Nick Offerman for Nylon Guys. New York, 2015.
When people find out I photograph celebrities, the most common question is usually “Who was the coolest person to shoot?” and, without hesitation, I always tell them it’s the actor Nick Offerman.
A Manhattan hotel had given us free rein of six rooms, its lobby and, yes, an abandoned basement disco in exchange for a location credit. Nick arrived by himself (no publicist, manager or assistant) and immediately apologized for his “Abe Lincoln beard,” the silly facial hair he’d grown for a role on the second season of Fargo. He brought two outfits—a casual jacket-and-jeans look and this suit he said his wife, Megan Mullally, likes him in. The crew that day was small: just myself, a groomer and a stylist from the magazine. As he sat for some light makeup, I plopped down onto the floor nearby and chatted with him. He was instantly warm with everyone, his disarming giggle stuttering the conversation. And I remember after we ran from room to room acting out my photo ideas for a few hours, he gave me a huge bearhug and said thank you. I couldn’t wait to get home and see what I got.
I look at this photo today and see a lot of things. His face is so calm, a deadpan counter to the total abandon of flying through the air in this cavernous room. This setup started with Nick directing high karate kicks toward me as I moved around him. I think he said, “Do you want to see if I can click my heels together?” But I kind of love that, with his arms lifted and his hair swooping back, it just looks like he’s soaring through the scene. I see the comedic persona he’s honed not far from his true personality—stoic gruffness meets total goober goofball. I see the performer in him, the kind of person you don’t have to prompt; the ideas and actions just spill out. Someone who could “yes, and” you endlessly. I see myself crouched down, probably sweating through my shirt, trying to hang on for dear life to the performance he was giving me. Because what if I somehow missed this? I see a mutual trust that he’s even willing to give me this moment to begin with, a trust that I won’t make him look stupid or dumb or embarrass him. But I also see an important benchmark in my development as a photographer in this image.
I made this photo for Nylon Guys, and there’s no chance I was paid for the assignment. I’d been shooting for Nylon for years. It was the very first publication to hire me after I’d started teaching myself photography in 2009 and was frequently e-mailing out the test shoots I’d been doing (my favorite photographers at the time were Ruvan Wijesooriya, Stacey Mark, Jason Nocito). One afternoon while I was working my day job at the OK! magazine copy desk (probably editing stories about Twilight or Heidi Montag), Nylon’s photo director, Stephen Walker, called my cell and asked if I could shoot some fashion-news stories for an upcoming issue. There was no budget, no rate; we shot this out of my apartment (the stylist came with trunks; we set up hair and makeup in my kitchen); and I probably made photos to accompany at least eight stories that day. I’d been obsessed with Nylon since studying magazine journalism in college. The opportunity was thrilling, and in the following years as I continued to shoot for them, countless jobs came my way because folks had “seen my work in Nylon.”
At the point of this Nick Offerman assignment, I’d probably shot at least two Nylon covers and continued to work for free whenever asked (covers were paid assignments—$1,000). Now, the reason I keep bringing up money is because there were sort of two ways you could approach taking on Nylon jobs: Either you spent a bit of your own money to, say, rent equipment you might need or hire some extra hands, or you simply made it work with the tools you had. I had a camera; I had a flash. I didn’t have enough money to go out-of-pocket on anything. So I nearly always made due with just the gear in my bag. It was a habit that followed me throughout so much of my early career, regardless of the publication: making due with what I had. And because of this, what I could do with photography had its limits.
I loved flash-on-camera. More than even the look, I loved how a subject responded to the flash of light. Flash! Move. Flash! Move. After shooting a lot of gauzy, window-lit images in my early test shoots, working with a flash was the first time I found subjects reacting to me as the photographer in the way that I wanted them to—maybe performing for me a bit more. I could interact with them better, build the energy of a photo shoot, move with them wherever they went because the flash moved right along with my camera. It was easy to adjust, relatively forgiving. As my aesthetic got tied to flash-on-camera, I’d also start to get frustrated with its limitations—first and foremost, the need to photograph someone right up against a background in order to achieve an evenly lit, bright photograph. If I wanted to make a photo in the middle of a room—not against or near a wall—the environment around the subject would go dark. No surfaces would catch my light, and those that did would appear dimly lit because the flash on my camera was firing from too far away. And that’s not what I wanted. I wanted bright photos. So ultimately, I found myself tied to walls.
In 2013, Profoto released the B1, a portable battery-powered strobe. You could stick it on a light stand and fire it with a remote connected to your camera’s hot-shoe, or in my case, I could sync it to my flash bursts and use it to alter the quality of light I was creating or illuminate an area of the scene my flash couldn’t reach (and, in many instances, I could do both at once). Professional studio strobes were expensive and heavy, but the B1 was light and relatively cheap. I could rent one for less than $50 and tuck it under my arm to hop on the subway. For a self-taught, flash-reliant photographer, the B1 unlocked so much and pushed my ability to learn and allowed me to think more dynamically about what I wanted my photos to look like.
In this frame, I can see that I’m still trying to figure things out. I’ve got a Profoto B1 on a light stand to my left, bare-headed and crudely pointed toward the empty room behind Nick—more try-it-and-see hope than a real plan. I don’t remember specifically wanting the columns to pop like they do here; I just wanted some feeling of dimensional depth in the frame. Nick himself is lit primarily by my flash. I remember at the time I loved the tightly tossed shadows of Frederike Helwig’s photography and was probably trying to hit something similar. The quality of light is crisp. I love how the pattern of the suit comes alive. I’ve never been a fan of motion blur, so I like that I’ve frozen him in place; even the flapping at his pant leg is sharp. The abandoned disco we’re in in the basement of this hotel is ridiculous, an intersection of opulence and deterioration. It adds to the disorienting “why” of this photo in a way that I like. The light coming from the B1 gives this room presence. This appearance of depth that I’ve managed to land on is the reason this photo works for me.
It might seem insignificant, but I was turning a corner here. The now-ubiquitous Profoto B1 was giving me a new freedom to experiment—to see what it looked like when I bounced some more light around. It accelerated my learning. I can look at this photo and recognize where I’d want to refine and hone now, but I wouldn’t change a thing. There’s something great about the fact that I was just figuring stuff out. It feels true. It helps me see myself in this photo. Throughout the years, I’ve abandon so many images from my archives because, as my technical skill improved, they no longer fit alongside the work I wanted to show or wanted to make. But this photo of Nick Offerman remains. And I think I’ll probably always be proud to pull this one up when folks ask me, “Who’s the coolest person you’ve ever shot?”
This photo makes me think about… Abraham Lincoln; hidden New York locations; Parks & Recreation; giggles; Megan Mullally; bearhugs; teaching myself photography; shooting for Nylon; the Profoto B1; letting loose; trust; the tiny little security camera on the right side of the frame; gravity; the curve in his tie and the pull at his jacket button; Frederike Helwig saying in a BTS interview that “photos should be in focus”
What does it make you think about? Leave a comment below.
Check out the rest of my work at www.aaronrichter.com.