There is a particular kind of face the camera waits for. Not the arranged one, not the face that performs readiness the moment a lens appears, but the one that carries a thought behind the eyes and lets you watch it move. Michael DelaFlor brought exactly that into my New York studio, and it made the work a pleasure.
I have spent twenty-three years photographing portraits in the tradition of the Old Masters — Holbein, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Caravaggio — and I approach an actor's headshot with the same seriousness I bring to a sitter destined for a national collection. A headshot is not a passport photograph with better lighting. For an actor it is a working tool, the first audition before the audition, the single frame a casting director holds against a role. It deserves to be made, not manufactured.
The sitter
Michael is a Houston-born, New York–based actor, writer, and director, and he arrives with the kind of training that shows in front of a camera. He is a graduate of the two-year Meisner program at The William Esper Studio and holds a BA in Dramatic Literature, Theatre and Cinema History from NYU. He founded the immersive theatre company UPDATE in 2018 and, during the lockdown years, the interdisciplinary collective 26B. His one-act The Bear Tax premiered off-Broadway at the Soho Playhouse, and his short film Leo, which he wrote and directed, screened at the Chelsea Film Festival. That range — performer, playwright, director — sits in the face. He knows what a frame is for.
Three looks, two centuries apart
We built the session around three distinct registers, because a working actor needs breadth on the reel, not a single note repeated.
The first is contemporary and editorial: a heather-red tee against a cool charcoal ground, clean and direct, the sort of frame that reads well for grounded, present-day casting — the friend, the colleague, the man in the room. The light is honest and modern.
The other two step back a couple of centuries. Against a mottled ochre wall — the kind of painterly ground that does half the storytelling on its own — I lit Michael in the warm, low-key key I return to again and again. Here the influence is unmistakable: the fall of light across the cheekbone, the shadow reclaiming the jaw, a stillness borrowed from portraiture that predates photography entirely. These are the frames that say leading man with interior life rather than available for commercials, and they give a casting director something rarer to hold.
Why New York actors keep coming to the studio
Actors travel across Manhattan for a headshot that looks like a portrait because the market is crowded and the difference is visible in three seconds. Anyone can produce a sharp, evenly lit file. Fewer photographers can make a frame that a casting director actually pauses on — one with mood, restraint, and a sense that a real person is looking back. That is the whole game, and it is the part I care about most.
The New York studio sits in Midtown Manhattan at 580 8th Avenue, on the 20th floor — a short walk from the theatre district and easy to reach for a between-audition sitting. I work in London and Los Angeles as well, but the New York room has become a home for actor portraiture, and sessions like Michael's are the reason.
