Photographer: Zachary Scott
Client: New York Times Magazine
Project name: Old Babies
Retoucher: Electric Art, Amy Dresser
Imagine a young Zachary Scott spending his childhood observing the details and textures of our world and how they fit together. From an early age, Scott was fascinated with anything his eyes could capture, but with neither the skill to draw or paint, the camera naturally became his paintbrush and the world his canvas. “As a child, I had access to a camera, and I’m grateful that I had enough freedom from my family to choose what I wanted to pursue,” says the Los Angeles-based photographer. After studying photography at the Art Center College of Design, he joined up with photographic reps Sharpe + Associates, in 2001, and has been shooting primarily advertising work with them ever since. His personal highlights range from numerous assignments with the New York Times Magazine to commercial shoots with advertising agency Goodby Silverstein and CD Brian Gunderson for the “Got Milk” campaign and HP. Lined up with an eye for quirky humour and visually coherent ideas, his series of old babies certainly is a high point in this photographer’s career.
The concept
When the photo editor at the New York Times magazine, Joanna Milter, commissioned Scott, the only information he had to go on was the title of the article his images would illustrate, “What if Age is Nothing but a Mind-set?” and themes such as “reverse ageing” and “fountain of youth”. With so little information, the road towards the vision of the series came with much ambiguity. Scott found himself with ten concepts, which were eventually narrowed down to two, with the help of the magazine editors. “We had planned to shoot two series of images. One was old babies and the other featured old people acting youthful,” says Scott, however, budget restraints forced him to pick only one concept – old babies. After the idea was settled on, it was then only a matter of how the old babies would actually look. “We were constantly re-evaluating what we were trying to communicate. Is this a young person that has grown old or is this an old person that has become young?” says Scott. In preparation, he did a lot of research looking for images similar to what he wanted to create, but the best he could find were children who had dressed up as old people on Halloween. “Things like Benjamin Button made us fear that our final product may turn out as a series of overly wrinkled children,” says Scott. But after determining what features he should keep to communicate a sense of “oldness”, the vision became clearer. “I eventually realised that, in a way, babies can already look like old people. Some actually have a look of male pattern baldness to them, so their hair is already thin,” says Scott.
Casting the characters
Scott initially had a mental list of characters he wanted to shoot and produce. However, it was the casting process that was pivotal in realising the true direction of the creative vision. “The casting agent, Doug Mangskau, and I selected the children who were the strongest for the story and that sort of dictated and informed what sort of characters I was going to produce. Seeing the children allowed and inspired us to create the characters in a unique way that directly correlated to the children,” says Scott. They had originally planned to cast four kids to get a series of four images, but Scott pushed to get a few more kids during the casting process, eventually settling on a selection of six children. “I’ve never shot babies in a capacity where you had to do something complicated with them, so I wanted to make sure we had some alternates, but we ended up using everybody,” he says.
The approach
Children have mood swings, they’re unpredictable, and they identify with the familiar. When you’re shooting a baby in the studio, having a pre-established concept of what sort of image you want is always a recipe for disaster, as Scott discovered. “When you’re shooting children, you get what you get. You can’t have an expectation going into it. Some of the babies were goods sports, but some had a hard time with the wigs and outfits,” says Scott. In one case, the optimistic-faced baby grandma, whom Scott and his team called “Sweet Granny”, experienced grouchy moods on the shoot day that contrasted with her usually joyous personality that Scott wanted to capture. Instead of pushing on with the baby, Scott decided to give “Sweet Granny” a break to be with her mother before shooting her later in the day. “Anything out of a baby’s usual routine will definitely instigate some tears, so you have to use an adaptive, age-appropriate style of direction, be comforting and understanding, and not push them too much,” he says. During the shoot, he wanted to make sure the babies were always comfortable to be themselves, so he made use of a blacked-out area to minimise distractions and to avoid scaring the children. “You have to black out the set and keep only the key members of the team close by,” he says. “I have three kids so I feel like I really put my parenting skills to task with this. Actually, being a parent was possibly the best way to prepare for a shoot like this.” In the end, it was good timing and teamwork that brought this series to life. The producer, Megan Sluiter, structured the shooting day to ensure that there was always one child being prepared in make-up or wardrobe while Scott was shooting another child. “The shoot became this organic machine. Whenever a kid was getting tired and bored, I would give them a break and pull the next kid in.”
Gear and lighting
The series was shot in studio on a Rolleiflex Hy6 Mod2 with a Leaf Credo 80 back, against a blue backdrop to give Scott greater control over the backgrounds at the end of the shoot. As for lighting, Scott decided to keep the set-up the same for each baby to give him more flexibility in post-production as well. His set-up included an Elinchrom Rotalux Softbox Octa as his top light and a strobe paired with a B2 Pro 77cm parabolic silver reflector as his key light positioned on the right-hand-side with a fill card to the left. “I didn’t feel the need to do a unique lighting set-up with each one. We were moving too fast and it was too much to do in one day,” says Scott. The environmental backgrounds were shot on a family vacation in Montana on a Nikon D800. “Some of those environmental shots added more to the character, and I had that in mind when I shot [the children],” he says.
Retouching
The timeline of the post-production stretched out over a couple of months after the shoot. Because Scott shot each of his subjects against a blue backdrop, and with a sparse lighting set-up, this meant that he was able to easily experiment and manipulate his images in Photoshop to figure out what sort of image he was looking for. “I find it really hard to completely visualise an image. I can’t remember a time where I knew exactly what something is going to look like before a shoot,” says Scott. He also composited the children into different location shots he took on vacation. “I like to do the backgrounds last because that gives me the flexibility after the job to be alone and think about how it incorporates with the image,” he says, emphasising how important the background is in tying the whole image together. The biggest challenge however, was compositing the wigs onto the children’s heads. The special effects team, Bruce Fuller and Amiee Macabeo, were pivotal in ensuring that all the wigs matched each of the children to make the post-production stage easier. “They actually made mannequins that matched the skin tones and head shape of each of the children to design the wigs on,” says Scott, “but when the child is moving all around the place, it’s tough to know what your ‘hero shot’ is, so when we shot the wigs, I had to make sure I shot them at every possible angle.” The final stage in the post-production process involved Electric Art and LA-based retoucher, Amy Dresser transforming his comps into beautiful seamless imagery. “They changed all the light direction and took all the shadows out and put some new ones in, as well as some other subtle details, including stubble on the farmer’s face,” says Scott. “It ended up looking so painterly. I think it’s the closest thing to Art I’ve ever produced!”
More Old Babies
Even though Old Babies looks like it belongs in the realm of Scott’s quirky mind, he found the shoot to be quite different from the rest of his work, which he describes as illustrative and straight to the point, with a few elements of quirky humour. The defining point of difference? Ambiguity. “When I make an image for an article, I usually have a definite visualisation of the article, but these ones ended up being more ambiguous,” he says. With a series like this, there is no right interpretation to it. Some people saw either young old people or old young people, and some people hated it while others loved it. “It’s unusual for me to elicit that sort of response,” says Scott, commenting on the ambiguity of this series. “My work is always very clear and the concept is clear, and you get it right away, but this one was a little more open-ended and far away from what I usually do, so I feel like this was definitely a shoot that stood out for me.” Scott also found that there was a cinematic quality to this series, a quality that he would love to incorporate more into his works. But could the impact of this series create a trend of more old babies in the baby photography industry? “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more old babies in the future. People are just asking for more!” says Scott.
Contacts
Zachary Scott zacharyscottphotography.com