Content Marketing and Photographic Services
It’s only the second day of the month and I’ve already seen some outstanding artwork. The Santa Cruz art scene is better than ever.
Today, I visited the Museum of Art and History downtown and the Radius Gallery at the Tannery. This week, I’ll be sharing my reviews of the excellent contemporary art I was lucky enough to see.
If you love art, fashion and cannabis, then LA has a lot to offer. It will be interesting to see how legal weed in NYC changes the game, but until they catch up to us, LA and SF are the best places to be for this combination of cultural elements. You only had to attend one of the Dr. Greenthumbs or Cookies stores on 4/20 to see a thriving cultural showing. During the past year cannabis transformed from marginal to essential and now it is evolving into a vital part of culture.
I went to college in Portland during the 90s and the art scene there was going off. They had a First Thursday art night when all the galleries would open their new exhibitions. As an artist, it was invigorating. They had probably 75-100 galleries at the time, so you could never see it all. You had to figure out where the art was that resonated most with you and then you could explore that territory and have some wild adventures.
It was a big part of the culture of the city, and that was exciting as an artist. There was an art market. People gave a fuck. When I went around and checked in with galleries and looked at work it was also overwhelmingly obvious that a lot of the people there were more interested in the other people than in the art. The art was important. It was the reason people were getting together in the first place. The people were always more important though. Art just provided the subject of conversation. It was an excuse to get dressed up to go out and look at other people who got dressed up to go out and look at other people.
This is exactly the vibe I got at Dr. Greenthumb’s Sylmar and Cookies Melrose. We have seen a lot of amazing developments in the cannabis industry since the advent of legal weed, but the most amazing one for me is the development of a new kind of contemporary art scene that is multi-media and interactive.
With the closing of galleries and museums, with no venues open for live music, cannabis stores have been able to remain vital cultural hubs. Spaces like Dr. Greenthumb’s and Cookies are following the path set by Apple in making their stores like a museum or contemporary art gallery. It was the art world that did it first, Apple saw the wisdom of emphasizing design for the customer experience, and cannabis has adopted the same bright minimalist aesthetic.
Cannabis branding has developed along parallel tracks to craft beer branding, and both have incorporated lots of elements of pop art. Appropriating other brands by flipping their logos, designing colorful fun cartoon like graphics and labels, craft beer and cannabis branding has found great success in evoking feelings of nostalgia through their artwork. Andy Warhol saw design everywhere and through the force of his artistic personality he brought imagery from the supermarket and magazines into the gallery and museum space. Cannabis brands like Cookies and Dr. Greenthumbs are changing the art world.
To understand that B Real is a force in the contemporary art scene, you have to go no further than to see him creating an NFT and entering into the tokenized art space. Why is B Real selling NFTs? The same reason he is hosting a podcast four or five times a week. He understands the market and artistic inspiration and process. Is B Real the most underrated figure in Hip Hop? Is it fair to even see him through that lens?
It is, because that is so deep a part of his history and because he is such an important part of the history of Rap. The first Cypress Hill album was released in 1991. I was a freshman in high school. B was not that much older than me, but he was about to take off on a journey around the world that was the journey of Hip Hop. As the world embraced and nourished Hip Hop, B Real and Cypress Hill built up their cultural empire to the extent that they are now still as relevant as ever. The music keeps getting better, too.
The world has never seen someone quite like Berner. He is one of the first great renaissance figures of our times. He is a true artist. He is also a wildly successful entrepreneur. His understanding of branding is second to none. He is one of the first figures to elevate cannabis to the level of contemporary art and to integrate his various passions into one flourishing business model.
Once weed is federally legal, what will happen with these movements? You never know. One of the best things about digital culture, in my mind, is a period of hip hop history when the mixtape reigned supreme. The organic spontaneity of freestyling over other people’s beats and releasing music for free was a moment in musical history that accelerated the progress of the form. That wild and organic experiment created a cultural engine of innovation, but it only lasted for a period of time. When things open back up, when there is federal legalization whatever the scene evolves to be, you can be certain that B Real and Berner will be a part of it.
I’m most interested in photographs that include and involve humans. I find the challenges and rewards of portraiture keep me studying this mysterious art. I value work that gets me to think and to feel something unique or universal about the human condition from looking at a photograph of a person. Sometimes less is more and in the case of my taste in portraiture that is true a lot of the time. I feel like people are so complex it can only help to give them some space.
The biggest obstacle to truth in portraiture is that sometimes we carry lifelong habits of creating masks to protect ourselves. Whether it is a smile or a neutral face, there is something that you do to preserve yourself from the intruding eyes of strangers. At least, hopefully there is. Because it can be a rough world if you don’t know how to move with an understanding of the ways people are likely to behave. If you don’t have a grasp on the business, then you are going to have to learn.
Portraits have lots of uses in our contemporary lives. We can use them for our LinkedIn profile, for any articles people may be writing about us, for other social media profiles, and for finding love. Whether you need a good Tinder shot or something to show your grandma that you are doing well, a skillful portrait can go a long way towards helping you to reach your goals.
But there is more to a portrait than that. It is something that belongs to the canons of art history and if you care that much about the result, then you can make some magic happen.
A big part of a great portrait is the lighting. The way you place the model in relation to the light is going to determine how a viewer’s eyes might travel around the composition. The light is going to give shape and interest to the form of your subject’s face, hair neck, etc. You can use light to draw attention to important parts of the face, like a catch light for the eyes. This is when you place a light in view of the subject so that a small white light appears in the dark of their pupil helping to create a sense of depth and importance in the eyes.
One huge advantage of working in the studio is having the ability to create a comfortable environment for the subject. In general, there is a lot more ability to control the results. Natural light can be amazing and the experience of being outside sometimes can make a person really shine, but there is a much higher rate of success with the advantages of studio lighting.
I like to use continuous lights, because I find it is much more comfortable for the model. Not having the flashing of the lights and the beeping of the unit recharging makes it a much more enjoyable atmosphere. The vibes of the shoot always matter. That is one reason why working with someone you really like can help to make great work, or in my case with someone you love. When I photograph Madison I know that there is going to be a whole world of energy, emotion, intrigue, mystery and fun all bundled up into one frame. The feelings. Oh the feelings. We have a lot of them, and they show up in the work. I like that. That is what I like art to be. This portrait is an expression of love, fear, lust, faith, and so many other things all at once.
The other night we set up the studio and had two continuous lights going to get this shot. What we did next was something amazing. We did an experiment with using long exposures and candle light. This is one area where it is so radical to have a model as a girlfriend because she is so beautiful and I tell her that all the time. She knows it. It’s not a question. It’s not an issue. What is great about this, is it give us the freedom to be silly and to have fun. We did a series of portraits that are not flattering even though they have a beautiful topless woman in them. I’m not going to show them here, but not for the reasons you might think.
This series is art. As a series, it is a powerful experiment that worked. The images are intriguing as fuck. She looks powerful but sometimes scary in these portraits. Because we have done a lot of work together and have a deep sense of creative trust, we were able to do something original and cool.
Now, we have a few different series going and I am super excited about the direction and shape our work is taking. Our collaboration is getting stronger and smarter at every turn and I can’t wait to see what we learn next. So many lessons. I’ll be sharing more of them here as it makes sense in the coming days. I feel as though I have made some very important discoveries and I am excited to put them into practice and to share with other people looking for ways to be more effective and to improve their outlook.
Searching for style is an interesting task in photography. Why do you choose the compositions and subjects that you do? Are you finding things that please you and sharing them with the world? How is what you are photographing representative of you as a person? How do you recognize your own photos?
In some way, style is unavoidable. It is the result of lots of work. The more work you do, the more you are able to distinguish your style from the rest of the world’s photographs. And it is a world full of images, more photographs than ever before by far. Every day it seems to increase, too.
There are different formal choices you can make that will mark your images as being yours. You could do only black and white or only focus on one color or any other number of ways to say this is your photograph. You can also do this with subject matter.
Your editing has as much to do with it as your shooting. I like to see natural looking light in photographs, so I tend to edit with an aim to having it look as close to the scene as possible. I care about color and want my photographs to show the truest version possible. Other people opt for a super saturated look. The important thing is to have a reason for your decisions. Why is this your style?
Another key distinction with style in photography comes from the use of perspective to achieve depth or flatness. Some photographs (with a foreground, middle ground and background) invite you to look into them as though mentally stepping into a world. On the other hand, some photographs lack perspective and are more for looking at than in.
You also have to choose where along the spectrum between abstract and figurative your work will exist. Some photographers focus on color, texture and geometry and exclude storytelling elements to create a formal viewing experience. Other photos attempt to show you a world, to depict a scene, to tell a story.
It is also very possible for one photographer to have several styles. It is fully possible to create different styles for your work. Different series have different elements needed for their effects.
