Tearsheet: Come Here Often?

Tearsheet this week is going editorial. Specifically, we’re doing New York Magazine and Alex Tehrani. A-list all the way. I couldn’t resist, be...

Tearsheet this week is going editorial. Specifically, we’re doing New York Magazine and Alex Tehrani. A-list all the way. I couldn’t resist, because when I opened the magazine yesterday I was really excited to see a piece in the Local section that Mr. Tehrani had shot.

Excited for three main reasons:

1. I’ve been a Tehrani fan for ages.
2. He shot a similar scenario for New York Mag a few months back that I thought was spectacularly successful.
3. That bar is like three blocks from my house and I like the ginger cocktail.

Here are the images, with an excerpt of the text that ran with the story. You can see all the text here.

Come Here Often?
The Place: Weather Up, a casually trendy, slightly claustrophobic, $11-cocktail lounge in Prospect Heights. The Time: Saturday night, 9:42. The Mission: Chat up every person in the bar.

3. Eric Morgan 30, Prospect Heights, commercial real estate.
There’s a party for me in Fort Greene that I’m working my way over to.
It starts now, but I’ll probably roll over there in an hour. This girl
here, Kate, she’s feeling me. We exchanged numbers, but I sort of have
a girlfriend. I’m committed to her, but I’m going to remain social. I’m
going to go out and have fun. I think Kate is cool and fun.

4. Kate Telfeyan 28, Prospect Heights, PR.
Rachel and I are just starting off for the night. It’s our first time
here, and we’re checking it out. We were at the Brooklyn Museum earlier
in the day, where we made clay animals–none keep-worthy. This guy,
Eric, started talking to me, but nothing’s happening, because he has
another party to go to. I got his digits, though.

5. Rachel Ferm 25, Prospect Heights, children’s-book editor.
Kate and I live next door to each other in this neighborhood. I was her
intern at Simon & Schuster and took her job when she quit. That guy
talking to her isn’t my type, so I’m texting my friend to pass the
time.

1. Daniel Donahue 30, Clinton Hill, waiter.

My favorite drink here is the Brooklyn. It’s like a darker, edgier
Manhattan. I think it’s rye whiskey or bourbon, vermouth, bitters, and
orange peel. I’m not looking to meet anyone tonight. Getting a phone
number is pretty easy. Getting the girl to answer is much harder.

3. Jessie Pascoe 28, Boerum Hill, Web writer (right).

Gabby Warsher 28, Gowanus, blogger.

Jessie: Gabby and I went to college together in Minnesota. We met
freshman year when we were both chain-smoking outside our dorm.

Gabby: We’re both in fairly long-term relationships, but we’ve met
many disreputable boys together. We both met former boyfriends at the
Cherry Tavern in the East Village. Mine was a heroin addict. Her boy
had a problem with thieving and got arrested for stealing a clarinet or
something.

….

Ok, so this image(s) at first glance to me look almost impossible to
have achieved. People look natural, the lighting looks even. I would
not know how to approach this story if it were assigned to me. It seems
nightmarishly complicated. Tehrani on the phone turns out to be
hilarious and good-natured, which is probably why he did so well with
this assignment. He’s also aware of the feelings of the people he
photographs: “Here’s the trippy thing. It’s a little awkward to go into
a bar and light it and not disturb people. Basically the way I light
things is to bounce light around, to keep it looking natural. People never want to be blasted with light, especially over cocktails at a bar.”

The scene was shot with a 5D and a Profoto 7B with a reflector on the
lighting head, and covered with tough spun.Tehrani had an assistant
throwing the light in the corner with a monopod. They just experimented
until they got it right. Also, they had a “phalanx” of interns from the
magazine to get all those interviews. I asked Tehrani to send me an
outtake from the shoot that he hadn’t submitted to the magazine,
because he knew it wasn’t the feel they were going for (which is sort
of a “clinical assesment” of a social scenario), and here’s what he
sent:

This image may or may not include “a picture of this great guy who looked like a renegade outlaw kind of guy, and who turned out to have been deported from St. Barts that day.”

Here are the images from the first story New York did in this vein, with Tehrani at the the helm:

This shoot was a apparently a little nuttier, because there are a “better mix of people on the subway, and we had like three minutes between the trains to find, interview, and photograph everyone.”

I’m pretty psyched about this idea, and its execution, in both cases. Tehrani worked with photo editor Caroline Smith at New York, and of course, the great photo director Jody Quon was also in the mix. And word on the street is that EIC Adam Moss is a fan of the format as well, so look for more of these in the future.

Career fallout for Tehrani? He’s shooting some images for the Wesleyan University Prospectus as a result of the subway shoot. Pretty much the same formula, but with students. I bet they’ll have some interesting things to say. And what does Weather Up think about all the free publicity? Alex and his buddy Gus Powell dropped by recently for a drink, and the owner bawled him out. Apparently she hated the story, because she wasn’t psyched about the tone of the interviews. But the drinks were on the house. So that’s something.

Go have a cocktail, everyone, it’s the weekend!