfectly willing to die a thousand deaths en route to his goal. Photographers of Joeys generation are different. Their education, motivations, shooting styles, business modelsall different.

It helps that Joey was born to exceptionally supportive parents. They not only gave him the freedom to learn and explore photography, but encouraged him to take creative chances and pursue more ambitious gigs. Id like to think that when my own kids hit seventeen in a few years, Ill be just as supportive.

It was right around 2007 when I first met Joey. He was in the midst of transitioning between his parental and professional environments. Five years doesnt sound like very long ago, but in digital native years it can be a lifetime. Joey was already shooting a steady stream of professional jobs. He had an agent in New York and another in London. On top of that, he was nearing completion of his first digital commercial product: a tutorial explaining pretty much everything he had learned to date about photography and postproduction.

Think about that for a moment. At seventeen years old, Joey already understood that he needed neither a publisher nor a distributor to be successful as a photographer. He just needed to create a digital product and put it out there. It would live or die via online word of mouth. Digital natives think differently.

The digital products were just a node in his ecosystem, but they gave him the ability to fund his photography. The symbiosis worked. He has done two more digital products since. Create and ship. Hone and iterate. Think like a digital start-up.

It was at this point that I started following Joeys career, and we kept in touch. Word soon trickled out that he had been hired to shoot the posters for the upcoming Twilight movie. As the first adaptation of Stephenie Meyers book series, the movie was all but guaranteed to be a blockbuster. And they were going to let an eighteen-year-old photographer shoot the poster. It was unheard of.

A year later, in December 2008, I stepped out of the subway in London and saw his photos on the Twilight posters. They were everywheredouble-decker buses, kiosks, billboards everywhere . I remember having difficulty processing that in my head. I took some shots and emailed them to Joey along with my congratulations.

What I would find out later was that he had seriously considered turning down the Twilight job. He didnt feel that it fit the compass point of his career. Ultimately, his main draw for doing the posters was that the paycheck would fuel more ambitious personal projects. It would allow him to travel to India to photograph holy men without commercial backing. And the photos from that project would impress future art directors enough to garner yet more high-end commercial assignments. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Still technically in high school (he was taking leaves to shoot commercial jobs and personal projects), Joey was already learning not just how to create his own ecosystem, but how to scale it to the point where it was creating its own weather.

Now, four years later, at a time when many people his age are holding freshly minted college diplomas and searching for jobs, Joey is largely in control of his path. He is choosy about what he shoots. He creates jobs and projects out of thin air by crafting imaginative treatments and proposalsand supplementing them with the body of work to back them up.