Brea Souders and the Scarlett Johansson Portrait

I was looking through New York Magazine the other day, and stopped short when I came upon this image of Scarlett Johansson. It appeared to be a promo shot for her new album of Tom Waits covers, but how could it be? It’s so beautiful! And so different than normal promo shots. I headed to the gutter credit and found Brea Souders‘ name. Turns out, according to her blog, that Souders has done a number of Johansson portraits; there was also one in French Vogue and one in Paste. But there was primarily (very beautiful) personal work on her site. I hit the email to get the lowdown.

I’ve seen a number of images of Scarlett that you shot for her upcoming album; how did you get involved with this project?

My involvement with the project was through a personal connection. My friend Dave Sitek produced the record and based on other work he had seen of mine, he thought that I would be the right match to create some of the artwork for it. The record was created in the Louisiana

bayou with a small crew of people and it has a curious, intimate sound that Scarlett and the label wanted to translate into the artwork. I was initially asked to create a diorama of the bayou for the cd packaging and that led to my photographing her in a way that worked with the diorama I was creating.

I was hesitant at first to get involved in that way, because I had all of these notions about what it must be like to photograph a celebrity, but it ended up with us spending the day driving around admiring the landscape and picking out places that grabbed us, and photographing mostly in a spontaneous way, without the entourage and stress that I initially feared.

The images in Paste came out of the photo shoot that I did for the record label. Originally, I was only shooting for the cd packaging, but there were a lot of extra photos left over from the shoot that they liked and decided to use some of those for promotion.

from French Vogue

Tell me how you shot the image I fell in love with (the one up top).

That image was shot at night, just using a simple flashlight as the light source. I almost always prefer to use natural light when I can. And if it’s shot at night, then I’ll use a flashlight because that is the natural way we would look at something in the dark. Most of the images that I shot of her were either photographed at night with a flashlight, or in a forest with light streaming through the treetops, and no other light source. We chased the light a good amount, and she was a good sport.

 

Do you do a lot of editorial work? I see mostly personal work on your website; how do you balance the two?

Before this project, I wasn’t really pursuing editorial work. This came out of the blue and I thought it seemed like a good match for me in terms of my personal interests and photographic style.  It turned out to be a really fun, interesting experience and it opened my mind to doing more editorial work in the future. I think it can be really challenging to balance editorial and personal work, when the aesthetic and conceptual demands of editorial clash with your own interests. The worry is that too much cookie-cutter editorial work will negatively
influence your personal projects. Of course that’s why everyone hopes someone like Kathy Ryan will call and offer an assignment. A director that appreciates a photographer’s unique voice and can pair it with an interesting story or subject is a rare gem, and the most inspired work comes out of those pairings. Given the right circumstances, I think editorial jobs can expand your thoughts and even lead to new personal projects. In the end, It all depends on the assignment, but I’d love to pursue more work of this kind.

Eggshells, 2008

Caught, 2008