The Real Deal

Trust the Machine

I started experimenting with flash back in college. We had, as I remember, anvil-like Ascor powerpacks that were blocky and weighty, and not particularly hot swappable—as in, if you weren’t careful on the electrical front, the pack could easily arc, and blow you and/or your model across the room. Tough to reestablish confidence in your subject when you just melted the power box and you look like a cartoon character who just peed on an electric fence. But the idea of controlling light and the look of it was drumming in my head. I was training to be a newspaper photog, run and gun, but at the same time I was poring over the work of Avedon, Penn, Helmut Newton, and Guy Bourdin. The image shown here was perhaps the one lonesome ...