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.
That is the kind of commission I enjoy most. A single headshot is a solved problem. A body of work that has to hold together across a website, a fund page, a foundation, a press request and a speaking bio is a different discipline, and it asks for a different way of lighting.
Lit like a scene
This was a cinematic build. Not one light shaping a face, but a set of sources doing separate jobs, balanced against each other the way a cinematographer balances a shot.
The key sits close and slightly off axis, and it does the modelling. Behind and to the side, a hard edge light lifts the shoulder line and the crown of the head away from the background so the figure sits in the frame rather than on it. The background is lit independently, which is what allows the tone behind him to change from cool grey to warm ivory to deep crimson without the exposure on his face moving at all. Fill is kept low and deliberate. The shadow side stays rich and holds detail, but it stays a shadow.
The result is depth rather than flatness. Three planes with air between them. It is the difference between a portrait that describes a face and one that puts a man in a space.
Four setups
Navy suit and red tie first, against grey and then against ivory. This is the load-bearing image, the frame that ends up on the About page, in the conference programme and next to the byline. Marvin holds a level gaze without stiffening, which is rarer than people assume. The folded-arm variants gave us a warmer version for the pages where authority is already established and something more human is wanted.
Grey suit and black shirt second, and here we changed the whole approach. The studio has a run of tall black-framed windows on the north side, and photographing into that available light with a controlled negative fill produced the most distinctive frames of the day. Low key, architectural, closer to a film still than to a portrait sitting. We also shot the same tailoring on white against a lit background, and full length against the wall with hands in pockets, for the moments when the brief calls for scale rather than intimacy.
Black tie third. Grey for one set, crimson for another. The dinner jacket portrait is having a quiet return among people who host, chair and receive. Against the deep red, with the edge light doing the separating and the background gelled and lit on its own, the reference is unmistakable and entirely intentional. It is the closest a modern sitting comes to a state portrait, made with the tools of a film set.
A final sequence away from tailoring closed the day, which I mention only because it demonstrates the point. Same room, same grammar of light, same face. The register changes because the sitter changes what he is doing.
Why the suite matters
Most people commission a headshot when they need one. The result is a photographic record that jumps in age, weight, colour and quality every eighteen months, assembled by four different photographers with four different ideas about what the person looks like.
A sitting like Marvin's produces something else. Every image in the set was made in the same afternoon with the same lighting logic, so the navy portrait, the window frame and the black tie picture read as one person seen properly rather than three approximations. It is how institutional portraiture has always worked, and it is why the National Portrait Gallery holds sittings rather than headshots.
Marvin's selections are now with him. The retouching is mine, done in-house, one frame at a time.
Los Angeles, New York and London
The Los Angeles studio is at 411 S Main Street in the historic core downtown. Sittings run there through most of the year.
New York and London operate on scheduled visits rather than continuously. The New York studio is on 8th Avenue in the garment district, and the London studio is at 2 Bleeding Heart Yard in Farringdon. Dates are released in blocks and they fill quickly, so if a portrait is needed in either city it is worth writing early.
Enquiries for all three cities go to Alexandra Lewis, who handles scheduling and will confirm availability, session length and what a sitting includes.
