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.
Trying to figure out the visual approach to the story, I imagined dramatic portraits of melancholy people who had already decided on their funeral arrangements. Then I googled Celestis, the company featured in the article that makes such a posthumous journey possible, and changed my mind. “Celestis makes the dream of spaceflight a reality,” reads the opening statement on their website, echoing the humorous absurdity of a Monty Python episode.
These photos were not going to be dark and gloomy. Instead, I drew inspiration from the colorful and quirky vintage aesthetic of sci-fi B-movie posters. With the help of wonderful assistants in each location, I devised a setup using theatrical lighting, color gels, gobos, and mirrors. Miraculously, it worked as envisioned.
When I take portraits of subjects who aren’t famous, the challenge is to make people care. A celebrity portrait is easy by comparison. The photographer’s job consists of not screwing it up because the viewer likes the photo before it is even taken. A mediocre photo of Brad Pitt will still allow the viewer to project their emotions onto the actor’s well-known likeness. With a regular person, the photographer has no wiggle room for empathy and has to construct a visual fantasy of a complete stranger from scratch.
A curious aspect of remote portraits is that they take away a false sense of familiarity that comes with meeting the subject in person. With minimum personal interaction, I am able to focus on superficial layers — the clothing, the facial features, hairstyle, body language, and details of their space — to create a narrative that I find most interesting about that particular person. If I am able to fall in love with my subject through the screen of a smartphone, I know the viewer could as well.
The setup for remote photoshoots is fairly simple. The subject downloads an app (I used Shutter app) to their smartphone, which connects my laptop to the phone’s camera, giving me the ability to use all the camera controls, including shutter, exposure, and white balance, remotely. The images are then downloaded straight into my iCloud account.
That’s the easy part. The difficult part is everything else. There are frequent technical difficulties, connection losses, and phone glitches. Through Zoom, I need to control every aspect of the setup and direct the lighting assistant and the subject. Over the years, I accumulated hacks to streamline the process, but this was the first time I worked on a remote project this big. All my knowledge and experience were put to the test in pushing the limits of what a virtual photoshoot could be.
For each of the subjects I devised a different color setup emphasizing one main hue. For Butch (Lemuel) Patterson, a retired science teacher who used to work with NASA, a bright bowtie he wore serendipitously matched with the red wall in his kitchen.
Besides a lighting assistant, I always ask my subject to have a family member or friend on site to help holding the smartphone. Having a familiar person during the shoot creates a sense of comfort in an otherwise strange setup. It also facilitates an intimacy that is harder to recreate during a regular photoshoot. Instead of a stranger with a professional camera, the person in front of the subject is a loved one, eliminating the photographer altogether.
Photographing the assignment for the Space issue took eight days, with seven portraits and one photoshoot at the Celestis headquarters in Houston, Texas. Had I done the project in person, it would have taken more than three weeks, with two days of travel and one shoot day for each of the locations. Even more staggering than the difference in the incurring travel expenses is the carbon footprint of a photographer traveling to eight different cities compared to the same job done from their home.
Despite new possibilities, remote photography is still nascent. I imagined it would take off after the pandemic, but few photographers have adopted it and publications quickly returned to the old paradigm of in-person shoots. Still, the potential of such technologies is staggering, eliminating both distance and time in a way that seemed science fiction just a decade ago. In this brave new world, the photographer is freed from the constraints of geography, time, and photo gear, leaving nothing but the fundamental act of connecting through photography.
The story, envisioned by Kathy Ryan, brought to life by Amy Kellner and written by Jon Mooallem, is out in print this Sunday in the New York Times Magazine.
Their Final Wish? A Burial in Space Digital version of the story
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Dina! So cool! Thanks for taking us behind the scenes of this project. In each location, you had the subject, a family member to hold the phone (or iPad) and a local assistant who set up the lighting gear...is that correct? And one more question for you: are you only looking through the camera--or you're also connected over zoom to see the entire environment from a more pulled back point of view?...Love the portraits--especially the guy with the red bowtie! This process really define's the concept of "working from home!" Inspiring! Thank you! Landon
Fascinating! Thank you for sharing. I know that phrase is used a lot by the members of the Hare Krishna movement, but I don't know of any other way of saying it.