Ashes to Space - Remote Portraits for the New York Time Magazine's Space Issue
How a virtual photoshoot comes together.
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In the beginning of October, Kathy Ryan, the director for the New York Times Magazine, reached out about a shoot for the magazine’s annual Space issue —portraits of eight subjects who have chosen to send their ashes to space after they die. It was a dream assignment, except that the people were scattered across the US, and I had two weeks before flying out to Japan. Fitting so much travel in the time allotted would have been impossible, and I had no choice but to turn the assignment down. Unless the magazine would take me up on a wild proposition — to photograph all the people remotely through a smartphone. Besides logistics, the remote process felt perfectly fitted for the story about people reimagining their funeral with a sci-fi flair. To my surprise, the magazine agreed.
I have photographed remote portraits many times before, but never as a unified portfolio. Both the advantage and the disadvantage of virtual shoots is being at the mercy of the subject’s location and setup. Each photoshoot focuses on making the most of what’s available and no two projects look alike. The trickiest part of the Space issue assignment was coming up with a concept that could be consistently applied to eight different people in eight different homes while shooting on a phone through my laptop hundreds of miles away.