TCF Ep. 471 - Jesse Dittmar

The Candid Frame: Conversations on Photography

Ibarionex R. Perello

Cameras, Art, Photoshop, Visual Arts, Career, Interviews, Photographers, Arts, Photography, Photo, Digital

4.8 • 749 Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2019

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jesse Dittmar is a celebrity portrait photographer who began serving as an assistant for some of the industry’s best photographers including Chris Buck and Annie Leibovitz. On his own, he has photographed celebrities including Jodie Foster, Uma Therman, Tom Hanks, Sting, James Earl Jones and more. His photographs have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines including The Hollywood Reporter, Village Voice and Rolling Stone. His recent book, Two showcases his penchant for intimate portraiture with beautiful black white portraits of his photographic subjects. Photographer Links: Listener Intro: John Adair Education Resources: Candid Frame Resources Download the free Candid Frame app for your favorite smart device. Click here to download for . Click here to download Support the work we do at The Candid Frame with contributing to our Patreon effort. You can do this by visiting or visiting the website and clicking on the Patreon button. You can also provide a one-time donation via . You can follow Ibarionex on and .

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is John Adair out of Eugene, Oregon, and you're listening to The Candid Frame.
0:13.3	When it comes to being a celebrity portrait photographer, there's a lot that you have to learn that has
0:19.3	nothing to do with photography.
0:22.1	That's actually the easy part.
0:24.4	As Liam Neeson famously said, you need to possess a particular set of skills.
0:30.9	Skills that include thinking on your feet, leveraging your strengths and minimizing your weaknesses,
0:36.8	and knowing how to solicit something
0:39.2	genuine from your often photograph subjects. Jesse Ditmar relies on extensive research on
0:46.8	its subjects before Porter Chu. This allows him to build rapport with a subject who is often
0:52.6	faced with falling praise and mundane questions.
0:57.0	When Jesse had the chance to photograph the musician's thing, he had to temper his fanboy impulse.
1:03.0	Instead, he used his research and a shared interest to elicit a genuine moment.
1:10.0	I'm a big chess player, and I knew he was too. I knew he had
1:13.3	played Gary Kasparov and I had that information in my back pocket. I didn't lead with it,
1:19.5	but I went through the whole photo shoot and I didn't get him to smile or laugh even once
1:23.9	because he's got that stoic sting face on and then I bring up this Kasparov thing I know about.
1:31.2	And I'm a chess player so I can talk chess and I get him to laugh.
1:34.2	And it was perfect, you know.
1:36.6	Like I didn't use the picture of him laughing, but I knew I wanted to see what that looked like.
1:41.0	And so it's research like that that matters to me.
1:46.1	And in this highly competitive field, there is one skill that is essential above all others. And that's how you react and
1:52.9	respond when things go terribly wrong, as was the case when he was scheduled to photograph
	...

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