My first theatrical production job was to create images for the Maltz Jupiter Theatre production of Newsies. As a longtime fan of this remarkable show and this incredible theatre, it was a wonderful introduction into the world of theatrical photography.
Though if we think back, my first theatre production photography job began in Lawrenceville, Georgia, in my high school theatre. It's funny, looking back on the things in our lives that led us to the places we are now. If you told teenage me, standing in the dark in a high school theatre, camera in hand, that I would be later commissioned to photograph press images for a professional theatre...well, let's say I probably wouldn't have believed you.
Flash forward a few years to my first trip to New York ever. I was with that same high school theatre group, and we saw a few shows on that week that we spent in Times Square. While most of my classmates were entranced with the hustle and bustle of this busy neighborhood, I was busy staring at production photos plastered on the sides of Broadway theatres.
Taking those pictures is someone's job, I remember thinking. I want that someone, someday, to be me.
Hop ahead a few years later, and I'm still in the theatre, still with a camera in my hand. I went to college to obtain a BFA in Theatre, acting and dancing my way through that tiny black box theatre for four years. I have pictures in a black scrapbook, crumpled from many a moving box, that I took of those collegiate productions.
That will be me one day. One day.
The last summer of college I moved to New York to intern for the Roundabout Theatre Company. My summer at RTC taught me a lot about the business of theatre, and a lot about productions and the importance of the press images taken of each show.
That will be me one day. One day.
I graduated. Moved to New York. Moved to Florida. Got married. Had a family. Theatre was still an active part of my life, but it was community theatre that I found myself photographing, so far from New York. I loved the work I did for the Tallahassee Little Theatre and with the students at Florida State University, but those press images, those theatre shoots, they all felt further away than ever.
In 2008 I ended up back in New York, and now I am taking pictures of the very things that I dreamed of as a child. Dance. Theatre. The vibrant swell of an orchestra, the precise point of a dancer's arched foot, the breathless moment before a show crashes into being, taking your mind away for hours on end. It is a huge honor to document these shows, for now, for press, and for the future.
That day is now, and it's finally me. And I'd love to work with you. I'd love to tell the story of your show, your performers, your dancers, your world. Get in touch, won't you? I'd love to hear from you.
