Michael Cinquino, photographer |
Within minutes of meeting one another, we were naked. He's the photographer for the upcoming book, Asana Exposed by ISIS Phoenix. I love the images we created, and it was only a test shoot -- that's saying a lot. I appreciate his feedback on the development of my male nude series, we've shared self-portraits and are overdue for a Hapkido class. It was hot and humid day and thankfully his Williamsburg studio was air-conditioned when we got together on Friday.
~ ~ ~
I’m Michael Cinquino, I’m a photographer here in New
York. I live in Brooklyn. I
shoot just about anything with people. The frequency I would say is headshots
first, then fashion, portraits and then also events and weddings. I work mostly
in the consumer market. I’ve started to move more towards editorial and
publications in the last 6 months to a year.
How many years have
you been doing this?
It’ll be 3 years July 7 or something like that.
Do you have an image
that you’ve captured or one that you saw that let you know, "I want to be a photographer"?
I don’t know if there was a single image. I will say though
that I’m most attracted to the face. I love doing actor headshots. Even with models or whomever, I’m most attracted to the face
because there’s so much to it. I like to make and like to see compelling
images; images that I look at and I instantly have some sort of visceral
response to.
As of this interview,
what’s the last photo you’ve taken?
The last photo I took was a headshot of an actress who hired
me to do headshots this week. I think I shot her on Tuesday.
Why headshots? Why
actors?
Well, I was an actor before I was a photographer. My
education’s in acting, I got out of the Navy a long time ago, I went right to
undergrad, in undergrad I auditioned to be in a play, I got cast. The best way
I can put it was on opening night I did something on stage, everybody laughed,
they really loved it— it was cocaine being injected into my heart. I loved
certain parts about acting, I didn’t love all of it. Photography was the first
thing I came to in my life that gave me energy, that the more I did it the more
I wanted to do it and I do it tirelessly. Headshots just made sense because I
was an actor, I knew the headshot business, I had had my headshots taken 3 or 4
times before that and it was just something I found attractive so I dove in to
headshots.
Is most of your
personal work, nude photography or erotic?
I would totally have to agree with that. Fortunately I’m busy enough with
client stuff that I don’t have as much time as I did a year ago to
do personal stuff but when I do do personal work, it’s usually some sort of
nude work.
Nude. But erotic at
all?
I would ask you how you define erotic.
It’s different for
everybody. Do you feel it’s erotic?
I usually take nude portraits. We’ll put it that way. The
work that I do, the subject is, yes, naked, but I also aim to capture
personality in it. Whereas I feel like some other kinds of work, take fine art
nudes for example, they’re absent of personality because they’re bodyscapes;
you're doing lighting and shape of the body. For me, I wanna see this girl naked
and I also wanna see what her personality is and I also want her to be unguarded
from a personal sense.
OK, so talk to me
about your book, your project.
Naked Girls on Polaroid, it’s called. It’s literal, I
know. That’s what it is. I’ll give you the snapshot of how I got there. About a
year and a half into [photography], I met up for coffee with Dean Lavery.
He shoots mostly film. I admired his work and I wanted to talk to him. He asked
me if I ever shot film and I said no and he said, “If you wanna be a great
photographer you have to learn how to shoot medium format film.” So I got a
Bronica 120 film camera and I started shooting medium format film and he was
100 percent right. I only had 16 shots on a roll of film where with digital as
a young photographer, I was shooting like 1000 shots of your face.
Then I met George Pitts, whose work is phenomenal. You wanna talk about erotic work, if
you’re reading this interview, look up George Pitts, find his work, this guy’s
amazing. I did some work with a model, she knew George and she introduced me and I said, “hey man, if you ever need an assistant please call me”, and
he did. He’s doing a book himself and needed an assistant and the model was in Bethesda,
Maryland. So what happened was we drove
down, just George and I and he was just the coolest guy in the world and it was
a master class. I got to see what he was doing and when he shot down there he
had this Polaroid 600SE camera, I’d never ever seen before, this huge hunking
thing and I saw the photos that were coming out and they were beautiful. He
uses it for the most part to proof his images before he puts them on film.
Two months
later I got this Polaroid SE camera and I started shooting on it. Like film, I
noticed, for me at least, that there’s a humanness to people on film that
digital still doesn’t have. Well, I was looking for a new project at the
beginning of this year and I said to myself well I wanna do something with the
resources that I have on hand, and I thought about where I’d come from in
photography which is, I started shooting nudes, and I thought about the Polaroid
camera. I set out with a goal to make a book of nudes just on Polaroids. And I
had, I think like 30 women volunteer and it was important for me to use, not
models, not professionals… I had a finance executive, I have an acupuncturist,
an anthropologist, 2 yoga teachers, elementary school teachers and these girls
all just volunteered for the book. I did 25 women and I did 4 photos a piece.
And it’s really a book of nude portraits on Polaroids. And I’m really
proud of it and it just came out. And it’s for sale on Amazon. What’s
interesting to me is the different reasons these women would model for the book.
For instance, one of the girls in the book had just lost 25 pounds—she’s not a
nude model, she just kinda wanted to …
Commemorate that.
Exactly! And she did. And we got done shooting and she was
visibly on cloud 9. Then I had her over I think a week ago to show her a copy
of the book and she turned to herself in the book and she started crying. And I
said I hope these are tears of joy and she’s like they are, this is so amazing.
And some other girls are just like, “Hey, I like being naked. I wanna be in the
book.”
So the book, it's
Polaroid-based. You fell in love with that camera, but the question of the day:
Canon vs Nikon?
The camera I learned on was a Nikon D70. I learned on that
camera so I stayed with that. All the Nikon shooters in the world are gonna
kill me but I just bought a Canon 5D Mark II. The main reason for that is that
I’m including videography, cinematography in my work now. A lot of
photographers would agree that this is the future and you have to include some
of this in your work if you wanna continue working and I really love it. And
with my acting background, I love movies and it just makes sense for me as
well. So I’m gonna give you my snapshot. For Nikon I find that the build
quality of the camera seems a little bit more solid than Canon. The controls
are on the outside of the camera which I like so you can move very quickly.
Canon things are little bit more buried in menus and they’re not as much on the
outside but I will also say that there is a film quality to the 5D Mark II that
it’s photos have that I really, really, really like. So actually I don’t favor
either cause I shoot Canon, I shoot Nikon, I have a Mamiya film camera, I shoot
Polaroid – I shoot whatever the situation calls for.
In your commissioned
work, any client pet peeves?
Yeah, not trusting yourself and not trusting me is the
fastest way to not get good photos. I’ll tell you right now, you asked me
before the last photo I took was of this girl doing headshots. The session went
phenomenal. Outstanding. Now this is a girl who’s already shot headshots with
some of the best names in New York,
people that charge 1100 dollars a session. She would admit that she loved my
work more than anybody’s and her headshots came out awesome. For me, for an
actress or an actor in a headshot session, my main goal is to get you work. For
her the session went really, really well and I asked her why she thought that
was and she said, “I was a little late, I was kinda nervous but I trusted you
and I trusted that the session would go well.” That is a recipe for a great
session. Having someone in here that doesn’t trust me and/or doesn’t trust
themselves, you’re not gonna have as good a session. I can win people over and
I’m an excellent coach but it really helps me when you trust me and you trust
yourself… yeah, that’s my pet peeve.
How do you maintain a
balance between your commercial and personal work?
I have to say I love my commercial and client work just as
much as I love my personal work so that’s where the balance is. I don’t feel
like, “oh shit, I gotta do this, I gotta do another headshot session”, I’m like,
“yes, I get to do another headshot session”, so that’s exciting. Sometimes
though, the balance for me comes in hey I just wanna take some photos and
experiment and have some fun without having to worry about delivering for this
client. For the sake of the art, for maybe the sake of experimentation or just
to create something cool or whatever, that is really the balance for me.
What is your favorite
word, in any language, and why?
My favorite word is YES. It’s the first thing that came to
mind and I feel like there might be another one but, yes, I feel like when you
say yes, things start to become possible. And just the act of saying yes really
loud I feel like just even creates something in your body, emotionally,
spiritually, you know, in everyway, say yes, man. It just feels really good to
say yes, to go a little further say yes to the stuff you want to move towards
and not necessarily yes to the stuff you wanna move away from. You know, the
actor in me, for improv, they say your attitude has to be “yes, and” – you do
something and improv to me, we’re gonna go somewhere if we say yes and I feel
like art and life and photography is all transactional.
How do you combat
burnout?
It’s hard actually. Yoga, I do not as much yoga as I would
like. I practice martial arts although I haven’t practiced martial arts in a
while now. I do my best to sleep a little more, you know but that’s … I really
love what I do so it’s not like when you’re stuck in a job you hate and you get
burnout really quick. This really, really inspires me at every corner so I
don’t really get burnout like oh god I don’t wanna take another picture, it’s
like my fucking body needs some rest. Like that’s where the burnout comes, I
need to get some rest, I’m not taking care of myself or not eating as well as I
should or something like that so I combat it by making time for yoga, making
time to take a break.
You work with actors
a lot, is there one emotion that you really like to capture in your images?
For my headshot clients my favorite thing to capture is
certainty. I’m a lot bigger on certainty than I am on hope. I feel like
certainty is sexier than hope. I feel like there is a place for hope but I feel
like certainty is active whereas hope can be passive. So I feel the first 2
images that would come into your head, an individual hoping, what they look
like, they’re probably not doing anything they’re probably just sitting there,
living in hope, whereas somebody with certainty they at least look like they
mean business. So for my clients, I wanna capture them certain cause I feel
like especially in the industries of acting, hell, even in New York in any
industry, I just don’t feel like there’s any room to be uncertain, because
there are so many people that are certain. So that’s something I feel like
constructively I wanna capture. My favorite emotion to capture… whatever’s open
and truthful, whatever comes forth organically in the moment that’s real and I
feel like that in itself is hard enough to do with a lot of people that are
untrained, even the trained people, they might have their bag of tricks but to
really get an unguarded, vulnerable- vulnerability is my favorite thing to
capture. That’s my favorite quote-unquote emotion. I don’t know if you’d call
that an emotion but I guess it’s like the doorway to all the emotions or how
you express them but vulnerability, to catch someone really being their honest
self and not posing for a picture, that’s really where I like to take
everybody. I think we’re all attracted to that. And it’s great to look at.
Word Association. No
thinking, just go. Smile.
Face.
Sun.
Rain.
Computer.
Mac.
Take.
Give.
Floor.
Ceiling.
Skin.
Touch.
Complete this
statement, please. If my muse were an animal, it would be…
Something big. If my muse were an animal…? I don’t like
cats, I wanna say lion but… If my muse were an animal… what’s peaceful and
strong? I’m gonna say an eagle ‘cause they’re just so cool looking and they fly
and they’re strong and I respond viscerally to a picture of a bald eagle,
it’s really cool.
* * *
No comments:
Post a Comment