On prioritizing meaningful projects

Can you tell me why you’ve always used your creativity to spotlight political issues?

It wasn’t always like that. I went to school for photography, and then I moved to New York with a dream of working in fashion. This was around 2011. I came here and I started interning, then assisting. As I got more involved with the industry and I got more of a behind-the-scenes look, I was not super inspired by the lack of community and the superficiality of it. I started transitioning more into beauty, which led me to portraits around the same time as the Black Lives Matter movement was starting to build steam [due to the murder of] Trayvon Martin and some unfortunate events that happened in 2015, 2016, when we were having public conversations around systemic racism in America. I used that conversation to examine my own contribution. I just had never—I mean, I’m a white person, privileged—examined that before.

I started looking at my own work and realizing that I was probably contributing to the problem of having a one-size-fits-all beauty standard because I was working a lot with the stereotypical thin, young, white, cisgender female. Around 2015, I began to take an active stance in my personal work where I said, “I’m not going to contribute to that anymore.” You don’t have so much flexibility with [paid work] because you’re working for a client, but at least in my personal work, I felt like I had control to exercise decisions around casting, who I was going to collaborate with, and making intentional work. Everything for us, [in] New York City as creatives, goes on Instagram, where you can have a small audience or a huge audience, and I think that a level of responsibility goes with that.

After Trump got elected the first time, I saw a lot of people in Brooklyn try to get involved in organizing and put their politics front and center in their work, but then they burnt out on it within a few months. You’ve had the opposite arc with politics in your work, so what advice would you give to creative folks going through a similar reckoning, who want to figure out how to prioritize more left-leaning politics in their creative work?

As someone who works commercially—and Brenna [Drury, makeup artist for Prim ’n Poppin’] does as well, as do a lot of my other collaborators—I think it can feel disempowering when you have other people in power dictating what you can and cannot do. In that case, I recommend having casual conversations with people in the creative force who could potentially be swayed to make a different decision when it comes to the message they’re creating with their work or the type of person they’re casting… Sometimes just giving a seed of an idea to people in the creative field who also are in corporate can be really useful.

And then, I recommend exercising your power as much as possible in your personal work. For me, what that’s looked like is collaborating. I’ve taken an interest in many issues that don’t necessarily affect me personally. In doing so, I’ve developed many conversations and relationships with different communities that I’m collaborating with. In that way, a lot of the work I do, I consider partner-oriented. For example, with Prim ’n Poppin’, Brenna and I came together to do this work. I would never say that I work in a vacuum and it’s all only mine. [Collaboration] can lead to important conversations about, “What messages should we be putting out? What’s important to you?”

I did a project recently around voting, and I collaborated with a queer couple who are both immigrants, and it was their first election cycle that they could vote. We had all kinds of conversations I wasn’t even thinking of, and the project took on new meaning in that context, and it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t chosen to collaborate with them.

How do you balance your time between paid projects and passion projects?

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve taken on fewer projects and, at the same time, made sure those projects are more meaningful. I used to shoot casually a lot more in the past, but those projects take a lot of time, resources, planning, and post-production—therefore, having to pay for things—but they weren’t necessarily so developed, or the message was much smaller. If I’m going to dedicate time to unpaid personal work, which is incredibly important to me—especially, again, with the political climate—I want to take the time to do something impactful and meaningful.

Whether it’s a few projects a year that you put a lot of time into, or one day a month, even, if that’s what you can do, great. It’s hard to balance it, and the more you’re doing paid work, the less you can have energy for personal work. I also think having grace around seasons of your life and your career is important. I don’t think it’s helpful to feel guilty.

To ask about Prim ’n Poppin’ a bit more: there was the 2021 campaign, then a 2024 campaign timed around the election cycle. Did you ever think, “Is this still worth doing depending on which way the election swings?” What questions were you asking yourself as you considered relaunching the campaign?

The project has always been based around diversity, equity, and inclusion. The reason, pre-election, that we were talking about relaunching was because we were seeing a decrease in DEI in advertising and beauty. I mean literally a decrease in terms of the jobs available to models that we know. Championing talent is the highlight of what our project is about. We were noticing and hearing—not only just visually and being on set, but also through models that we know who are trans or disabled, for example—that they weren’t booking as many jobs, and it was a sharp decrease from previous years. From 2019 to 2022, we had this inclusivity boom. It seems like after that, people were over it, got bored or were feeling like, “This had its moment, it’s not trending anymore, so there’s no point in us paying attention to it.”

The campaign has always been an excuse to have conversations regardless of which way the election would’ve gone. It wouldn’t have meant that having conversations around inclusion isn’t still extremely important. It just happens that, since the election went the way that it did, it’s even more important, timely, and urgent.

The press release that I got about Prim ’n Poppin’ relaunching describes the 2021 campaign as “massively successful.” What does success mean to you, particularly for personal projects? Is success just being a conversation starter?

We were measuring success in terms of the amount of coverage we got and, therefore, the amount of people talking about it. We were noticing that big places like the Guardian posted, and we were looking at the comments coming in, and it was really interesting to see a certain percentage of the comments being really supportive, and that made us think, “This feels like it was so needed. A lot of people want to be having these conversations.” And then there was a percentage of comments that were quite negative, as I’m sure you can imagine. Troll-y people saying very mean things. Even though there’s buzz and that’s great, obviously we’re not done here.

Your artistic style is very colorful and bold. How did you land on that style?

It’s just what I’m attracted to. It’s that simple. I’m just not inspired by basic color. I like intentional color—strong, intentional contrast. I’m bored by soft, smooth, natural-feeling colors.

Is that something you’ve always known about yourself, or did you have to come to that realization?

I used to—many, many years ago—exclusively do black-and-white, and it was always high-contrast. At the time, I was resolute that I wouldn’t do color until I understood color enough to do it intentionally. This is just my personal opinion, but I think if color’s not going to contribute something to what you’re doing, what’s the point? I think color can be really distracting, particularly in photography. If you’re not going to be intentional with it, shoot it in black and white. I’ll get what I need to know without being distracted by the color.

You also work in video and create GIFs. As you’re approaching a project, how do you know which of your mediums is right?

Producing video is very cost-prohibitive. I only did my first personal project that included film recently. Two projects that I worked on within the last couple of years that had motion were not client-oriented, and that was the first time I could exercise my creative direction in that medium. All other video projects prior to that have been client-led because they have money for that, and producing video, at least the way I would want with strong lighting and color, you need some amount of money to do it. Photography has been a lot more accessible for me in that way, and GIFs [too]. GIFs just take longer on the backend. Photo’s been the easiest medium for me to work in. And then if I feel like it’s appropriate to do a GIF or an animation, I do.

How do you know when a photograph—meaning the post-production image—is complete?

It took me a lot of time to come to a place where I could call something done. It’s just intuitive. Through years of experience—and I have employment history of being a professional retoucher—I know when I’ve taken it too far. Also, with people’s attention spans, no one will care as much as you, the artist, cares. My “done” is already past what many other people would probably consider “done.”

One thing that’s been really nice for me as a creative is this ability to do a gut check, whether I’m on set or working on post-production. In my regular life, I don’t have that same level of intuition, just trusting my gut.

How do you go about starting a photography project?

Because I work a lot collaboratively, it usually starts with a conversation that will lead to a series of actions, and on my end, that next step is usually pulling an inspiration. I’ll use the Freedom Project, which was this political project I worked on recently with acrobats, as an example. Their domain is what they do with their bodies. That’s not my domain. My domain is the photo stuff. It was their job to come to me with a design of, “We want to pose people in this way.” I took that and said, “I have these references I’m really inspired by. I want the light and color to go in this direction.” I mapped out, for each one, my approach.

Is there anything else you want to share about Prim ’n Poppin’?

In terms of approaching things politically or using your artistic expression as a means of activism, I have found it much easier to engage a wider audience if you’re creating work that is beautiful, visually appealing, something that doesn’t make a viewer turn away. There’s a space for that work, and that work is important, but in my case, if your intention is to not only preach to the choir but to reach people who don’t share the same set of beliefs as you, or don’t know as much as you know about a certain topic or community but are open, you want to meet them in the middle. You want to meet them where they’re at.