My grandfather, Louis Wise, was born in Odessa, Ukraine. At the age of 5 in 1910, his family migrated to Baltimore where he later founded a scrap metal business. He died before I was born but in a cosmic way, Louis passed his love of metal on to me. I am drawn to the gritty world of industrial photography, where docu-realism meets style. Here, the beautiful Reesa Ishiyama contrasts against the oily, slick, dystopian setting of a welding shop.
My first visit to Cuba was in 2011. I was invited to screen my documentary “Poster Girl” as part of a global film exchange with MoMA. With a crappy old point-and-shoot I ventured outside of Havana where an old woman invited me into her crumbling home. Between the cracks in the walls were stories of people living in abundance before the Cuban Revolution. When I returned to Cuba years later in 2018 for a music documentary, very little had changed. Visiting the home of one of the musicians, it didn’t matter that there was no mechanism to flush the toilet, they had a piano, congas, heart and soul, and each other.
On an industrial shoot for Weber Metals in Southern California, I photographed 3 generation families working for the same company. One of the workers told me about a time he flew on a plane. He turned to his wife sitting in the window seat and said: “I helped make that window”.
I shoot corporate / lifestyle stuff too. I love finding interesting ways to draw the viewer in and build a human connection. For example, when the woman coder smiled politely for the camera, the image lacked feeling. So, I asked her to take out a legal pad and describe herself. She grinned a little brighter after that, and I knew I captured the feeling I was going for.
