Cold Call Portraits
"Would Chris Buck make my portrait?"
I received two emails in the same week, both asked if I accepted commissions from individuals. I answered "Yes," and here are the results.
I was first contacted in early spring by Vietnamese-American comedian Mic Nguyen. We met at a café in upstate New York a few years before and had been following each other on Instagram ever since.
A couple of weeks later I heard from Scott Cameron, a producer for Sesame Street International. Again, he called out the fact that his inquiry was not specifically tied to his professional needs; perhaps he would use one of these portraits when he gave an upcoming talk, but he didn’t want that potential to drive the creative.
Mic’s humor is self-aware and inviting, often dealing with being an Asian American working in a creative field. When we met for a coffee in a hipster Styvesant establishment he keenly observed that we were the only two present in sports jackets, showing a finely tuned sense of observation, and building a commonality between us at the same time.
Scott Cameron was more of an anomaly to me initially. Despite his professional success, there were only a handful of media clips of him to be found online, and they were focused on the Sesame projects, rather than on his personal story. Nevertheless, my misgivings were put aside during our lunch together where Scott showed vulnerability and warmth, on top of his good humor. He grew up in California, loved sketching and art, later making Sesame Street an easy fit for his interests and talents.
Like with any shoot, I aimed to make a shot list that covered a wide spectrum, from the wild, to the conceptual, to the simple and elegant. But I brought to the fore a philosophical approach that would be key to the sessions’ success: ask them to do the crazy ideas that are too wild for celebrities.
With Mic and Scott coming to me, referencing some of my most successful conceptual portraits (like Bill Buford, Matt Berry, and Harold Ramis) surely they would at least be open to hearing about them.
A key moment happened halfway through the first session. We were shooting a tight portrait in a small park near Mic’s home in Brooklyn. He was giving me a good range of expressions, from handsome and thoughtful, to silly and strange, and I thought, “I like all of these directions, but I can’t go multiple ways at once.“ And then I remembered, Mic is my client as well, so and I showed him a few of the images.
He told me with clarity that he liked the weirdest ones best!
I worked hard on the front end to come up with concepts that were visual and dynamic but what I did not count on was the performances and the personalities of the respective subjects, bringing warmth and fleshing them out, elevating the final portraits.
Top & Second Image Right: Mic Nguyen, shot in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
Second Left & Bottom Image: Scott Cameron, shot at my home in suburban New Jersey (hence the cameo by my daughter, who gamefully volunteered to eat cake for a photo).