Late last year I had the pleasure of working on the annual report for The Science Museum of Minnesota and spent an afternoon photographing kids enjoying the great displays, demonstrations and summer programs. Working with designer Bettina Dehnhard, we shot fairly guerrilla style with high-iso’s, ambient light and a portable low-powered softbox boomed by my assistant. The museum was definitely open to the public while we shot, so our maneuvering around became quite the complex dance!
Some recent work commissioned from international culture, travel and lifestyle magazine Monocle, which is based out of the UK and has a world-wide readership. The brief was to provide an overview of the all-in-one concept Marvel Building in the Warehouse District of downtown Minneapolis. Owned and created by brothers Andrew and Eric Dayton, the Marvel Building contains one of the Midwest’s most celebrated new restaurants The Bachelor Farmer (serving re-imagined Nordic fare), cocktail mecca Marvel Bar and the very stylish Askov Finlayson clothing store.
From this month’s Brown+Forman page in the Delta SKY in-flight magazine.
I was driving back to my studio one late afternoon when my phone rang and a voice from the past was on the other end. It was Leslie Dela Vega, the photo editor at one of my favorite magazines, Fast Co. She previously worked at Time Magazine, and was my contact while I photographed the Sarah Palin cover for them. She asked if I remembered her, and of course I did. After all, she gave me my 15 minutes of semi-local obscure fame! Fast Co. needed a portrait of Michael Jones, the Chief Intelligence Officer for the National Marrow Donor Program. After scouting two locations affiliated with the National Marrow Donor Program, it was decided to shoot at their lab, with Mr. Jones in that environment. The main two set-ups were of him with a microscope & with blood samples (in this case, my own concoction of chocolate syrup, red dye and corn syrup). It’s interesting that what you think is a pretty straight-forward shot can quickly become knotted up. The lab really wanted him to be wearing a lab-coat, which would have killed everything nice about the shot. So some very delicate negotiations ensued and gloves were all that needed to be worn in the end (which I liked!).
The St. Catherine University Alumni magazine has been a nice client of mine for a year or so, and it’s always fun to work with their art director Jessica Gallo. At the end of 2011, Jessica hired me to do environmental portraits of three graduates of St. Kate’s merchandising and design program: Jenny Carle, Amanda Christine, and Amanda Chaffin. All three were incredibly nice and cordial to work with, and each space I shot at presented its own unique challenge, which really, is what made it so fun.
That last couple of pages of work from the Tim Laird “That’s Entertaining” series I work on. We have a real fun March page that’s already in the can, and I’m looking forward to shooting some nice Spring recipes next week.
Richard Fleischman Photography: People Book
Richard Fleischman Photography: Food Book
I worked with Sean Stone from Wonderful Machine on these new books, and am quite pleased with the results. Sean sorted through lots & lots of my images and paired it down to what you see now. It’s always fascinating to see what a talented editor will curate out of a vague, disparate mass. For a young, emerging photographer like myself, it’s essential to have that pure objective eye helping you. My next step is to get some promo materials together & started knocking on doors.
I’ve been lax in posting new work up here, so here are the last three months of Brown+Forman advertorial pages from Delta SKY Magazine. These are always fun to shoot, and I love the variety of recipe that we work with, all seasonally-themed. In order, they are from Sept., Oct., and November. Shooting the January page next week!
I have two pieces in the Fall 2011 issue of the quarterly “Where Women Cook.” I photographed my friend Christine Hoffman doing her thing, and Laurie Crowell of “The Golden Fig” food store in St. Paul. This might be the closest to Martha Stewart photography that I get, and I loved it! When I first got into photography, I couldn’t imagine shooting anything like this – it was all Cindy Sherman knock-offs of actors I knew, and and now I find this one of my favorite areas of photography. Also, Christine & I have work coming out soon in a book: ‘Where Women Cook: Celebrations” – the book release is this within the month.
