Photos to Inspire
Photos to Inspire: Mark Robert Halper
By Connor Leighton
Dec 1, 2006

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.

©Mark Robert Halper

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.
 

©Mark Robert Halper

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?

©Mark Robert Halper

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.

©Mark Robert Halper

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

©Mark Robert Halper

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.



© Copyright 2002 by Photoworkshop.com