May 2008

Matthew Jordan Smith: Shooting Stars

Matthew Jordan Smith is a photographer who isn’t afraid of change. He has moved around the US to pursue his career and moved with ease, and his camera, between the worlds of fashion, advertising and celebrity. John McDermott spoke to him about how his childhood love of photography has grown into a hugely successful career.

Oprah Winfrey is the most respected and, arguably, the most powerful, woman in the United States. When a magazine wants to do a cover story on the media mogul and queen of American daytime television it is she, not the magazine, who has the final word on the choice of a photographer. The list of shooters acceptable to Oprah isn’t a long one, but when the magazine proposes Los Angeles-based celebrity portrait and fashion specialist Matthew Jordan Smith her approval is assured.

Supermodels Tyra Banks and Iman pictured together.

Matthew has worked successfully with Oprah Winfrey at various times over the past 14 years. As it happens, he was on the phone with Oprah’s ‘people’, working out the details of an upcoming cover shoot in Chicago, when contacted for this CPN profile.

These days Matthew, one of Microsoft’s elite ‘Icons of Imaging’ , is recognized for making supermodels, like Tyra Banks and Iman, and actors, like Samuel L. Jackson, Halle Berry, Winona Ryder and Vanessa Williams, look their best. But his initial goal was rather different. He wanted to shoot on the sidelines at major sporting events for Sports Illustrated. Matthew’s father was a keen amateur photographer and as a boy growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, his dad’s camera and pictures fascinated him. His father let him use the camera and, like his father, Matthew eventually became a dedicated hobbyist.

Reading A Choice of Weapons, the biography of the great Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks, inspired him. But it never occurred to Matthew to consider a career in photography until he was challenged to do so by a high school counsellor who noticed that he nearly always carried a camera. That counsellor later arranged for a working photojournalist to give a talk at the school and, after hearing the photographer speak, Smith made the decision to go to the Art Institute of Atlanta to earn a degree in photography. His parents had been hoping he would stick closer to home and attend the University of South Carolina to study something “more practical”. But they ultimately gave their blessing to Matthew’s pursuit of a career in photography.

Model Vivian Leigh pictured in a fashion shoot.

Monika.

“When I first got to the Art Institute” Smith recalls, “I was planning on becoming a sports photographer. My dream was to shoot for Sports Illustrated.” But that soon changed. “I had one professor” he continues, “who talked to us about the work of people like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Horst P. Horst. He also introduced me to magazines like Vogue and Zoom. The more I learned about fashion photography and how it was all about having the control to be able to create your own vision and tell your story about how you see fashion, beauty and people, the more I came to realize that was really what I wanted to do. And getting paid to shoot beautiful women, well that appealed to me too.”

Matthew adds: “Mostly it was about being free to project your thoughts and feelings about how something should look on everything you shoot, rather than just documenting what’s happening. Even now that’s what I love most about what I do, having a voice that allows me to share with the world how I feel - about fashion, about women, about the year 2008 or the all places I get to visit in my work.”

Actress Halle Berry was one of Matthew’s first celebrity shoots for Essence magazine.

The professor who inspired Matthew’s interest in fashion photography ultimately encouraged him to make another crucial decision - to leave school early and move to New York. “He told me that all the best fashion photographers were either in Europe or New York and that if I wanted to make it in fashion that was where I needed to be.” So Smith followed the time-honoured path of working as an assistant to a series of established New York photographers while living very frugally, learning as much as he could and saving money to launch his own career. He started out shooting whatever was available and eventually began scoring some editorial work.

An important early decision was his choice of a camera system. “When I made my first investment in a 35mm system” he points out, “I was working every day as an assistant in New York and everybody either had Nikon or Canon. That was it. One day I’d be working with a photographer shooting a girl on the beach with a long lens with Nikon, the next job I would be doing the same thing, only with Canon. I had that direct comparison every day under all different working conditions, so when it came time to spend my own money there was no question in my mind. I went with Canon and have shot Canon ever since.”

One of his early editorial clients, the monthly glossy magazine Essence, provided what was to be Matthew’s big break. Another photographer had been assigned to do a cover story on an up and coming young actress named Halle Berry.

The photographer initially assigned to the story had to cancel on short notice and Essence’s director of photography, having been impressed by Matthew’s seriousness and the quality of his work up to that point, decided to entrust him with his first cover shoot for the magazine.

“I was nervous, of course,” Matthew recalls. “Even if she wasn’t yet the superstar she is now, she was still, you know, Halle Berry! But the photo editor just told me to relax and go do what I’d been for them doing up till then and that everything would be fine. I ended up having a ball.” And doing many more covers in the years since for Essence and other magazines like People, Savoy, Mademoiselle, Ebony and InStyle.

Actor Don Cheadle on the beach with one of his children.

Smith is especially proud of the fact that many of his subjects have become his friends. “For me,” he emphasizes, “it’s all about the relationship, not only about this shoot but about the ones you will hopefully be doing with the same person in the years to come. I’ve been fortunate in that most of my subjects seem to like me. And that makes it much easier when you work together in the future. It’s basically a lot more relaxed, more like getting together and shooting your friends. A lot of my jobs are that way now.” One frequent subject who has become a good friend is supermodel Banks, now retired from the fashion runway but emulating media entrepreneur Winfrey as the producer and hostess of her own television programmes, for which Matthew has been a frequent guest and contributor.

Change has been a constant in Matthew’s career. Having firmly established himself as one of America’s top portrait and fashion photographers over a dozen years in the ultra-competitive New York market, he moved to Los Angeles two years ago in search of new challenges. His subjects are frequently big names from the world of entertainment and his current studio is located right in the middle of Hollywood. There he continues to shoot for the covers of major magazines but also, increasingly, for a range of clients looking to bring his special touch with lighting and composition to their advertising campaigns.

Singer and actress Queen Latifah.

The decision to move to LA has proven to be a good one. Another recent decision, to do a lot more of his high profile work with the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, is also working out well. Matthew, like most photographers in his specialty, has relied heavily on medium format cameras in the past, first with transparency film and more recently with the use of digital backs. But according to Matthew the latest incarnation of the EOS-1Ds is a breakthrough. “It’s all I’ve been using in the studio lately. It is truly amazing, a mind-blowing camera,” Matthew states emphatically. “I was convinced when I looked at the first files I shot with it.”

Prior to this Matthew recalls: “Pre-digital, if I had a job on location, shooting a magazine layout in the Caribbean, I would always shoot it on 35mm. But if I were shooting a magazine cover in the studio, or an advertising campaign that was going to be used as a billboard on Broadway or Hollywood Boulevard, I’d shoot medium format. The EOS-1Ds Mark III has changed the game in a lot ways. I’m using 35mm digital now in areas where I never would have before. Now I have the clarity and the file size that rivals medium format. But with the EOS-1Ds Mark III you also get back a certain spontaneity that you just can’t get working with medium format.”

He enthuses: “For the first time ever I can be running alongside a model on a beach, getting some amazing shots but also get the file size of a medium format back. With medium format you gain file size but you lose that spontaneity, you’re always waiting on the camera or waiting on the computer. With 35mm you’re not waiting anymore. My entire career has been about capturing the moment, so this is an extremely important development to me. I’m shooting again like I did back in the old days of 35mm film!”

Stylish portrait based on eye contact.

Matthew continues: “In the beginning I was wary of digital, not because of the images but because of the process itself. We were all learning it as we went along and suddenly you’re on a set with a monitor and the client can see things before you’re ready to show them, before you’ve had a chance to do any processing or post-production work. In the old days if you didn’t like a Polaroid you just tore it up and didn’t show it to anyone. With digital you can’t do that. We’ve not only had to teach ourselves but we’ve also had to educate clients, and also the subjects, about the digital process so that they don’t go running to look at the monitor after every exposure.”

Smith’s years of experience and technical mastery served him well when it came to making his own transition from film-based cameras to shooting with digital SLRs. In particular the prior need to be so exact with exposures when using slide film: “My background shooting film – particularly unforgiving transparency film, where you really need to be very precise and get everything right at the moment of exposure - has really helped me with digital. We used to test, test and test film emulsions. Now we test cameras and lenses and lighting, constantly looking for the right combination to get the best digital file possible.”

One of Matthew’s beauty images.

Smith readily admits that the fashion photography business can be fickle, something he’s learned from first-hand experience. “Editors, art directors and picture editors, at magazines, who like your work and hire you all come and go,” he explains. “Usually when that happens you end up not shooting for that particular magazine anymore because the new people who come in want to bring their own favourite photographers along with them.”

Matthew explains: “After the Halle Berry cover I shot covers for Essence for the next ten years. Then there was a change at the magazine and for the next five years I didn’t do any more. But recently they’ve ‘rediscovered’ me and now I’ve shot five of their last six covers! You’ve always got to be thinking about marketing and put yourself out there so that people see your name and your work all the time. It’s a continuous process and you’re always brand new to somebody. So editorial work is essential in that regard, more important than anything else.”

He adds: “When I was assisting in New York I would see a famous photographer like Albert Watson shooting an editorial job for a little low-budget magazine like Paper and wonder why he would do that. But now I get it. Editorial is THE best way to market yourself and it’s the only way to be able to shoot the things you really want to shoot, the way you want to shoot them, and have people looking at your style all the time. People I haven’t heard from in a long time, for example, are calling me for assignments again because they saw those five covers!”

A striking portrait of actor Christian Slater.

Over the years Matthew has developed a number of unique lighting techniques - he says he frequently uses mirrors as reflectors, for example - that have led to his being invited to produce a popular instructional DVD on lighting. “The DVD came about as a result of my being inundated with requests to teach classes on lighting or from people who want to come to the studio and observe during a shoot,” according to Matthew. Not surprisingly, given his enthusiasm for the camera, all the shoots for the DVD were done with the EOS-1Ds Mark III. As a result of the DVD’s success he’s recently been engaged to do a 25-city lecture tour that has been playing to sold-out audiences around the United States.

An achievement of which Matthew is particularly proud is the publication of his first book, Sepia Dreams, in 2001. “As a boy, Gordon Parks’ book inspired me,” he confides, “and I wanted to do a book that might inspire other people. But I didn’t want it to be about me. I decided to focus on 50 people, black celebrities, telling their own stories about how they overcame obstacles to achieve their dreams.” Smith started by asking people he knew, mostly celebrities he had photographed on assignment, if they would agree to be photographed and interviewed.

On the advice of a knowledgeable friend, he designed what looked like an elegant party invitation and sent it out to the people he hoped to include. It worked. “I had never done a book before and wasn’t really sure how to go about it,” he recalls, “so, I just did it. Eventually I got a literary agent and we presented our book proposal, based on what I had done up to that point, to 20 publishers. Seven of them bid on it and we ended up getting a six-figure deal with St. Martin’s Press.”

Matthew got to photograph one of his main inspirations, Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks, for this image from the book Sepia Dreams.

Matthew admits: “I fell in love with the whole book, not only doing the photographs, but also doing interviewing people who are talking about something they are passionate about. Most of them are used to doing interviews when they have a project to promote - a film or a record, for example. But this was different. It was not about PR. And it very often got emotional and intimate as they talked about things that were very personal to them. We all have our legacy to leave and in that respect a book is very different from a magazine story. A book has a long life and people will hopefully remember it forever.”

Matthew is now working on his third book, this time a collection of images he started doing after he moved to Los Angeles. “I had such a good time working on the first book that it got me hooked,” he admits. “But to be honest, this one started out as a way to meet people and not be bored when I first got to California, it wasn’t just about work.” All he will say about the pictures is that they are portraits of 100 people, all shot in the same way, on film with what he calls an “untraditional” camera.

Something Matthew takes very seriously is his position as a high-profile African-American photographer. “You can count the black photographers on one hand,” he explains.

Actor Samuel L. Jackson.

“It’s frustrating when people look at your colour first or categorize you as ‘the guy who shoots black women’. One of my first big location jobs was a large production on an island. The client contact person showed up, walked past me and went straight to my assistant, a white guy, to introduce herself because she assumed he had to be the photographer!

Matthew adds: “It’s something that has happened quite a bit. Even Whitney Houston did it on a shoot once. She assumed the photographer wouldn’t be black! I don’t let it consume me. I know I can shoot beautiful pictures of people of all races, but if people want to pigeon hole me as a ‘black photographer’, that’s their problem. I don’t let it bother me. I love what I do, I’m having a great career and I’ve got a lot of goals I want to achieve. I’m very blessed because I can make a living doing what I love.”

Actresses (from left to right) Gabrielle Union, Sanaa Lathan and Nia Long.

Matthew Jordan Smith is in the middle of a distinguished and evolving career. And his outlook on the future is refreshingly upbeat. “Change is scary,” he admits, “but it’s a wonderful thing because it means you’re reinventing yourself. Whenever I’ve made a big move - from South Carolina to Atlanta, from Atlanta to New York, from New York to LA - I’ve always come out on top. Whenever you take a chance and do something you’re scared to do you always grow in a positive way.” And, in Matthew’s case, he has ended up climbing the career ladder even higher.

Technical: Matthew Jordan Smith’s equipment:

Cameras:
1 x EOS-1Ds Mark III
1 x EOS-1D Mark II N

Lenses:
1 x EF28mm f/1.8 USM
1 x EF50mm f/1.2 L USM
1 x EF80-200mm f/2.8L
1 x EF85mm f/1.2 L II USM
1 x EF100mm f/2.8 Macro USM

Accessories:
PocketWizards
Expo Disc
Epson P-3000 viewer
Sekonic L-758dr meter
8x Sandisk Extreme III CF cards
Photoflex LiteDisc
Card reader
2x black sharpies
The Alchemist
Gum

Matthew Jordan Smith: Shooting Stars

Matthew Jordan Smith

EOS-1Ds Mark III product info