3-DAY WORKSHOPS + 2-HOUR WRAP
Orientation Monday, October 9th, 4:30pm – 5:30pm
Tuesday, October 10th – Thursday, October 12th 9:00am – 4:00pm.
Friday, October 20th 9:00am – 11:00am Pacific Standard Time VIA ZOOM
Ben Hassett, an English photographer based in New York City, is an acknowledged master of the beauty advertising and editorial photograph. His style is uniquely edgy and derivative of no one. . He is amongst the top few beauty photographers working today, well-known for the visceral, highly polished photography that are the hallmark of his work. His photography is prized by a wide range of luxury brands, advertising agencies and magazine editors. A large number of Ben Hassett’s best known editorial photographs are conceived to illustrate concepts related to cosmetics.
Hassett is a regular contributor to Vogue magazines worldwide. His clients include Dior, Givenchy, Revlon, Cartier, Estee Lauder, Tom Ford, Chanel, and Calvin Klein.
In this first of its kind PSPF workshop, Ben Hassett will take you through the making of a number of these images in a hands-on studio environment, discussing the practical, technical, and philosophical/theoretical aspects of his studio working practice. Participants will have the chance to have their own work reviewed, as well as spending time working out real life solutions in front of his camera. Attendees will have ample time making photographs.
This will provide participants with an unprecedented look into the way a top photographer thinks about photographing beauty and approaches his photographic processes with a tightly organized series of lighting setups covering everything in his work flow from concept to prep, shooting and editing, retouching, and digital archiving.
PRICE: $2540
plus $55 per day (Monday not included) Daily Registration included: Model fees, workshop transportation, opening reception, networking dinner, evening presentation and party.
LISTEN TO THE BEN HASSETT INTERVIEW ON PSPF PODCAST #4
Photographers should bring their laptops and be conversant with their hardware and software in order to facilitate downloading and projecting their work for critiques in class. Digital projectors with standard DVI / VGA cables will be provided. If you require DVI connectors and / or adapters, please bring one to class.
BIOGRAPHY
British artist Ben Hassett explores and exploits themes found throughout the history of Photography. He carefully examines Photography’s significant and recurrent subject matter (the still life, the nude, the landscape, the floral study), in an effort to reevaluate and challenge convention. Parallel to his photographic art practice, Hassett continues to collaborate with editorial magazines and advertising agencies as a commercial photographer and motion pictures director.
At the age of fourteen, Ben Hassett took a photography class at school, learning the basic principles of camera, film, and process. This was 1989, and the class took a field trip to the Royal Academy of Art where he would see the seminal “The Art of Photography” exhibition, celebrating the first one hundred and fifty years of photography.
It was here that he was to encounter for the first time many of the people that would later become his heroes.
As an enthused youth, he spent all of his free time making photographs and engaged in the photo pursuit. He explored half frame, 35, 6×6, and 4×5 camera formats, borrowing equipment wherever he could, and he was to build his first darkroom, much to the chagrin of his parents, in a corner of their basement. At that time, he was particularly inspired by the more personal work of commercial photographers David Bailey and Irving Penn, in their landscape and still life studies respectively.
Young Hassett went on to study Fine Art at University, and while there found himself experimenting with film and video in addition to his photographic practice. Ultimately he was disenchanted with his work as a Fine Artist and believing that his future lay in commercial photography, he devoted his energy to the making of reportage and landscape photography and began to seek representation in earnest. It was this early body of work that led him to win his first editorial assignment with British GQ magazine.
Following early success, he was commissioned to make a number of photographic portraits, which caught the attention of British Vogue. As a consequence they convinced him to try his hand at photographing models in a studio. His relationship with Conde Nast flourished. He moved to Paris, where he found himself working steadily for the French, German and Japanese editions of Vogue. He contributed also to a slew of other magazines, among them The Face, i-D, and Dazed and Confused in London, even though as a fashion photographer he felt that perhaps he had still not settled into a genre that best suited him.
Realizing that he was more interested in people than fashion, he made a conscious decision to work only on beauty assignments. Making these images allowed him a greater freedom creatively than he had making fashion pictures, which typically had been dictated by fashion editors keen to see their looks presented from head to toe.
His has been a lifelong love affair with photography. He continues to explore the creative possibilities of his own work, making bodies of work of personal interest both in and out of the studio.
With support from
