Rugged Road: A Menswear Story Shot Through New York Market Stalls

A menswear campaign for Rugged Road built by walking one subject through hat shops, belt stalls and fabric racks in New York, and finishing on the waterfront under the Williamsburg Bridge.

Menswear campaigns tend to be shot in one of two places: a studio, or a street chosen for how little is happening on it. Both are safe. Both produce images that could have been made in any city on earth.

For Rugged Road we did the opposite and walked the subject into the busiest, most cluttered interiors we could find.

Clutter as a background, deliberately

Four of the six frames are inside shops - a glass counter, an aisle of hanging belts, a wall of patterned fabric and shirts. These are visually chaotic spaces and conventional wisdom says they will destroy an apparel shot.

They do not, provided you do two things. Shoot wide open so the clutter goes to texture rather than detail, and make sure the garment is the only thing in the frame that is sharp. What you get is a background that says a great deal about place and taste while carrying almost no competing information.

The hat holds it together

The straw hat appears in all six frames and it is doing structural work. Across a set shot in five different locations with different light and different colour, one strong repeated silhouette is what tells the viewer this is one story.

It also solves the hardest thing about photographing a face outdoors in February, which is that the light comes from directly overhead in the middle of the day and puts everything you care about in shadow. A brim gives you a controlled shadow instead of an accidental one, and a clean line to expose for.

“Shoot the clutter wide open and it stops being detail. It becomes texture, and texture never argues with the garment.”

Ending on water

The last two frames leave the shops entirely and put him on the waterfront with the Williamsburg Bridge running behind. After four tight, warm, crowded interiors the sudden air is a relief, and it is the only point in the campaign where the city is named.

That structure - build in the interiors, release on a landmark - is one I use constantly. It is the same shape as the Lee session in Brooklyn, and not far off how the Pitti Uomo portraits in Florence are put together.