The LA Times sent me to photograph Christin Evans, who owns The Booksmith on Haight Street in San Francisco, for a story on how rising health premiums are squeezing small businesses. Her staff’s premiums jumped 17 percent this year.
A bookstore is a gift of a location. Books floor to ceiling, warm light, color everywhere. I shot the clean environmental portrait first, Christin seated among the shelves, and I had a solid, publishable frame in the bag.
But the safe shot and the memorable shot are rarely the same thing. The story was about words and numbers, premiums, costs, and fine print, and I was standing in a room made entirely of pages. So I pulled a copy of the New Yorker off a shelf, wrapped it around the front of my lens, and held it there with a rubber band.
Then I shot Christin straight through the tunnel of open pages. The printed text blurs into a swirl around the frame, she stays sharp in the center, and the whole portrait gets framed by the exact thing the scene is built on: words on a page.
That is the frame the LA Times ran, as the lead image. You can read the story here.
Fifteen years shooting for the wire taught me the shot nobody else walked away with is usually the one worth chasing. Sometimes you build it out of whatever is on the shelf, a magazine and a rubber band included.