Joey L is a photographer of the modern age. He doesn’t really care much about film tools, like light meters-why should he? He can see the image when he takes it and judge for himself if it is too dark or too light. At the same time, he has a serious fondness for the lighting styles of the old Hollywood Masters like Sinclair Bull and George Hurrell. The cover of Photographing Shadow and Light has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood glamour shot, bright highlights and dark shadows and an image that tells a story.
As a portrait photographer I have usually worked with three or four lights-the lighting has often been pretty flat and the subjects have often been unwilling. But from time to time I try my hand at going beyond the limits of my equipment and my subjects. I have a handful of lighting techniques that I like to use to get my own Hollywood lighting shot, but they are nothing like the shots created by Joey L.
Photographing Shadow and Light is a picture book with a few paragraphs of text here and there to break up the subject matter. Joey L talks about his vision and how he goes about under-exposing the sky in the African sun or how many lights he uses when photographing 50 Cent or the Jonas Brothers. His edgy and stylized portraits make him the go-to guy for the up and coming and soon forgotten crowd. His ultimate current hip status had to be when he shot the movie poster for Twilight-a gig he thought about turning down. Hmm, really?
I like the look of most of his work, he’s good at what he does, as he says somewhere near the front of the book. He’s also nice enough to offer lighting diagrams with many of his sample images that give you an idea as to how the image was created. Many of images follow the same general plan, use the largest light source you can find and then use a half dozen or so smaller lights to bring out the details. This is part of the reason his commercial work looks so much like old Hollywood-they loved their lights as well. Like many masters of light and shadow, he wants to get his images straight out of the camera and do as little post processing as possible.
Some of his images are flat out stunning and others look like random grab shots. His portraits of Holy Men and his Cradle of Mankind series images left me cold. Yeah he did some interesting tricks with the lighting, but the images are often just weird. It’s also a bit hard not be jealous of a young man who takes photos of movie stars and does the cast photos for TV Shows-and then spends his free time wandering around the world doing his personal work.
In the end Joey L isn’t doing anything all that new or different-it really has all been done before-but I still like a lot of his work. Photographing Shadow and Light: Inside the Dramatic Lighting Techniques and Creative Vision of Portrait Photographer Joey L.
