Samuel L. Jackson, Queens NY, 1999. Shooting the advertising campaign for the movie Shaft was one of those moments where I had to work fast—no scouting, no pre-lighting, just me and my assistant showing up with one camera, one light, and a few minutes with Samuel L. Jackson. There’s one shot of him against the sky, with asphalt and water behind him, and you’d never know we were just at the edge of a parking lot in Queens, where all the trailers were set up.That’s what I love—creating an illusion out of nothing. I can get someone to step five feet outside of their trailer and suddenly, in my frame, it’s not a parking lot anymore. It’s this dramatic landscape of asphalt, water, and sky. With the right exposure and light, I could tranform anything into something entirely different.Photography is always about light. If you know how to manipulate it, you can make anything work—even if you only have a few minutes by an abandoned factory next to the set—dangerous, dirty, and falling apart. I couldn’t bring Samuel in there in wardrobe or risk him getting hurt, but with the right angle and exposure, I could turn it into something cinematic.Photography is all an illusion, and that’s the fun of it. On a movie set I don’t have weeks of scouting, a studio, pre-lighting—I have two minutes—reacting in real time, making it happen. And that’s how I got these shots.
