“I rarely care about a
headshot of an artist,”
says Jason Schmidt.
“I sometimes will
tell an artist that the
reason I asked them to
be in the photograph
is to give it scale, only
half jokingly.”
to disappear into the artist’s esthetic.” He
rarely lights when shooting artists outdoors;
indoors, he may bounce a strobe off the ceil-
ing or hold a flash. “I don’t want the viewer
to think about the light, so I don’t use light to
make an obvious statement.”
While his personal series on artists has
allowed him to test different techniques
outside the pressures of a commercial as-
signment, Schmidt says his editorial and ad-
vertising work over the years has informed
his artists’ portraits. Since designer Patrick
Li first asked Schmidt to shoot a group por-
trait for Self Service magazine, he’s often
been hired to photograph groups of people
in grand spaces—from the floor of the New
York Stock Exchange to the deck of a ship—
for a variety of editorial, commercial and cor-
porate clients.
His portrait of artist Jeff Koons standing
with the dozens of artisans and fabricators
who work in his studio, along with his wife
and kids, shows that Koons is the opposite
of the solitary, romantic artist. Schmidt
asked everyone to file in, then he stood on
the stairs in order to be slightly elevated
when he took the shot. It shows Koons surrounded by his cartoon-like paintings, grinning broadly, even cartoonishly. “He always
looks like that,” notes Schmidt, who gives
minimal direction to his subjects.
His group portraits combine Schmidt’s
photographic strengths and his interests.
“I think I’m good with groups because I’m
about exploring a space and inhabiting it
with people.”
Schmidt says he had not expected to con-
tinue photographing artists more than a de-
cade after he began, but he still finds it
interesting and inspiring. “I’m trying to ar-
chive artists of our time for posterity,” he
says. “The best way to achieve this is through
environmental portraiture.”
