Red Steel: A Lifestyle Session on the Williamsburg Bridge

Four frames made on and around the Williamsburg Bridge - painted steel, chain link, and a graffiti bowl on the Brooklyn side. Notes on using one very loud location without letting it eat the subject.

The Williamsburg Bridge is one of the most photographed structures in New York and one of the most difficult to use well. It is painted a red that overpowers almost anything you put in front of it, the walkway is a corridor of chain link, and every third person crossing it is carrying a camera.

I spent an afternoon there working out how to make it behave.

Let the colour be the wardrobe decision

The answer turned out to be clothing, not lighting. Blue denim and a black printed tee sit in almost perfect opposition to that red, so the subject separates without any effort at all. Had he been wearing anything warm the frames would have collapsed.

This is the boring, unglamorous half of location shooting. Half the problems people try to solve with lights and grades are solved an hour earlier by looking at a location and choosing what the person wears to it.

Use the structure as a frame, not a backdrop

The strongest frame in the four is the one shot through the bridge's own steelwork, with the subject seated inside a cage of red beams and chain link. The structure surrounds him rather than sitting behind him, which gives depth to something that would otherwise be flat.

Then the last frame breaks the pattern completely: down off the bridge into a graffiti bowl on the Brooklyn side, warm concrete, tags in every direction, nothing red at all. A four-image set needs one image that changes the subject, or it is a contact sheet rather than a story.

“Half the problems people fix with lights are fixed an hour earlier by choosing what the subject wears.”

New York in September

September is the month I try to book New York exteriors. The light has lengthened, the humidity has broken, and there is a couple of weeks before the leaves start changing everything about how a street reads.

This afternoon fed directly into the commissioned work I shot in the same borough later, including the Lee workwear session and the JBL portraits. Walking a city with no client and no shot list is how you find the corners you use when somebody is paying.