Environmental Portraits: Eric Ogden

A lot has happened to portraiture since Arnold Newman, master of the environmental portrait, photographed Igor Stravinsky behind the lid of a grand piano or directed Robert Moses to balance on a girder beside New York City’s East River. Editorial portraiture today is dominated by portraits of celebrities, often photographed in a carefully styled fashion shoot, or during a short portrait session in a hotel room that needs to be concealed or disguised with a backdrop or by shooting a tight close-up. Opportunities for photographers to create portraits that show both the subjects and their surroundings—using the setting to symbolize an aspect of the subject’s life or personality, or simply to lend atmosphere or graphic interest to the composition—are often limited by celebrity publicists, who prefer the easily controlled environment of a bare, well-lit studio.

When the subject is unfamiliar, however, the environmental portrait offers an engaging—if sometimes challenging—way to tell a person’s story in a single frame. “A beautiful static portrait serves its purpose but we want to tell the story more,” says Zana Woods, director of photography at Wired, which commissions portraits of scientists and entrepreneurs. “I like to see the subject engaged in [his or her] environment.”

To shoot a successful environmental portrait, photographers need to be skilled at lighting, composition and problem solving. They also need an understanding of their subject and a way to communicate their insights to the viewer.

We spoke with four photographers who love opportunities to photograph people within environments for a variety of reasons: to draw personality and energy out of subjects, to craft a narrative, or to create a graphic and dynamic composition. They explain their approaches to lighting, shooting and directing, which are as varied as their motivations and personalities.

In the first of these four profiles, we talk to celebrity photographer Eric Ogden about how he directs subjects when shooting them in an environment, and how his lighting style allows him to adapt and respond in the moment.

Eric Ogden believes that placing subjects in an environment helps draw out their personalities. “I’m surprised by who’s shy or uncomfortable in front of a camera and who’s not,” he says. “You might be photographing movie stars and find that they’re shy in front of a still camera because they’re not in character.” Posing such subjects on white seamless only makes it harder for them, while having them in a setting “gives them something to play off of, whether it’s a couch, a chair, a window,” while also lending “a narrative quality” to the image.

For an Esquire profile on Paris Hilton, Ogden was called on to show a fresh perspective on the socialite/actress, who is most widely known through paparazzi photos. “She’s obviously a beautiful woman, but she’s a polarizing figure. We wanted to show her in a way that’s more soulful or thoughtful.” He adds, “There’s an unknowable quality about her because she’s such a celebrity. Can you know anything below the surface?”

Ogden had an afternoon to shoot a handful of setups in Hilton’s home, which he had only seen in photos before the day of the shoot. He lit her kitchen using two or three strobes outside a window, and placed two more strobes inside. “I try to light three dimensionally, and not just light the person,” says Ogden. “I’m trying to light the environment to look as interesting as the person. I want everything to be interesting.” When he shoots, often with a Hasselblad, he rarely uses a tripod. “As I shoot, I move around, and I’ll discover how light hits a wall, or how it looks here or there. It allows for more discovery and chance.”

As he began shooting he discovered that Hilton’s face was mirrored in the glass of her kitchen cabinets. “I didn’t realize this until I started shooting, but this is what I was trying to accomplish, to show her image reflected and multiplied. That’s cool, when you have something that supplies a visual metaphor.”

For an ad campaign for the Animal Planet’s TV show about Mike Tyson’s fascination with homing pigeons, Ogden was able to scout the rooftop of a large Brooklyn warehouse where the pigeons are kept and then released to race home to their coop in New Jersey. Ogden placed strobes around the coop and shot using a handheld 35mm to capture the birds in flight as Tyson released them into the air. Ogden recalls that the rooftop shoot came near the end of a day of shooting: “We had to work quickly, because [the pigeons] can’t fly in the dark and we had to give them enough time to fly to New Jersey. He only had 18 birds, and he released them in bursts. Once they were gone it’s, goodbye! They’re on their way to New Jersey.”

The first pigeon release didn’t look right, Ogden says. When he told Tyson this, the boxer replied, “I did what you told me to do,” recalls the photographer (who also remembers noticing the girth of Tyson’s arm relative to that of Ogden’s chest). Ogden says, “I just had to say, ‘You’re right. Now try doing it a little more regally.’”

An outtake from the campaign shows Tyson gazing toward the horizon as delicate white birds whirl around him. “He really loves those birds, and he’s really watching them,” Ogden notes. “That’s the great thing about working in a real space. And any time there’s an animal around, I pull it into the shot. It just gives a subject something to react off of, and it adds surprise.”