The Human Aspect - Studio Photography & Design Magazine 7/99
-Leigh Grimm

You could say he has done it all. And every experience, from being born and raised in New York City to exploring various genres of image-making have infused in portrait photographer Michael Halsband a sense of personal style and the ability to connect with the musician, artist or actor before his camera. To Halsband, every shoot is exciting. Every assignment is an in-depth adventure into a big world.
“I think what people come to me for is that there is a certain human aspect about themselves, a realness that they want to portray along with the attitude,” says Halsband. “They want to be spontaneous. They are fearless in being themselves, and they want to express that. They don’t want straight portrait, they want some spark to it, but they want it to be real. That’s a tall order. I live for that challenge. That to me is the ultimate, to be able to capture people and their true inner makeup of emotion and personality---
everything they are about that makes them different from everybody else, yet celebrates what we’re all about as human beings. To me that’s awesome,” says Halsband during a recent interview at his Manhattan studio.

PHOTOGRAPHER ON TOUR
Shortly after graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 1980. Halsband got the chance to document the Rolling Stones’ 1981 United States Tour.
“It was numbing. I dreamed about touring with the Rolling Stones for seven years before that. It’s like something you imagine what would it be like,” he remembers.
While in art school. Halsband got some jobs from Rolling Stone records to photograph the Rolling Stones for some publicity shoots. Then an opportunity came up for him to photograph Keith Richards for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
“It’s a sobering thing when you get such a major responsibility; you rise to the occasion of what those responsibilities entail,” comments Halsband.
“We started in late July shooting for this Rolling Stone cover and by mid-September I still hadn’t captured the image we were going after so I ended up going on the road with them. And two weeks into the tour I was still with them and that’s when the deadline came for the Rolling Stone cover but the magazine had decided to go with another image.” But Halsband was approached with another opportunity---Mick Jagger came to him that day and asked him to be the band’s tour photographer.
“I learned a lot about the inner workings of music business through that experience. It’s been valuable for me to continue to work with people in helping them to achieve their visual image, “ says Halsband.

GETTING TO KNOW YOU
It’s important for Halsband to get a feel for the person or band member that he will be photographing. He likes to at least talk to his clients beforehand to find out what they’re expectations are or what image they’re hoping to achieve.
“My responsibility ultimately is to draw out as much information as I can and try to piece together and not filter it through any of my expectations. I try to be a really good listener and as open to who and what they are and what they want as I can be.”
Halsband makes sure people feel free to experiment, because the day doesn’t hinge on just one shot. “I have to trust that I am working with energy between myself and my subject and that is the ultimate power. And making the pictures is really just documenting that interaction, that energy,” says Halsband.

CAREER CROSSROADS
Halsband was equally interested in music from the same age he became interested in photography. “I had these interests from 10 years old and on. When I graduated high school I had no real sense of what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
“Every stage in my life in terms of deciding what I was going to do always hinged on what I was doing at that time. So I thought, ‘Well I could go into music or photography.’ I was at that crossroad and I remember my mother saying to me, “Try to imagine yourself a 55 years old doing whatever it is you want to do in life.’ Then I got this very clear image of myself in a beat-up tuxedo playing Hava Nagila at a Bar Mitzvah. And I thought, man music is not the way I should go. That image sobered me right up,” he laughs.
“When I got into photography, the decision to photograph musicians and artists came through a process of eliminations. I had experimented with interior photography, working for Architectural Digest, House & Gardens and magazines like that. And then I experimented with still life photography.” He learned a lot about lighting and composition through these applications that he took to portrait photography.
Over the years, as he began to expand a little more---he switched from photographing musicians and went into fashion photography in the 1980’s.

NEW SKILLS
Although Halsband did not find fashion photography gratifying. It was a learning experience that has helped bring his portraits to the level of excitement and energy that they exhibit now.
“In the beginning, my influences defined my idea of what portrait photography was. Then, when I got into fashion I broke out of this rigid guideline that I set for myself. My new goal became fashion with lots of spontaneous action and moments and trying to capture the peak of each moment and getting these beautiful, fresh, alive feelings out of people.
“But in the world of fashion photography, pictures just don’t last very long. It’s an insatiable machine. I felt at the end of the year that all I had to show for myself were pictures that weren’t worth anything anymore because so many hundreds of thousands of fashion pictures are being taken everyday.
“From fashion to portrait work, I was able to accelerate, to shoot far more film, far more regularly. I was able to speed up the learning process through the volume of film I shot as a fashion photographer and the experimentation and variety of angles. I brought a lot of my fashion energy, everything I was looking for in fashion back into music. All of a sudden I was striving for action, energy, and there were people that wanted that, that wanted to break out of these moody portraits of musicians standing still.

CREATIVE COLOR THROUGH CROSS PROCESSING
With cross processing, Halsband had to establish a lighting philosophy “because it’s a very tricky process which I really started to take seriously because it solved my color creative problem. For years I shot black and white and would shoot color to fill the order but I never really had a sense of fulfillment through color until I came upon cross processing.
“Cross processing required a whole different understanding of lighting, because when your working with a high contrast film then the lighting has to be lower contrast. I was experimenting in the studio with all sorts of ways of lighting and I set up a specific lighting that had always worked in my black and white. Now it doesn’t matter what I put in the camera, because the end result is really the same in black and white or color.
“Cross processing is not as flexible as people would think because the illusion is that because you’re coming out with a negative, you can do a lot of correcting in the printing but the reality is it behaves very much like the transparency-base that it comes from. It doesn’t have the latitude. The negative is in such a state at that point that it’s so contrasty there isn’t much you can pull out and papers don’t have the flexibility that black & white paper has where you can burn and dodge without repercussions.”
“As far as lighting equipment, I use Norman strobes. I’ve limited myself to direct fair head umbrellas, three different size umbrellas---black backwarm satins that I get from the garment industry and then I have an umbrella maker make them. I use color filtration, light balance filters, color correction filters, and I create filter packs based on where I want to go. I never do anything subtle. I go right to an 81C or stronger or I’ll go right to heavy color filters, green blue, I’ll try them all. Its like adding words to your vocabulary”.

SUPER POSITIVE APPROACH
Halsband takes on each assignment, each adventure, filled with positive energy. “I definitely take a super positive approach. I put on myself a tremendous pressure to top myself each time. I’m always’s trying to enrichen and expend on my work so I can offer more depth. It’s not that I’m trying to change my look all the time as much as understanding how many times are changing.
“Especially in that today, more so than ever, there’s a real demand for emotional content in work. You have to combine the Pop sensibility along with the emotional content and depth. People come and that’s what they want so I have to be plugged into that, be a part of it. I have no problem with that. It totally fits in what I’m doing.”

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