After photographing Julian Koenig, I started a list of other people I’d like to photograph. I wrote up a pitch with some of my work attached. I reached out to people in any way I could think of (mostly I was emailing management). My goal was to assure them that allowing me to take up 20 minutes of their day wouldn't be a complete waste of time. There could even be some value in these photographs for them. Assuming they liked the portraits, I would make them available to use for press or whatever came up. Influential people need photographs of themselves for things.
As a kid, I went through a graffiti phase. Aside from a few marker tags and one terrible piece in a train tunnel, the phase never really developed beyond my algebra notebook, but it did lead to me and my friends watching the movie Wild Style a dozen or so times. The star of Wild Style is NYC graffiti legend, Lee Quinones. That put Lee on my list for The Influence Project. I explained my project to his assistant(?), she said she’d run it by him, and thankfully he agreed to let me come out to his studio in Brooklyn and shoot some portraits. It was pretty great. I got to see a preview of what he was working on and his paint collection. Being in an artist’s studio is always pretty thrilling for me, I like to see where the art gets made.
So I was 2 for 2! A pretty good start, I began to think this was going to come together pretty easily. I was wrong. I soon learned that I’d just been fortunate (lucky) in my first two selections. One of whom was willing to cooperate at the urging of his daughter, the other (I assume) having been an artist his entire life, was a little more willing to help someone out with a project like this.
I continued to reach out to people who I thought would fit in with the series and who I wanted to meet and photograph. Unfortunately, I started getting a lot of people saying they were too busy, or more often I’d get no response at all. For about 2 years I spent my time between commercial jobs trying to add to the list, but I just couldn’t get access. I didn’t have an established publication or a big enough name to get people willing to participate. I don’t remember when it happened exactly, but at some point, I simply stopped trying to find people, and I moved on to other projects, some of which would also fail.
I wonder if the people I did shoot ever wonder what happened to the project. I think it’s safe to say they forgot about it as soon as I left. I did learn some things and met some amazing people (Mary Ellen Mark!), but the best thing to come of it was probably Sarah Koenig telling me she had my portrait of her dad hanging in her office.
Travis
While writing this I was listening to:
It's a really great idea, even just the process of making the list up is worth doing, one of those 3am and I can't sleep again mental games. 🧠📷