Bob Johnston, Executive Portraits, Los Angeles

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Bob Johnston, Executive Portraits, Los Angeles

Bob Johnston sat for me in Los Angeles last month. He is the founder and chief executive of Exec.org, and his working life is built on introductions: putting a chief executive in front of the person who can move the thing along, a company in front of capital, a board in front of the director it did not know it needed. He also sits as an independent director and on audit committees, which is a different discipline again, and a quieter one.

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Marvin Jones II at the Los Angeles studio

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Marvin Jones II at the Los Angeles studio

Marvin Jones II came to the Main Street studio in downtown Los Angeles for a set of portraits to carry his personal platform, his family office and the ventures that sit beneath both. He is an entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, and he arrived with a clear brief. The pictures had to work as a suite. Several registers, one man, and none of it looking like a corporate headshot.

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If I Can Photograph a King, a Prince, a General, a Prime Minister and a Mayor, I Can Photograph Your CEO

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If I Can Photograph a King, a Prince, a General, a Prime Minister and a Mayor, I Can Photograph Your CEO

There is a question every marketing director eventually asks me, usually in the third or fourth email, usually phrased carefully. It is some version of: can you handle our chairman?

What they mean is: he has forty minutes, he does not enjoy being photographed, he has approval over the final image, and the last three attempts were quietly shelved. They are not asking about my lighting. They are asking whether I will make the situation worse.

The honest answer is a list of names.

The people who taught me to work in twenty minutes

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Annual Report Portraits

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Annual Report Portraits

An annual report portrait has to survive being printed at size, sitting next to eleven others, and being looked at by people deciding whether to trust the company. An ordinary headshot has to survive being three centimetres wide on a website. They are different objects and the difference shows.

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Why Every Leadership Page Looks the Same

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Why Every Leadership Page Looks the Same

Open twenty corporate leadership pages and you will see the same photograph twenty times. Grey background or white. Even light, no shadow anywhere. A slight turn of the shoulders. An expression somewhere between welcome and apology. The subjects differ; the portraits do not.

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Photographing Ray Dalio

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Photographing Ray Dalio

Some sitters arrive having decided in advance what a photograph is for. Ray Dalio is one of them.

He is a man who has spent decades being listened to carefully, and who has written at length about how thinking should be done. That produces a particular problem for a portraitist, and it is not the one people assume. The difficulty is not reticence. It is fluency. A person accustomed to explaining themselves clearly will keep explaining, and a face that is mid-explanation is a face performing a function rather than occupying itself.

What I wanted was the pause before the sentence.

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