Ep 007: Daniel Dorsa
A SHOT: So to start, can you describe this photo that we’re gonna talk about?
DANIEL DORSA: This is a photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “AOC,” that was commissioned for Rolling Stone. I think it was [2019’s] April issue. [Rolling Stone photo editor] Joe Rodriguez — shout out to Joe — hit me up for this assignment. Their issue was about climate change, and [the story] was interviewing her about Green New Deal things and that sort of stuff.
So where is this? Where was this taken?
This was in DC A few days before, I was in Miami for a completely separate job. Hours before I was going to the airport to go to Miami, Joe e-mailed me being like, “Hey, do you wanna go to DC and shoot AOC?” I was like, “What? Uh, yes. But I’m on this job. How are we gonna make this happen?” He told me the day, and I was like, “Okay, that’s the day after my job ends.” But it had to be at 9 in the morning. Pretty much what I ended up doing was doing my job for two or three days — I can’t remember how long it was — and then staying up all night and taking a 5am flight, not even from Miami airport, from Fort Lauderdale airport, flying straight to DC, killing some time in a café down the street from her office and then got to shoot here at 9 in the morning, shot her for 20 minutes, then left, got on a plane right after and went [home] to New York.
Did you have to decide if you were gonna go to bed that night before?
Pretty much, yeah. I was like, “Okay, I can sleep for an hour or maybe an hour and a half, or I could just stay up.” I tried to go so sleep, and I just had too much energy from the work I was already doing, and I was like, “I’m just gonna stay up, I guess.” Which was a bummer. I was staying at a really nice hotel, and it was such a comfortable bed. I’m like, “Man, I can’t even enjoy this for a moment. I have to stare at the ceiling. Okay, whatever.”
How did you wake up? How were you ready for it?
Just pounded some coffee. I mean, frankly, I wasn’t so nervous about shooting her. It was more of, like, I was excited to meet her because I’m a fan. My background, I’m mixed race. My mom is from Cuba. I was very excited to meet a woman who is of Latin heritage, who also reflects the same ideals that me and my family do. And to see someone like her come up from nothing essential… Not nothing, but you know, she started up from being a bartender, etcetera, to being where she was. I thought that was really important and exciting and was something I could relate to. Especially for my mom being an immigrant, moving here, working in a textile factory in New Jersey when she first moved here and then slowly worked her way up. She eventually became a nail tech and ended up doing [nails for] a lot of Broadway stars in the ’70s and ’80s, and now my mom’s very successful, works in beauty. She works at a salon, has her own thing. She’s very good at what she does. I don’t know. I see some similarities with that. And mostly my family… I don’t know how it is; everyone’s family’s different, but definitely in my family, the women run shit. So I was like, “Okay, cool, this is going to feel like…” I don’t have a sister, but if I had a sister, I’d feel like, ”Oh, this is somebody who’s in my family, in a weird way.”
So what’s your setup for when you’re taking a photo like this?
This is just natural light. I do like to make a lot of these blur images. It can be something helpful when there’s not a lot going on. Literally it’s across the street from the office. It’s January, so it’s super cold. We’re 20 minutes, shooting in a park essentially. It’s not the most interesting location. And this is her walking back. When you have 20 minutes, you try to pull as much time from someone as you possibly can. At this point, I’m like, “Okay, our time’s wrapping up. Let’s just start walking you back to your office, and let’s go this way.” At that point I was like, “I know I want to make this kind of blurry image.” I was just thinking, DC is chaos in terms of politics, especially right now, so having something of her just constantly moving, I think, is a very literal reflection of that. But the fact that in those moments she was still smiling and engaged is really accurate to her personality.
How much do you plan for something like this?
I tend to get hired from my editors as somebody who can be given a really shitty set of cards, not the most ideal circumstance, and make something. I spent maybe an hour and a half before the shoot scouting spots with my assistant and figuring out, “Okay, I want to shoot here, here and here.” But you’re going into something like this with no idea of what things are going to be like: You don’t know what the light’s gonna be like. You don’t know if there’s gonna be people out that day. You don’t know how it’s gonna be. So I don’t know. I make some plans, but I use it more like a guide as opposed to making it the strict rigid plans because your plans are just going to get thrown out, at least in my experience. So it’s like, you have this plan so you have something to guide yourself and then… I definitely view myself as a reactionary photographer. I like meeting people and seeing how they are and letting that dictate the work, as opposed to trying to pre-conceptualize every single aspect of my work.
So when you’re in a situation like this, what are you looking for?
Mostly, the first few minutes of whenever I’m shooting someone in this kind of situation, I’m actually just speaking to them and talking to them and getting to know them. I think that helps steer the shoot. If they are someone like her who’s very open, very comfortable to talk, and genuine as she is, I can then see like, “Oh, okay, this person is like this.” I can now know how to portray this person because this is how they are. Whereas when you get someone who’s maybe a little bit more reserved, pulled back, that’s fine, too. You just have to work within what capacity they want to be working in. Getting your photo taken for a lot of people is not the funnest thing in the world. So you kind of have to lean into that a little bit and just own it when you’re not given a subject that is either into it at all or is just having a bad day or whatever.
So for her in particular, she has a beautiful smile, and it’s a very genuine smile. I’m not a really smiley photographer, but I was like, “I have to let this person smile because this is actually who she is.” She is actually a sweet and generous person. The entire time while we were shooting, maybe four or five different sets of people came up to her and asked her for a photo or to talk to her or a handshake, and she did it for every single person, and I felt like she could have just talked to them all day if she wanted to.
It’s interesting. I had written down a question specifically: You’re not necessarily a very smile heavy photographer. I wanted to know what a smile means to this. Maybe in the same sense, how does this image change if there’s no smile?
I don’t think it’s anything. It’s a throwaway. Probably in my archive I have some blurred photos of this same scene without her smiling, and I just overlooked them. I think that is the focal point of the entire image. It brings the energy to the image 100 percent.
Right. So why’s it important?
It just speaks to who she is. I feel like she, contextually with what she does as her job, is swimming through constant chaos, and she still is somebody who seemingly is optimistic about what we can do as a country and what we can do policy-wise. You know, she really does this for the right reasons, at least seemingly. And it gets to me that this person actually cares about her constituents a lot and more so than just her constituents but the whole nation, and wants to make sure that we’re in a better place. That smile is a translation to that, that this person is here to actually care about you, and not in this like, I don’t know, sleazy stereotypical politician type of way where they have the fake smile and they can turn it on and off. That person is genuinely like that.
What direction do you have to give in a situation like this?
For someone like her in particular, she is somebody who’s been photographed a lot. So she has a really good understanding of what she looks like and what works. For the most part for the whole shoot, it was more minute things, like, “Hey, turn just a little bit this way,” nothing too crazy because she’s so aware of her self-image and how she looks and how she can look from certain angles, etcetera, no different than, like, a professional model almost. But in this particular image, there isn’t much direction. It’s more, like, being there, really paying attention to the composition, and then the direction that I give is just, “Look over here. Look over here. Look this way. Look that way.” With this kind of photo where you’re shooting this blur, it’s such a gamble because you have to shoot a lot in order to get to this one. I think I had maybe one other image from that that kind of turned out okay, but it did not turn out as well as this, and all the other ones are just utter garbage. You might as well delete them off the drive.
Do you think you can tell that this is at the end of the shoot?
I don’t know. I never really thought about it that way. Do you think so?
I mean, you breaking down how the shoot went and saying this is at the end of it when you were walking back to her office, I can see that now because someone shows up on set — especially someone who knows how they look in photos — they stand a certain way. They take direction. But with this, it’s like there’s that little bit of lean in, almost like she’s in on it with you, that just her in other circumstances — she’s standing and being powerful, she’s standing and being folksy… She’s never really given that image where it’s just like, “I’m kind of in on this with you,” like, “We’re both in this together.”
Yeah, totally. And also, she definitely leaned in too because frankly this is before masks and stuff, before Covid, so we were definitely very close to each other. We’re literally crossing a busy street when this is happening, on the cross walk, close to each other. But at that point of the shoot, we were a lot more comfortable with each other and cracking jokes and whatever, as comfortable as you can for, like, a 20-minute fleeting thing.
What are some of the difficulties of working this way?
It’s challenging when you have an image in your head that you’re trying to make and once you actually get to somewhere and you’re trying to parse it out, it’s not working the way you want it. That can be really challenge. Sometimes I can definitely get a little down on myself because I had this idea in my head of I want it to look like X, Y, or Z, and it doesn’t. It falls short of all those things. So that can be a little disappointing at times. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean what I come up with is necessarily bad.
Did that happen on this shoot?
Yes and no. I had one idea that I actually did work out a little bit but not quite exactly how I wanted to, but then this image manifested itself, and I was like, “Oh, well, this is way better than my original idea.” I had this idea… This is by the steps, by the Capitol steps. It’s pretty close to it. So we had this idea of shooting up there that I scouted for and looked at and was like, “Oh, this will look really great,” but then I did get some direction from [Rolling Stone] editors being like, “We want some sky,” or “We want trees,” because the whole issue is about the environment. I’m like, “Okay, this is kind of nixing my idea.” I can’t commit to going all the way over here knowing that they’re going to completely kill this shot and I might miss everything else. If it was really close, then I would do both and just deal with it, but knowing that I pretty much had to commit to doing one thing or the other, I had to nix that completely. But then I ended up wanting to do this image, and that worked out the way I wanted it to.
So when you’re working with a celebrity or a public figure like this, how do you connect? What kind of rapport are you looking to create with them?
First, do some research on them. Have an idea of things that they do, things that they like to… Just have some talking points. It’s just like what you’re doing with me right now, where we’re having this conversation. You do a little bit of research. You have a basic idea of not just who they are but what they’re interested in outside of the thing that they do. And then just talk. Just talk to them. They’re normal people. See how they are, and see their demeanor. You definitely don’t always get the nicest people, or sometimes they’re nice, and maybe it’s just, like, the wrong day and they’re just trying to go through the motions, like, “Alright, cool, this is my third shoot of the day. Let’s do this.” Totally cool, and I can respect that. But the more you break those barriers down, the more intimate of a session that you can have with somebody. You can feel more connected with them, personally and in the images. And that’s what I really strive to do in all my work, to have a personal connection with whatever I’m shooting.
I often don’t remember what I talk to people about on shoots just because things go by so quickly, but do you remember what you talked to her about?
I definitely talked about how exhausted I was and how I didn’t sleep and got on this plane. She lives in New York. I live here, obviously, so we were talking about the city, where she lives. I was asking her, “How long do you stay in DC versus do you come up?” And she was like, “Once a month I usually go up for a weekend to see my family and my boyfriend,” and so on and so forth. And then we talked about coming from Latin backgrounds, Latin families. I talked about how I mentioned [the assignment] to my mom and how excited she was for me to shoot her and meet her and things like that. That’s basically what I remember. I’m sure there was other stuff.
So one thing that I love about your portraiture is how well you convey a subject within the context of a space or an environment. But how do you know when you want to move closer like this?
Lately, I’ve been moving closer and closer, getting more and more… I guess, less context, more of someone’s face. So I think that’s just been a recent habit of mine. However, I feel like normally I just do kind of, like, a wide, a medium and a tight. From doing so much assignment work, that’s just ingrained in my work flow. Knowing your art director or your editor is going to want all the options, it’s just burned into my brain that you have to do that. So I think I tend to do it all the time. However, I’m usually more successful with the things that are a little bit more environmental. I think that’s how my eye naturally works. That’s how I see things. If I walk into a space and needed to make a photo of anything, that’s probably how I would approach it to begin with.
But getting closer, sometimes… I think it’s twofold: Sometimes it’s light. Sometimes it’s the background content, like, “Oh, this is boring, so I’m going to punch it.” And sometimes it’s a combo of those two things and just having enough time with somebody that taking a step closer feels like I know this person better. I feel like I’ve gotten to know this person better, to an extent. Yeah, I guess it’s a permission or an access thing, where it’s like, “You are allowing me to do this. Cool. We’re both aware of what is going on, and you view me as somebody who has your best interest in mind when I’m getting closer to you.” There’s a trust in that. That’s something you just have to build up with someone over the course of your session with them. Someone like her, she’s a pro. She can turn it on and off really easily and well, but you don’t always get that. And most of the time with my assignments, I don’t get that. I shoot a lot of artists who hate getting their photo taken. And I don’t blame them. I don’t like getting my photo taken either. That’s something you just work your way toward, just like any other relationship. You don’t instantly trust somebody. You meet someone, and then you get to know them, and you build trust over time, and that’s how a relationship is formed.
What do you think we can learn about her from this photo?
I’d say compassion and honesty, being true to one’s self and caring for each other and being genuine. I think that’s maybe what you can get out of this image. That’s what I get out of it. That’s the vibe I get from her in general and in this image especially. So maybe that’s something.
What do you think we can learn about you from the choices you made here?
Way less. Way less than her for sure. I guess maybe, just because you’re on an assignment doesn’t mean you can’t take a gamble on making something abstract, or something a little bit harder to tame. I think that’s maybe the only thing you can learn from that photo about me. I don’t know. Do you learn anything from it?
Just the fact that you’re looking for that is something.
You should always be striving to try to make something that’s for you, outside of the scope of what your client’s looking for, at least on the editorial level. It’s a little different for commercial work, where you have something a little bit more rigid like that and frankly usually less time to actually make something because you have so much work to do. But for editorial, you should always be trying to make something you wanna make. If you’re shooting editorial, you’re not getting paid super well, generally speaking. The circumstances are usually not quite as ideal, so do it because you wanna walk away with something. Don’t do it just to get a paycheck. There’s way more lucrative things to get a paycheck for.
So let’s talk about something super obvious. This photo is blurry.
Yeah.
A lot of photographers might look at a photo like this in the mix of what they shot and just disregard it, but what draws you to a shot like this that is blurry?
There’s the obvious thing of there’s the suggestion of movement. And I think when you are confined into maybe not a very desirable location, such as us crossing the street, shooting something blurry, it just becomes a more painterly kind of thing. The background’s blurred. Everything’s blurred. Nothing really matters. Focus doesn’t matter. You lose all the real details, the contextual details of what is this, and it’s way more focused on the few key parts that are in focus. Her eyes are in focus. Her mouth is in focus. Your eye just goes to that and stays there. And moves around but always comes back. And that blur is fully intentional. I didn’t take a blurry photo on accident and just like, “Oh, this is the photo.” I’m shooting probably at f/16 at 1/15th of a second or something. Purposely, I want to make some images that can abstract the background a little bit and add some movement. It’s help for something that the background and the context of where she is not the most interesting. But it doesn’t matter. Just focus on what matters. It’s her eyes, her face, that’s what matters. That’s what you’re looking at. Because I went in it with that intention of making that image, I’m actually really paying attention to those blurry images when I’m going through my selection process, as opposed to when you make one on accident, I would probably even just disregard it.
There is some interplay of accident within this that you do have to acknowledge. Do you acknowledge that when you’re shooting it?
Oh, for sure. There’s intention to it, but you can’t fully sculpt it the way you want. I don’t even know how many frames of this I have of her, but I have a lot, and most of them are terrible. You try, and there’s some things you can do, sometimes play with your shutter speed or something to try to fine-tune it a little bit and playing with your movement a little bit on your camera, but you’re never gonna really get it exactly how you want, so there is this element of chance, which is exciting. Something like photography, it’s cool because you can do things two ways. You can have this chance, this gamble, this hunt for an interesting image. Or you can have this sculpted, painter approach where you’re concepting every single bit of the entire image. And I think this is a little Venn diagram of both. And that’s fun. That actually makes it exciting when you get a good result. You’re like, “Oh, yes, my idea worked.”
Yeah, I think when we’re first learning photography, happy accidents come as a nice surprise where you’re like, “Oh, my god, that actually worked.” And then the more we learn about our process and our craft, we can still harness that method, but because we know how to put the right pieces in place, there’s a greater chance that something good will happen.
Yeah, exactly. That’s why you’re a professional versus someone who’s just a hobbyist or an amateur. You can deliver something almost every time.
Did you have to learn how to get comfortable working in that way?
I would say no. My background, when I first got into photo, was I grew up skateboarding. I still skateboard very often. And I got into skating where I was shooting skating. That’s what I was committed to doing when I was younger. I’m gonna shoot skating. I wanted to be a Thrasher staff photographer or TransWorld or somebody. That was my goal when I was 16. And I was pretty serious about it until about college. When I started moving away, I went to a decent photo program and started getting way more into fine art, but with skating, it’s totally like that: You’re setting up flashes at the bottom of some stair set. There is this moment of paying attention to what’s happening and trying to time a trick in a certain way in order to make it look good. But it’s so dependent on the skater to do the trick well in order for you to actually have the opportunity to catch it at the right moment, if that makes sense. There is this sculpted process where you’re like, “Okay, cool, this is my composition,” but then it’s totally up to the skater to do the thing well and for you to make sure you get it. That type of work is definitely, I would say, the center of the Venn diagram for those two approaches. Since that’s my background, it just comes pretty natural, I guess.
So I think there’s something to be said how even through the distortion of focus, this image is 100 percent recognizable. It’s in part because of what you said: You managed to isolate her defining features in her face, but at the same time, it kind of conveys how much this person’s image is becoming ubiquitous. What do you think of the interplay of that here?
I would agree with that 100 percent. Besides all the things that I said before about being intentional with it, etcetera, this image probably wouldn’t work as well if it was anybody else, if it’s somebody who isn’t as well known as she is. If I did a photo of you, for example, you would know it’s you, and your friends would know it’s you, but it wouldn’t have necessarily the same impact. It just might be, “Oh, that’s a cool interesting photo,” and move on. But because it’s her, because of her stature, because of the amount of times you’ve seen her face, that is where that impact comes from, absolutely.
So the color in this image is also a distortion to some extent. What decisions did you make with the color here?
I tend to like warmer tones in general, so I definitely have a default, if that makes sense. Or I’ll be like, “Okay, start here,” and then I’ll kind of go from there. That day, it was a bright sunny day despite it being super cold. I think it was 15, 20 degrees outside. But it was sunny, so I definitely was like, “Alright, let’s lean into it.” And every time I tried to make this image maybe more realistic, quote unquote, or accurate to what the color tone was, it just fell flat. She didn’t have this vibrancy that I think is accurate to her, so there is intention pushing it to that kind of saturation level that it’s at because normally I like to tone things really flat and not have a lot of contrast and not have super crunchy shadows, and this I feel like maybe was a little bit outside of that. It all just came down to making her look the best she could, making her look how she actually is.
Did you have much thought into the color of her smile, her lips?
She wore really good lipstick, so it was there for sure. I didn’t purposely adjust anything on her lips. I definitely didn’t enhance that or add some saturation or something like that. She was wearing good lipstick already, so it just kind of worked out that what I was doing globally did affect her lips, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, this looks cool.” When you have this blur, it adds a defining feature.
If you close your eyes and think about the photo, it’s the first thing that you see.
Yeah, for sure. It’s the brightest part of the whole photo. Her lips and her eyes, and that’s it.
Does anything about this photo feel familiar?
She felt familiar in the sense of, like, you’re another woman in my family. That part, meeting her and talking to her feels familiar. Maybe the image itself doesn’t feel familiar, but her presence feels familiar. I’m just like, “Yeah, if you’re not who you are, you could have been a family member; you could have been a family friend.” There is familiarity in that, and I think it’s just a cultural thing.
What about her made her feel that way to you?
All the women in my family are super strong, very proud women. That’s what I grew up in. The women in my household run the house. My mom is one of four, all sisters, so it’s four sisters. And all of them are like that. And my grandmother also. My grandmother, when she immigrated with three of the four daughters to New York by herself, just four women, don’t speak any English, flew on a plane from Cuba to New York, to New Jersey, and just figured shit out. She gives off a similar vibe of “I’m confident. I know what I’m doing, and if I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m gonna own up to not knowing what I’m doing, and I’m gonna figure it out. And while I’m doing it, I’m going to be the nicest person I can.” That’s what I get from her, and that’s how my family operates.
What do you think Daniel 10 years ago would say about this photo?
“Why’s it out of focus?” I was such a nerd 10 years ago. I’m still a nerd, but I was just such a tech-y photo geek, wanted all the cool gear, definitely reading all the forums on stuff. I’m way less like that now. Make work. That’s all that matters, you know?
How did you learn to become comfortable with that? Like, I definitely had… I think it came from teaching myself, I definitely had a limited knowledge to start, so there’s things I clung to because I felt like if I didn’t do them, people would know I wasn’t supposed to be there. Like, something needed to be in focus, tack sharp or else they knew I wasn’t right for that job.
Yeah, or like you had to use lights even though it wasn’t necessary. I think it’s been a couple things. A) When I went to college, I started… I have a weird college situation. I went to a small community college first, not really focusing on school because I was like so “I’m gonna work in skateboarding; this doesn’t matter.” Once I went away from that and actually went to a decent photo program, we had all this stuff at our disposal. I started doing color darkroom, and I was like, “This is the best thing ever.” School opened me up to looking at other kinds of work. One of my professors was just handing me fine-art books. He was like, “Check out Gursky. Check out Eggleston. Check out Stephen Shore. You don’t know any of these. And I’m like, “Oh, fuck, I don’t know any of these, and this is amazing.” I had all these flashes and all this gear, and I got rid of it all and just focused on one camera that I liked and then focusing on what I’m making.
Then when I moved to New York, I became an assistant, and when I became an assistant, I used all that knowledge that I had as a way to make money and be able to work in photo. Watching other photographers, you’re like, “Oh, it doesn’t fucking matter.” You can do whatever you want at the end of it. I would work with some photographers who would be like every shot was 10, 12 lights, and then I would work with some photographers where we had a Cube truck full of gear, and we used two things. And I was like, “That’s cool.” It’s cool seeing both sides of it. And that just made me realize, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the photo at the end of the day, what you’re making. If a certain piece of equipment, or shooting on film versus shooting digitally, or whatever, if there’s certain cameras that you like that makes making the work that you want to make better, cool, and that’s all that matters. Everything else is irrelevant.
What do you think you’ve learned that gave you the instinct to take this photo specifically?
I think it comes from making a lot of boring images, like a lot of static, boring photos where you’re like, “What do I do? I’m stumped. This person is not interesting, is very uncomfortable. I have a shitty background. I don’t have a lot of options of what I can do.” So it’s just like being forced into this bad situation but needing to make something good out of it, you can do some things that you inherently will, like, maybe it’s a bit of a crutch sometimes, but then you figure out ways to make it more interesting and sculpt it a little bit better and refine it. And then it ends up doing something like that.
So to close the conversation, what something unrelated to photography that’s been feeding you creatively lately?
Oh man, this summer I was skating a lot, which the past few years I haven’t been able to do as much. Though it’s not necessarily a full-on creative exercise necessarily, it is a very meditative thing for me. It gives me some clear-headedness and lets me think of work a certain way. When I do go back to the screen or whatever I’m doing work-wise, I’ll have a clear-headedness to approach things.
Been playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons with my friends, and I’ve been writing all these narratives for them, so that’s been really fun. It’s obviously hardcore nerdy, but it’s fun to explore this narrative-based thing and being a part of writing something, being the gamemaster doing that is really fun. And it’s something I didn’t know I could do, if that makes sense. I’m like, “Oh, I never thought I could write some kind of weird narrative stuff,” but I guess I can. Which is like now it’s been giving me ideas of I should do something that is narrative but within photo. What can I do? And how can I apply it? Does it have to be photo? Maybe it should be a video thing. And then get my gears moving a certain way. I think that’s probably it. Oh, and I’ve been baking. That’s been nice.
Joining the club.
Yeah, my wife is in the sourdough club, and I’ve just been making other, like, sweets and stuff. She just got me a stand mixer for my birthday. I’m going to make some buttermilk miso biscuits for Thanksgiving, so I’m very excited for that, yeah.
Interviewed on November 23, 2020.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)
Links:
Daniel Dorsa
Rolling Stone: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on How to Build a Green New Deal”