Michael Rubenstein
Michael Rubenstein is one of my favorite photographers. I do have a lot of favorite photographers but Michael strikes a unique chord in the chorus.
So I was excited when he asked me to edit a portfolio with him. The challenges were unique, too. Michael is known well for his portraiture and an edgy approach, such as his pictures in the American Teen project created by Redux, which represents Michael. He’s less well known for his documentary photography.
© Michael Rubenstein
He wanted a portfolio that represented the range of his abilities. Not an easy task, because so often people want to hire photographers for one or the other way of seeing. And in Michael’s case, you wouldn’t know that the same photographer made each type of picture, represented here by a fashion shoot in a New York hotel room and the shootings at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai.
Further complicating choices is the fact that Michael lives in Mumbai. So there are large bodies of work from India and the U.S.
With these factors in mind, we started looking at pictures, a few thousand of them. And they weren’t exactly organized so it took time.
The process with thousands of pictures before you can be daunting. But it needn’t be. With a sense of the overall goal you can take one set of pictures at a time, elevate the best pictures, move the next and repeat. Then evaluate the different sets of pictures for their merit, raise the best to the top, repeat, until you have a set of stories and individual images that compose a symphony of your work.
The fun with Michael’s pictures is that his images are really like notes. Listen to the notes, move them together in a carefully crafted sequence and you’ll hear a symphony playing a movement or two or three. I found pictures that were made thousands of miles apart but that held together for an essay about people in their spaces, for instance.
His portfolio edit remains a work in progress. It’s a bit like having your favorite desert in the freezer waiting to be thawed.
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