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Photos to Inspire: Mark Robert Halper
By Connor Leighton | Photos to Inspire |
Dec 1, 2006
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Armed with a
business-minded tenacity and a deft creative touch, Mark Robert Halper
has been shooting professionally since 1989. He runs a full service
commercial studio based in Los Angeles, and has shot numerous projects
for a wide variety of clients based all over the United States and in
Europe. In the midst of a busy schedule, he was kind enough to find
time to talk to us a little about how he got started and how he keeps
an edge on the competition.
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©Mark Robert Halper
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Double Exposure: What was your first experience with photography?
Mark Robert Halper:
I have a vague memory of a Mickey Mouse camera from when I was very
young that used cartridge film, but my real first experience with
photography would have been making Super 8 films in junior high and
high school because that was what eventually became my photography.
DE: When did you know you wanted to make photography your career?
MRH:
The signposts had been sitting there in my life for many years, but I
just hadn’t seen them. The interest in filmmaking was certainly one,
but it didn’t end up being the right fit for me—the projects were too
involved or it required too many people, and I wanted to be in charge.
When I graduated from USC, I remember I finished my last class, and for
the very first time in my life I had no idea what was next. If you’ve
ever seen "The Graduate," there’s the scene where Dustin Hoffman is
staring into this fish tank, utterly lost. That’s where I was. I was
asking myself, "What’s next?" for the first time in my life.
I
dug out my Pentax camera from my bottom drawer and took it out for the
day. When graduation came around, my parents asked me what I wanted for
a present, and I asked for a darkroom.
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©Mark Robert Halper
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I
ended up applying for a number of different jobs out of college and was
hired to take photos of homes for an interactive videodisc system—this
was long before the internet). There was a camera in my hands, but it
wasn’t really photography. When that company went under about a year
later, I realized that photography was what I wanted to do, even though
I had no idea what was really involved or how difficult it was. I still
didn’t know what real photography was.
So I began taking some
courses at UCLA Extension, and it was the first time I was in a class
where I was disappointed if I wasn’t assigned homework. That’s how you
know that you’re on the right track, when the work is something you
really want to do.
Even though a lot of the courses weren’t
particularly enlightening, they got my feet wet, and every so often I
found somebody who really taught me something. I’ve continued to take
courses and workshops throughout my entire career, because the people
who aren’t always learning will inevitably fall by the wayside.
DE: Where do you get your inspiration?
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©Mark Robert Halper
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MRH:
I don’t know if I believe in that concept as much as other people do. I
get my inspiration from my love of doing the work. I love taking
pictures and that inspires me to take more. I don’t look at a lot of
other photographers or photography for inspiration. There’s a lot of
great work out there, but…someone’s already doing it.
I get
inspiration from the things that I love. For instance, I love women—The
Bed Project is all about what I love about women. It’s that simple.
DE: Can you tell me a little about your fine art projects?
MRH: Low Overhead
was a testing idea gone wild. I had some free time and I was banging my
head trying to come up with something original to do, and I began to
think about Irving Penn’s corner and how I liked the way he used space
and had his subjects interacting within space. But Penn had his corner,
and I certainly couldn’t do it better than he did. But people are
confined on the sides all the time, I thought. What I’ve never seen is
how people behave when they are confined from above—people don’t know
how to deal with a low ceiling, and that’s basically what Low Overhead
is all about.
The Bed Project
was a stark contrast to Low Overhead since I wanted my subjects to feel
very free and open. People have this personality that they show when
they’re in bed that they don’t share with anyone anywhere else. I asked
the models to bring with them what they actually wear to bed; their
sheets, their pillows, the things that make them comfortable, and we
recreated their beds in the studio. It was really a simple studio set
up––a few tungsten lights through silk. I shot very loose and I often
didn’t have to give them much direction at all. When we got lost, I
just told them to jump on the bed more, and that always created energy.
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©Mark Robert Halper
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City of Hope
is actually a commercial project, and not a personal project. The City
of Hope Medical Center commissioned me for the second time to do a
series of portraits of Bone Marrow Transplant survivors—I had done it
five years earlier and was hired again this year (2006). Even though it
wasn’t a personal project, I was given a lot of creative freedom, and a
lot of what I learned about working with people in my previous projects
and the way I approached them found it’s way into this project. But
unlike the Bed Project and Low Overhead where I used primarily models
and performers or actors who were capable of opening up in front of a
camera, these were regular people. It was certainly a much greater
challenge because they thought they were going to get something simple
like a few headshots done, and instead found themselves in front of my
camera for several hundred frames. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure
what to expect from them either, and there were times I was
apprehensive about how the images would turn out. It was a challenge,
but a very rewarding one.
To see a Gallery of Mark Robert Halper’s Images, Click Here
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©Mark Robert Halper
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DE: How do you divide or manage your time between personal projects and your commercial work?
MRH: My commercial work always takes precedence, and when I have the time, I do personal work.
DE: Do you have any interests besides photography?
MRH:
I run my photography business and I’m a photographer; each of those
responsibilities is a full time job on it’s own; and they both
represent what I love to do.
DE: You also teach some workshop courses. Can you tell me a little about those?
MRH:
I teach them myself, that way I can run the workshop the way I want to.
I conduct about three of them a year, and it’s a three-day workshop for
people who are very serious about photography, primarily focused on
Photographing People for Publication. The next one is in March, and
it’s already a third full.
I
enjoy teaching, but I wouldn’t want to do it every weekend. My
workshops are three of the hardest days I work all year, and my heart
and soul go into them. They are very intense and I push my students
very hard, so they have to be very serious about being there and moving
forward. It’s definitely not a workshop for people who are looking to
take a vacation.
DE: Any words of advice for our readers?
MRH:
Half of the time and money you spend on sales and marketing ought to be
spent on being a better photographer and having a better product to
sell and market.
To find out more about Mark Robert Halper’s photography and workshops, visit his website at studiomark.com.
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Last Updated: Jul 10th, 2010 - 16:19:44
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