The day before my shoot with Chole Sevigny for the cover of Tokion magazine found me writing frantic emails from airports in Nairobi and Dubai, trying to lock down a location. I was just returning from Zanzibar, where I was shooting the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition for South Africa (more on that in future posts).
I’d chosen the Standard hotel in NYC as a location, and thankfully, they pulled through. When it comes to actresses, I prefer not to shoot them on the inside of a ping pong ball. That’s to say, in a studio on a cyc, as opposed to a real environment they can really put themselves into and work around.
Chloe arrived looking super-fashionable, dressed in tight little, high denim shirts and kind of a cool t-shirt tucked into them. What impressed me most, though, was that she came by herself. No publicist, no entourage, no hair and makeup of her own. That really stood out to me because obviously it’s intimidating for an actress to arrive on a set and have her image in the hands of other people—and in this case, people she’s never met. She went straight into makeup and made it very clear that she didn’t want people to fuss over her. Chloe is a true New Yorker—not into all the hype and bullshit—so that was supercool.
THIS SHOT WAS ACTUALLY MY PREFERRED COVER BUT THE MAGAZINE DID NOT WANT TO GO WITH IT....HMMMM!I explained the concept—the theme of this particular issue of Tokion is resurrection—and we got right to it. With Chloe, they were looking to get some sort of iconic image for the cover (who doesn’t want to do an iconic image for the cover anyway?), but it had to have some sort of resurrection theme.
I didn’t want to follow that theme too literally or narratively, getting into too much heavy religious iconography. At the end of the day, you are shooting a celebrity, and you have to make portraits of them. But I definitely steeped the portraits in that aesthetic, using resurrection as a reference, or a launching point. That’s why I used this sort of halo-y, flared light in the background. I tried to get that outside, on the bed, wherever I was shooting.
Chloe is unbelievably photogenic, and loves to take direction, as most actresses do, and she was super pleasant throughout the entire shoot. I am super happy with the way it turned out.
SOME UNPUBLISHED IMAGES
CHLOE IN THE SHOWER
A FEW WORDS FROM CHLOE
CHLOE AND ME
