Ep 024: Jingyu Lin
A SHOT: To start, can you describe the photo that we’re going to talk about?
JINGYU LIN: Today I decided to pick the cover that I shot of Linda Zhang, who is chief engineer of the Ford F-150 — the first electric truck — that I shot for Time magazine. It was one of the covers that came out in October, in the US.
So where was this taken?
It was taken in Detroit, Michigan, one of the few travel jobs I had last year. It was the first time that I’d really left the state and gotten on a plane to go shoot something.
How does an assignment like this come together?
The biggest surprise to me when I first started really shooting, or even when I was assisting and observed how other photographers function, was how last-minute these things come together. Like, you would think that for a cover or something really big that it would be planned out weeks or months in advance, but I actually got the call for this particular job seven days before I was supposed to shoot it. We had to lock down my entire team, do all the travel arrangements, get all of the creative together within that time before we touched down in Michigan.
And then how much planning is there on your part as far as what you wanna be doing?
It depends on the assignment. For this particular shoot, there was more planning on my end than it would normally be because this job was, in my opinion, very out of the realm of what I normally shoot. So a lot of the time for assignments that people will give me, they just kind of are like, “Okay, this is our subject, and we just want you to take this beautiful portrait of this person for this magazine or this client.” And I’m like, “Yes, this is great. This is super up my wheelhouse. Fantastic.” This job in particular, I don’t often shoot folks who aren’t used to being in front of the camera, especially businesspeople. I think this might have been actually the first time I’d been asked to shoot a businessperson ever. And they wanted me to shoot her with the truck. And the truck is big. It’s a big car. And it took a lot of planning.
I pulled a bunch of references. The day after I was assigned this job, I went into my studio that I share with a couple of other guys, and we’re really great about bouncing ideas off of each other and whatnot. I walked in, and I sat down, and I was like, “I’m freakin out right now because I’ve been asked to do a portrait of a businesswoman with a truck, and I don’t know how I’m going to do this in a way that feels like me.” Like, how do I photograph this in a way that I’m going to be really proud to show this image on my site because, in my opinion, those are two very difficult things to shoot. A business woman can be very difficult to shoot, especially if it’s someone who has not previously been in front of the camera before or feels awkward in front of the camera, and then there’s also the truck, which is, once again… It’s pretty limiting. There are only so many ways you can shoot a truck. So for me creatively, I pulled a ton of references, made mood boards, sent ideas to my editor, had calls with him. It was really important to me that I walked away with something that I felt really proud of, especially because I knew it was going to be the cover. So a lot more prep went into this than normally for me.
What sort of stuff were you looking at for inspiration then?
My studio-mate showed me this incredible photographer. His name is Mattia Balsamini. He is this incredible photographer that shoots a lot of, I hesitate to call it documentary work, but for lack of a better term, I feel like his work kind of veers in that category, but he would photograph it in a way that felt incredibly artistic and very storytelling. I was very taken by these images. He would go into labs and shoot robots, and there was a lot of very clinical, kind of sterile environments, which I would… It wouldn’t be my first choice to go into an environment like that and shoot there. The reason I was looking at his work is because I knew we were shooting at the Ford factory. I was going to be in a warehouse with lots of machines and parts of cars, and I wanted to see good examples of somebody who had managed to take something that was quite clinical and sterile and turn it into something more artistic and a little bit more creative and something that draws your eye in instead of being strictly a journalistic story.
So how do you prepare on the actual day that you’re shooting? What is your morning like before you’re arriving at the factory?
I always make sure to eat before I go because I never eat really when I’m on set. Even when food is served, I’m sometimes just too wrapped up in it, so my biggest thing is having a big breakfast. And then I go through my camera bag and double and triple check everything to make sure that I have all of the extras because we all know that you’re going to show up on set and something isn’t going to be working that the [equipment] rental house has given you, which actually did happen. So [I’m] just making sure I have all of my ducks in a row. In this particular shoot, there were a couple of moving parts. I wanted to check with my assistant to make sure she was ready to go. I flew my first [assistant] in from New York. And then I hired two other crew members that were local to Michigan, and one of them was in charge of picking up all of our equipment and driving it over. So there’s also touching base with my team members to make sure that all of our individual responsibilities are being carried out.
What do you remember about the day you shot this?
It was a really good shoot. The one standout that I had that was maybe a panicky moment was one of the lights that the equipment house gave to us straight up wasn’t working. But it was a crucial light that I had ordered specifically for this one shot that I wanted to do of Linda on the seamless [paper backdrop]. A lot of times I just shoot a 2K tungsten [light] directly onto the subject. It’s one of my formulaic seamless setups, and my assistant turns it on, and it doesn’t turn on. I’m like, “Cool.” She’s like, “I don’t think it’s working, but let me try to switch out the extension cords. Maybe it’s a cord problem.” We plug it in a couple different times. There’s nothing.
At this point, Linda is waiting upstairs. She’s ready to come down. And this light isn’t working, so we had to figure out something else. We bring the seamless outdoors, which is always a bad idea, and I knew it wasn’t gonna work, but in my head, I was like, “Well, maybe we can just use the sun.” That didn’t work. We bring it outside; it’s blowing everywhere. I’m like, “No, this is not it.” We bring the seamless back inside, and I end up lighting it with a strobe in a way that actually mimicked the light. It worked, and actually that’s the way that I do a lot of my seamless shots now because I tested it that day.
What’s your demeanor on set when stuff like that is happening?
My biggest thing is always to keep calm. That’s huge because if you’re not calm then the subject is not calm and nobody else is calm either. It’s really important that the photographer keep her cool, or his cool, whoever, because if you panic or you show that you’re getting too flustered or you’re freaking out a little bit, it comes off, and everyone around you can feel that. Then they think they also have a reason to panic. In this case, I didn’t even have an editor with me because it wasn’t a local shoot, so the only people I had in my presence were Linda’s PR folks and a couple of the administrators of the factory that were showing me around and making sure everything was organized, and they don’t really know anything about photo. I didn’t want to startle them or make it seem like there was something wrong. So I just told them over and over again, “We’re having a little malfunction, but it should be sorted out in the next 10 to 15 minutes, and I will just go up and grab Linda when we’re ready, so just sit tight. We’ll have it solved soon.”
So what’s your setup for taking a photo like this?
Yeah, so this one, it’s very different, once again, because it’s so out of the realm of what I normally do. The way that I approached this one was I chose a couple of different frames, I guess. Like, for example, the one that you’re seeing, she’s got her hands up and she’s looking through both of the windows of the car. That was its own light setup, and then the other two that I ended up choosing were also their own light setup. So I had to test every single one, one at a time, and have my assistants mark down exactly where the light was with gaff tape and write down exactly what the power was on each light and what modifiers we were using for each light, for every single setup so that when she arrived on set, I could immediately be like, “Let’s start with setup one.” And setup two is gonna be next, and setup three is the last one. I just needed [my assistants] to have all of that ready to go, or have the information written down. That way we could swing from one to the next without a ton of issue.
When we were shooting with the car especially — and because I wanted to capture a couple of different angles or frames that were a little bit more interesting — the lights all had to be in a very specific place; there are so many parts of the car that block light. For example, the shot that got chosen as the cover, there’s a light coming from viewer’s left that’s going through the windshield onto her face. If that light had been shifted over, like, six inches, it would have been covered by, I guess, the front of the car or the area where the windshield connects to. And if it had been shifted too much frontward, then it wouldn’t have hit her face at all. So this one was incredibly particular, and we had to test everything on digital before we even touched the film camera.
What were some of the elements of this scene or this setting that you might have found yourself battling while you were shooting, or things that made this particularly challenging?
There were a few things about this one. A big question that I had prior to even showing up on set was how much access we were gonna have to the factory. I wanted as much as we possibly could. I didn’t know that we were gonna get that. I kept asking for reference photos, but of course, with PR sometimes that stuff is a little bit slower. I kind of showed up not really knowing what we were going to get. What you guys are seeing in the cover image, this is the place where the final car pops out of the factory. When they’re finished putting it all together, it pops out, and this is the space that it hangs out in after it’s finished. And this [area] was the only photo that I got from them [prior to arriving]. I didn’t know what the rest of the factory looked like at all. So there were a couple of surprises to work though.
When I got there, I was struggling pretty hard with these lights. You can see in the back there are these strip lights that go up and down. There were two on the side, and they were also on the ceiling, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to incorporate that into the shot or not. There were a lot of aesthetic choices that were difficult for me to make in this moment because the environment was so out of my comfort zone.
So as you said, having an enormous truck isn’t the easiest prop for a photo, especially alongside a woman who the story says is 5-foot-3, so she’s pretty small. How did you arrive at the way you wanted her to be interacting with the truck in this photo?
I knew that I wanted to shoot her through the window. But I didn’t know if I wanted her to be sitting in the car because I think that’s just a very obvious way of shooting someone with a car — for her to be sitting in it at the driver’s wheel — and in my head I was like, “There’s a more creative way, a more interesting way to shoot her interacting with the car, and I would like to think of something different.” So framing was really big to me. The big thing was I wanted to show parts of the car without… You know, the truck is really bulky, and no matter how you look at it, it’s awkward. Like, if you put the whole thing in a frame or try to get most of it in a frame with a person, it’s going to look awkward, and there’s no way to really get around that. So yeah, I think that framing was a really important thing for me. I was like, “If I could have the windows framing her somehow, that would be ideal.” So I arrived at this idea of having her all the way in the back because it’s kind of two frames in one, and you can see most of the car too. The seat are illuminated. You can see the steering wheel. You can even see some of the front mirror. So I felt like it was a really nice way to display how beautiful this car is. The leather looks so great in this photo without it being your very typical car photograph.
How would you describe your presence behind the camera here? How are you interacting with her and what direction are you giving?
With folks that are not comfortable in front of the camera or who have just not gotten their photograph taken very often, I find it’s always best to give them very specific directions about what I would like them to do because they always get in front of the camera and they’re nervous, which makes a lot of sense because I would be nervous too. I gave her really specific directions of like, “If you can put both of your elbows up against the window, and maybe you move your hand a little bit this way so you’re not clutching your wrist so tightly.” And I had a different version of her in this same photo where only one of her arms was up. So I would just give her really specific instruction, like, “Please tilt your head a little to the right. Now face forward.” Very, very minute details because I’ve found that actually it makes them the most comfortable because they don’t know what else they would do if I didn’t give them direction. In this case as well, it helps to have something to interact with, I think. The motion of being able to place your elbows on something instead of just standing there brings a lot of comfort, so that was kind of how this photograph unfolded. I had to give her very specific instructions.
How much did you learn about her beforehand? I imagine this is the type of shoot where they tell you who you’re shooting and you probably hadn’t heard of her.
Yeah, I didn’t. No, it was funny actually because the day that I was told that I got this shoot… There are three agents at my agency’s office, and only one of them manages me, and the other two handle the other artists on the roster. [My agent] called me, and I couldn’t pick up. I missed his call. And then I had to call back. He had stepped out for a moment, so one of the other agents, Leslie, answered the phone, and she’s like, “It’s so exciting about the Time cover.” And [my agent] hadn’t told me yet that I had gotten a Time cover, so I was like, “You mean the one that came out in May?” I was like, “Well, thanks, but that was a couple of months ago.” She’s like, “No, shooting Linda next week.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” And she then had to fill me in. She was like, “You got called for another cover for Time,” and then she told me who it was, and I was like, “Is this supposed to be someone that I know?”
I was very blindsided basically by the way the shoot came about. I did not know who she was, and I did have to do a little bit of research. There’s not a lot of information on her, to be honest, on the Internet. I found this article. It was, like, two paragraphs, like, “Her name is Linda Zhang. She’s the first female chief engineer and woman of color to be heading a project like this. And she lives in Michigan.” And that was it, and I was like, “Cool! I’m in!”
Part of the profile of Linda that accompanies the photo mentions that the market she works in may be sort of skeptical of switching toward electric vehicles. So to some extent, there’s a level of convincing and marketing that needs to happen with the work that she’s doing. And your image being on the cover of Time kind of exists as a part of that. There are a lot of folks — and she knows this and your editors know this — who are finding out that Ford is making an electric truck for the first time because of this photo. Obviously in every shoot you wanna make a great photo first and foremost. But did you feel any type of responsibility with this assignment?
Honestly, I don’t think so because I didn’t know at the time or before I was shooting it that so many people were skeptical of this truck. I’m not a huge car person myself. I drive things that are efficient. And if it gets great mileage, that’s a plus. And that’s probably the only thing I know about cars. So my first thought was, “I wonder who the electric truck is for.” I did think about that. I wasn’t sure who the clientele was aiming toward, I think, when I first heard of this project. So I didn’t necessarily feel a responsibility, per se, to shoot the car in a certain way. But I do know that when I was photographing it that it was important to show the car, and show aspects of this car that would make it appealing because obviously it was going to be a cover, and it was a really important project for everybody that was involved in this factory.
If anything, I felt more responsibility toward portraying Linda to the best that I could do and portraying the work that she was doing to the best that I could do because a big takeaway for me was how passionate everybody at this factory was. This was a group of people that took way more time out of their day to accommodate me and my team than was necessary. I got there three hours early, before Linda even showed up, and they took me around the entire factory, and they showed me all of the different parts and all of the different processes that went into making this car, and they were all just so passionate when they were explaining it. You could see and feel the excitement that they had not only working on this but the fact that it was going to be featured in such a public way. It was just a really genuine and authentic and down-to-earth energy that I got from all of the folks that worked there. So if anything I think I felt more of a responsibility to them to portray their work and their chief engineer in the best possible light that I could.
I think one of the triumphs of this photo is just the strength that it conveys in her. Like you said, if you Google Linda, she kind of looks like an engineer. She’s either standing next to the truck wearing jeans or a reflective safety vest, and if you don’t know who she is, they might be images that you would just dismiss. But your image has an authority to it and commands that she’s really in charge. How much did you think about that when you were working on this?
The way that I approach all of my subjects, especially women — I shoot mostly women; I rarely ever shoot men — but women especially, it’s really important for me to look up at them. A lot of my photographs are kind of from a lower angle, and the reason that I take it that way, outside of aesthetic purposes, is because I want the women in my photographs to look and to feel powerful. This kind of goes across the board for me when I’m photographing women anyways. For her especially, though, she had this stoicism and seriousness to her that once I met her I kind of understood what portrait I was going to be getting out of her.
One of the photos that I really love that actually didn’t end up running was the seamless shot. She looks quite powerful in that one too. She has her hands crossed in front of her, and she’s looking out toward my light, and I’m shooting it from a little bit of a lower angle. It was very important to me to make her appear as powerful as possible.
Do you think that your work creating fashion images informs this photo at all?
I don’t think so. I mean, obviously there’s parts of me, of course, in this picture. But the reason that I picked this picture to talk about was because it is completely different from all of my other work. This job was one of the most challenging jobs for me creatively that I’d ever done. I think I walked away from it feeling really proud of myself because I remember looking at the photos and being like, “I love this photograph, and I would be more than happy to put it front and center in my portfolio” and that was the goal I had set for myself when I was presented with two subjects, the car and the person, that were outside of my comfort zone.
I think that this photograph is significantly more still than the way that I normally work. With fashion work, especially with models or personalities that are often in front of the camera, they kind of move on their own. They start moving, and then I give them a little bit of direction to help get them to where I would like them to be. With her, I kind of had to direct her every step of the way. So this, for me, was an incredibly different way of working. If I tried to directly pull from the way that I normally shoot and apply it to this setting, it would not have gone very well.
Did anything about this photo surprise you?
Honestly, I’m really surprised by how much I ended up liking it. That was surprising. I’m surprised by how seamlessly all of it seems to sort of meld together and become this one photograph. I thought that the bright lights in the back might be too distracting at first. We played with turning them on and off a couple of different times, and we had to jigger it so that the background wasn’t too light, so that it was a little bit darker. I’m surprised by how much it fits into the rest of my work. This was on film, and then I also printed it at my lab with all of my personal post processing touches, and it ended up being something that fits really well into my body of work, and that was honestly a big surprise to me.
This photo also has a softness to it, which I think is kind of what ties it into most of the rest of your work. What do you like about that here? And what affect does that have on an image like this?
It’s funny that you say it has softness because I actually think the light, if I’m remembering correctly, I’m not sure that there was a modifier on that light. I think it might have just been a Magnum, like a strobe with a [Profoto] Magnum [reflector]. So actually the way that I lit it wasn’t soft at all. If it’s soft, that’s probably due to the way that I chose to process it after the fact, or the color correction and everything else that I put onto it. I actually think that this photo is a lot more sharp than the rest of my work because a lot of the time either I’m using natural light or I’m mimicking natural light, and it can be quite soft this way, but this one was straight on hard flash, kind of punchy, to me. But I think you’re seeing it differently, which is interesting.
Well, I think that there’s something to the line structure that you’ve created in it. You have the smooth curves of the car. You have her presence in an angle that feels soft. It’s funny. You’re looking at it technically, like how you actually made this and saying, “I know that the light that I used was hard.”
Yeah.
But the overall effect of how it feels is it’s all hugged together. There’s nothing that feels too crisp to me.
That’s so interesting. Looking at it from your perspective, I see what you’re saying. The lines of the car are very soft. Her facial expression is powerful, but her pose and the way that she is presenting herself is soft as well, like she doesn’t look like a scary person, you know?
What does color convey in this photo?
Oh, this was very intentional on my end because it was not blue in the factory. The factory was gray. I very purposely toned it to this blue-magenta. I wanted there to be this very electric energy about the image. Factories are not the most interesting place to photograph something. And in order to make the picture what it was, I wanted there to be this element that brought the entire thing together, and for me, that was color. So it could have gone in a couple different directions, but I think I had chosen blue, something cool, from the very beginning because I wanted it, yeah, to feel quite electric and very tied together. The fact that she was wearing this periwinkle blazer was perfect. As soon as I saw it, I was like “Great, that solidifies this idea that I had for this photo from the beginning, so we’re good.”
I guess the other thing that’s interesting about working in a factory and especially something like this is how much are you thinking about how much you’re actually seeing in this photo? You’ve actually hidden quite a bit with the way that you’ve lit this.
For me my default when I’m put in an environment that I’m not comfortable in is to shoot less of it but in a more creative way. So obviously you see the framing of the windows of the car here, but I actually also played with framing of the lights. What you’re not seeing in this image is I’m standing in front of her, and then there’s her and the lights behind her. But there’s also a set of lights behind me that are not shown up in this picture. I actually played around with standing behind that set of lights, the strip lights, and shooting through that as well. I played around with quite a bit of framing because I wanted to show the factory, but I wanted to do it in bits and pieces that weren’t as obvious because I didn’t want it to look like, “Oh, we’re standing in a factory,” and have the factory be the focus. That wasn’t what I was going for for this image. So [showing less of an environment] is kind of a default mechanism to me.
Let’s talk a bit about your career arc without straying too far from this specific photo. You were full-time photo assisting in New York before you returned to primarily shooting for yourself. What was it like making that transition for you?
My transition was very specific, and it’s not one that… I don’t know. I feel like I got lucky. It was odd because it kind of happened a little bit during COVID, but then a little bit after COVID. I always think that 2020 should have been the year that I quit [assisting]. It was supposed to be that way. Everything was pointing to the direction of it being that way. The way that I sort of view my career path is I moved to New York in spring of 2018, started [assisting] maybe two months after I moved. I sent out all of the e-mails, and most people didn’t get back to me, but then shout out, Heather Hazzan — I love her so much. She took me under her wing, and that’s where it kicked off for me.
So I assisted for her most of 2018, and then 2019 is really when I expanded the roster of photographers that I was working for. I was still working for Heather, but I was also working for the wonderful Cait Opperman, who I adore, as well as a lot of the other photographers on the East [Photographic] roster. It was through that support. I don’t even know really what to say or call it, but everyone that I’d ever worked for was so willing to push me forward. They wanted me ultimately to not assist for them anymore. They knew that I wanted to shoot. That was my goal. I’d come to them with this sort of fully flesh-out book already because of the number of years that I’d spent doing my own thing in Chicago, where I have to say assisting doesn’t really exist. The community out there is so small that I didn’t even know that assisting and production could exist at this caliber until I moved to New York and I was in Pier 59 for the first time in my life, and I was assisting for Sacha Maric on this seven-day Nordstom job, completely overwhelmed. I was the second assistant. I didn’t even know, like, “Why are they serving me food? I don’t understand. What’s happening right now?” And it was through those connections, I think.
The agents at [Opperman’s agency] East have always been so kind to me. They put me up [to assist] with all their photographers. Sent me to different countries to work for their photographers, that by the time early 2020 rolled around… And of course, it was during this time that I was also making time for my own work. That’s very important, trying to shoot once or twice a month at least. So it was during this time that I made a lot of connections, so by the time early 2020 rolled around, I was starting to get commissions for my own work. It wasn’t like the people that I was on set with were hiring me, but I think that it was, you know, me being present in the industry and these photographers that I worked for giving me the space to have a presence on set. I know that the old-school way of working is assistants are very quiet. They’re ghosts. But the photographers, everyone that I’d ever worked for enjoyed having me as a presence on set because I’m kind of loud and bubbly and energetic, and that didn’t work for everybody, but the people that it did work for, they wanted me to occupy space on their set, and I think it’s because of that space I was given that, by the time I was ready to make my own leap, I had a presence in the industry. People knew who I was just because I’d been around and because people had given me that space.
So yeah, 2020 was supposed to be my year. It didn’t happen ‘cause COVID. And then last January rolls around, and the reason I say this was really specific was because I sent out a round of newsletters, and one of them was to my current agency, Kramer & Kramer, and they are rock stars. I love them so much. They called me in for a meeting, and I ended up signing with them. It was super unexpected for me. I did not think that this meeting I was gonna take with them was going to lead to me actually signing with them. We just really hit it off. I know that it’s not very common for people to sign as soon as I did, but I think that it’s the reason why I was able to… I’m very happy with the success that I was able to find in my first year of freelancing, and I think it’s because I was with this incredible agency. The way that I see it is everything kind of lined up perfectly for me to make this exit. I don’t even know how much credit I can really take for that, though, because it just seemed super lucky.
I mean, an important point to all that you kept shooting while you were working for other people. And that’s part of why people knew who you were, I’m sure. You know, I work with plenty of assistant, and they’re much more confident showing up on set and executing what someone else wants to make. But it sounds like you didn’t move to the city with that being the plan for forever.
I kind of moved to the city not really knowing what I was doing. I knew I wanted to assist. It seemed like shooting was not very possible right away. So I chose the assisting route because I also wanted to learn. That was the big thing. If I’m being perfectly honest, I walked into assisting not even knowing how to use a C-stand. My first day on set, I was a PA. It was for Coach. And I saw the Profoto pack, like, the 8A hanging on the side of the C-stand, and I was like, “I don’t know what that’s for.” Then I was supposed to help them wrap everything, and I didn’t know that in order to take the head out of the pack you had to twist and then pull, so I was just pulling at it, and I was like, “It’s not… not coming out!” and kind of looking around at the other assistants, like maybe if I just observe, I’ll figure out how to take this thing… I knew nothing.
So after years of creating photos that other people wanted to be making, how did you find the process of discovering what your own images would look like?
It was slow, I think. Slow and steady. I was in the position of having a body of work at the time that I moved to New York because I spent from ages 18 to 22 in Chicago. I was going to state school, but I was also shooting in the city. I had an entire body of work, so I already knew what I wanted things to look like, I guess. I was a very natural-light shooter simply because I did not know how to use lights. So I relied on window light, and I also was already experimenting with the warm tungsten lights that you still see in my pictures today. Really when I moved here it was less about finding my look and a little bit more about how to achieve that look and how to refine it and how to experiment with something’s that were a little bit different through the process of learning how to light and watching other photographers light, absorbing all of that information. That’s not to say that my work looks the same because it really doesn’t. It’s all very different from what it looked like back then, but that also comes with, you know, I used to shoot digital and then after I was done with that, I was shooting 35mm for a really long time, and when I got to New York, I started shooting 120. And then last year I stared doing c-prints, so my work has aesthetically evolved a ton. But the lighting is not all that different. My work has always been really soft and always been centered around women and always been about capturing this powerful energy from my subjects. At the core, I think it’s very much the same. There wasn’t a ton for me to discover about myself after I moved here because I already knew what I wanted to shoot.
What advantage did the time that you spent assisting give you for an assignment like this?
Everything. Everything. Oh, my god, if I hadn’t assisted, I would have messed this up. That’s for sure. There’s no way I would have gotten this right. Knowing that I should light every single one individually, every shot individually and have my assistant mark everything, that was something that I learned from assisting. Being able to carry this job out to maximum efficiency had everything to do with me assisting because maximizing my time with the subject meant pre-lighting everything, using my assistants as the models, making sure that everything was perfect before she even stepped on set. And then when we had that malfunction with our piece of equipment, I had to stay calm then and that was also something I learned from watching my bosses handle tough situations and knowing how to deal with the client, or in my case, the PR people and Linda’s people during a time of panic, a little bit, and just staying calm.
I think there was definitely a turning point in my career when I realized I could rely on a team. That just opens up so many things that you can actually do on set.
Yeah. Having the team, I have so much appreciation and respect for every single crew member I have ever hired because I’m a very firm believer that I could not do what I do if it wasn’t for them because I was in that position once. Really, it’s not just about the photographer. It takes a village. It really does. But I also think knowing what I know because of the time that I spent assisting allowed me the brain space to be creative. Otherwise I would have been so caught up with the logistics of everything, but I got there, and I knew exactly what I had to do logistically, so it opened me up to being able to get the best shot that I could get creatively for myself.
What do you think we can learn about you from the choices that you’ve made here?
I think that the biggest thing is I hope at least that you can clearly see how much I respect my subjects and how much I respect the women that end up in front of my lenses. This is the most I’ve ever looked at this photo, this hour that I’ve spent chatting with you. She looks so powerful, and that’s the way I want to feel, you know, in my own life. And it’s the way that I want the people that I photograph to feel because I think that power and feeling confident and secure in yourself is something that is so easily taken away by things outside of your control a lot of the times, and it takes a lot to keep yourself grounded, and I find myself very swayed very often by things that aren’t in my control. There’s something really reassuring about how strong she looks in this. It is a reflection of how I would like myself to feel a lot of the time when I don’t.
What do you think Jingyu 10 years ago would have to say about this photo?
Aw, so much. Wow, that was when I was 16. I’m 26 now. I was a very lost kid. I was shooting by the time I was 16 already, but it was silly portraits of my friends in some trees in my backyard, and that was kind of what I was doing at that time. I did not think I was going to be a photographer. I grew up as a daughter of Chinese immigrants, so photo was out of the question. I was gonna have a stable job in something that had room for growth. So yeah, as a kid that was lost and had very little direction and was just going with the thing that she thought she was supposed to be doing, I think that she would be very proud of where I am now.
What have you learned that’s given you the instinct to take this photo?
You mean creatively or technically or both?
Anything.
I think that I’ve learned more than anything to take my time. In order to create this picture, I think it requires a level of patience that I would not have had a couple of years ago — to try different things and try different ways of lighting things. They gave us three hours prior to her physically being on my set ready to take the photos. I had three hours to pre-light, and I used every single minute of it, slowly trying every single thing that I thought might be interesting and allowing myself that patience to try all of those things.
To close our conversation, what’s something unrelated to photography that’s been feeding you creatively lately?
I love cooking. Anyone who follows me on Instagram knows this already. I have a whole little highlight on it for all of my fun food adventures. I have been spending the winter making pasta. Tons of pasta. Different types of pasta. I have the little scale, the fluted wheel cutter. It’s really important to me to have things outside of my job — hobbies — because this used to be my hobby, and now it’s my career. So food is really fun for me. I have such a good time with it.
Interviewed on January 20, 2022.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)
Links:
Jingyu Lin
Time: “The Engineer Who Made Electric Vehicles Palatable for the Pickup-Truck Set”