The Art of the Personal Project: Kendrick Brinson

The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own.  I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before.  In this thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is not affiliated with any company; I’m just featuring projects that I find.  Please DO NOT send me your work.  I do not take submissions.

 

Today’s featured artist:  Kendrick Brinson  Brinson/Banks

“I call this community: “Life after Life”. There are people well into 80’s and 90’s enjoying their life as if they were 50’s and 60’s. You can actually look forward to growing old. There is a lot to do. A reason to live,” said Vera MacIntosh, on a Sun City blog.

The first time I went to Sun City, Arizona was December 2009. I was a new freelancer after having left my last staff photojournalist job at a newspaper and I’d read about the age-restricted city of 40,000 retirees, and then read about the Sun City Poms, a cheerleading squad made up of women all the way in their 80s, and I read about the 50th anniversary of the place that would begin the next month, and I knew I had to go and take photos there. I never would have thought that December that I’d be returning with my camera for a decade, but I have.

For 60 years, those 55 and older have relocated to Sun City, Arizona, a city self-governed, a city unlike any other in the world. Sun City was the first place of its kind and it is still the largest. The city is 14 square miles of a retirement paradise of palm tree lined streets, each with a golf cart lane.  Sun City provides seniors with a life after work and a life after raising children.  Sun City is a life of enjoying friends and being active, in spite of age.

There are more than 100 active clubs in Sun City and the days are filled with lawn bowling and group swim classes and the nights are filled with dancing. All this living comes with loss, however. Friends and spouses die, and the singles dance night are just as full as the couples dance night for obvious reasons. Yet, there’s optimism everywhere.

“Enjoy your youth, I’ll tell ya, you never know how much you have left,” resident Tom Woods told me.

People can see more my work here:

Yes, I do intend to make a book of the project I just have to decide when I’m done going 😂

To see more of this project, click here.

APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world. She has been involved in the photography and illustration industry since the mid 80s.  After establishing the art buying department at The Martin Agency, then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies, she decided to be a consultant in 1999. She has a new Twitter feed with helpful marketing information because she believes that marketing should be driven by brand and not by specialty.  Follow her at @SuzanneSease.  Instagram

Success is more than a matter of your talent. It’s also a matter of doing a better job presenting it.  And that is what I do with decades of agency and in-house experience.

 

Joe Baraban – One exposure, one frame, one click… shot on Kodachrome 25

Sometimes you think you’ve shot just about everything!!

I got a call from an Art Director I had worked with before, telling me that he’s now at a new agency. The agency he was at lost a big account, so everyone got the proverbial boot!

If you professionals out there ever thought that being a free-lance photographer was/is a precarious occupation, you should try being an Art Director back in the day. Your portfolio was always up to date and under your desk.

You went home on Friday after a successful meeting with the client (third in agency billing) who had just approved a new campaign, and over the weekend the client decides they no longer want to go in that direction and fires the agency. You come to work an hour late on Monday and twenty-five percent of the agency is gone; happened all the time.

I’ve seen it happen because I was going to be the photographer that was chosen to shoot an (eight day) new big campaign on a Friday for Bud Light and by Monday the agency had lost the account.
OUCH!!!!!

The creative team usually consists of a writer and Art Director. The writer usually comes up with a concept, and the Art Director makes it come to life; sometimes the other way around.

This client was fairly new to the agency, so it was important that the Art Director/writer team deliver “the goods”, as they sometimes said. The reason I was called was that I had “delivered the goods” once before.

The client was an insurance company whose customers were owners of expensive sailboats and motor yachts.

The approved concept, that also went into focus groups, was that you never knew when trouble was coming so you had to be ready for anything; even when you are about to be attacked by a giant crab. Whoever came up with this idea was probably stoned…everybody must have been stoned for this one!!

And that’s where I came in.  The Art director asked me if I thought I could make a giant claw attack a boat…” Hell yes!”

I learned a long time ago that the secret to the success I have had was/is because I always surround myself with the best (most talented) people possible, and I still believe it.

Having said that, I hired Danny Harries, a good friend and an amazing model maker/illustrator, to create a giant claw that we could position where it looked like it was about to attack both a sailboat and motor yacht.

Danny carved it out of a huge block of foam (to make it light), painted it, and from one end to the other it was eighteen feet long.

We took it down to a bay near Houston whose depth was only about four feet deep and tried to set it up…it wouldn’t stand upright, and as a result we missed a beautiful sunset!!!!!!

Since there wasn’t a plan ‘B’, we had to keep working with what we had…the original ‘A’ plan. We took it to a nearby garage so Danny could figure out what went wrong and what he needed to do. While he was scratching his head the Art Director and I were toasting to the Photo Gods with a few beers, thinking that it couldn’t hurt.

The next day we went out again to a great sky and this time it worked like a charm; Danny had worked his magic, much to the relief of the Art Director whose color had returned to his face…and of course, yours truly.

While my assistant and I were lying in a Zodiac, I had the sailboat and motor yacht follow directly behind one another, so I could take full advantage of the last rays before the sun hit the water…as in the sunset. I was very close to the claw with a 20mm lens on, so it would appear larger than life; the Art Director’s words, not mine!!

Those were great days where you could actually use your imagination and then create those ideas in the camera, and having a hell of a lot of fun doing it. Now, the claw would be about eight inches long, shot against a green screen, and with post-processing it would be added to the shot…computer art…UGH!!!

We finished the shoot and had a couple of celebration beers while loading up the claw. After about a mile I had to make a pit stop. Luckily, I pulled over on the shoulder next to a semi-dense forest to disappear into it.

As I was getting out I told the Art director that I had to see “a man about a horse”. When I got back everyone was laughing, especially the Art director.

It seems that while I was gone the account executive, a young woman named Beth (fake name to protect the innocent) said to the Art Director, “Oh I want to go, I love horses”.

One exposure, one frame, one click…shot on Kodachrome 25

To read more of Joe’s stories visit his Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/joe.baraban