zac

Zach is responsible for two of the most difficult theatre shoots I’ve ever had. Both were ‘theatre in the round,’ meaning audience 360 degrees around the stage, and in one of the shows the whole goddamn stage also rotated the entire time. Through those shows I feel like he low-key challenged me to level up my show shooting game… and it worked. Totally opened my eyes to new possibilities in documenting theatre that I’m now taking forward on a grant project to research a new way of filming the stage for the post-covid era.

Zach has been a huge source of creative insight; a ‘what the biggest picture possible?,’ kind of big picture guy. I once floated an idea for a photo essay and within the hour we had talked it up into a touring stage show with multiple video, audio and photo lobby installations and spanning multiple continents worth of research… still might do that project one day.

This session, perhaps more than anything, locked in one of the framing devices you’ll see in a lot of the remaining portraits: my rolling backdrop wall. Its textures and portable, and with an 80mm medium format lens, its also just the right size to cut into the sides of the frame, breaking up the uniform background tones. I really love what it does for these photos.