Another Era Remembered

I grew up spending afternoons at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, standing in front of John Singer Sargent paintings and wondering what it would feel like to make something like that. The light. The presence. The sense that the person in the portrait has been genuinely seen rather than merely recorded. That aspiration has never left me.

The vintage community gave me the closest thing to it I've found in photography. People who show up to an event in a perfectly researched 1940s swing dress, or a Gilded Age gown with the posture to match, or a double-breasted suit that belonged to someone's grandfather — these are subjects who have already done half the work. My job is to meet them where they are.

What I bring is a specific and unusual knowledge: I don't just photograph people in vintage clothing. I photograph them the way a photographer from that period would have. The lighting ratios of a 1930s Hollywood portrait. The compositional conventions of a 1940s studio sitting. The painterly softness of an Edwardian photograph that was still consciously imitating Sargent. Each decade had its own visual language, and I know those languages.

If you arrive in period clothing with period hair and makeup, I will give you a period portrait. If the light is right and the look is right and the moment is right, I will make something that looks like it was pulled from an archive rather than shot last Saturday night in Brooklyn.

I've been photographing the vintage community for decades. Many of the people in this gallery I've known for years — some for much longer. These portraits are made in two to three minutes at events, but they are made with a lifetime of looking at the right things.