Starting Your Career as a Photo Stylist

A Comprehensive Guide to Photo Shoots, Marketing, Business, Fashion, Wardrobe, Off Figure, Product, Prop, Room Sets, and Food Styling

Susan Linnet Cox

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781621535980
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Darstellende Kunst & Business

This invaluable career manual explores the numerous directions a career in photo styling can take. Starting Your Career as a Photo Stylist prepares new and working stylists with in-depth information on food styling, fashion styling, and six other areas of specialization. Readers will also learn everything they need to know about practical aspects of the profession, including production, casting, location scouting, working with a photo crew, creating a portfolio, and marketing their work.
Established stylists will benefit from tips on how to develop and sustain their freelance careers, and business forms will provide aspiring stylists with a head start on building their businesses. Interviews with working stylists offer insight into what it takes to thrive in their line of work. Written by a stylist with over twenty years of experience, Starting Your Career as a Photo Stylist is the ultimate guide to this little-known and exciting career!

PART I

INTRODUCTION TO PHOTO STYLING

CHAPTER 1 What Is a Photo Stylist?

PHOTO STYLING IS THE little-known art of manipulating and controlling all the physical elements in a photograph to create an effective image. It takes a creative and organized person to be a good photo stylist. Many artistic people find styling to be a more practical outlet for their creativity than a career in the fine arts.

And now the word is out about this behind-the-scenes career. Many young adults have heard of styling, having read about celebrity stylists in magazines, and it has become their dream job. This glamorous image of styling, though, is not wholly accurate. Knowledge and understanding of the interdependent fields of photography, graphic design, and marketing are important factors for success as a photo stylist. Long hours, physically demanding work, thorough organization, and business management skills are as crucial as creativity.

Boston stylist Ann Fitzgerald says, “Becoming a good stylist takes time; to build resources, train your eye, and learn to beg, borrow, and steal in the nicest way possible.”

DESCRIBING WHAT YOU DO

The goal of styling is to make a photograph look as though there wasn’t a stylist involved. So it’s no wonder most people don’t know about photo styling. They see photographs in catalogs, magazines, and advertisements and have no idea of the amount of work involved in creating them. As a stylist, you can explain that you make everything in a photograph look just right. But there are people who hear the word “photograph” and stop right there. Even after the explanation, they may say, “Oh, so you’re a photographer?” Then you bring out a catalog and describe the process—how you stacked the T-shirts so that one might see every color, making them thicker with batting, like the kind used for quilting, tucking in the sides, lifting the top one with cardboard held up by a brick; how you adjusted and readjusted the stack so it would look perfect. The response will be, “Oh, I had no idea every photograph took so much work!”

The preparation—and expense—involved in a fashion shoot on location will amaze them even more; the weeks of planning, scheduling, booking models, prop shopping, the travel to locations, hotel rooms, meals, and steaming the merchandise. The response then may be, “All that, just for a background that you can hardly see?” “It’s the light,” you’ll say, “and the local landmarks we include in some shots for atmosphere.” They won’t believe you, but who’s complaining?

Four pages from a holiday catalog showing different types of styling. Photographer: Tim Mantoani; art director: Cindy Cochran; stylist: Susan Linnet Cox; hair and makeup: Claire Young. © Tim Mantoani

DISCOVERING STYLING

What leads one to discover this fascinating hidden career? Most stylists just “fall into it” as a career. One of the interns I trained, Veronica Guzman, admitted she wished she had known there was such a thing as a stylist during all those youthful years when she was cutting photos out of magazines.

Conversely, New York fashion student Tiffany Olson said, “I am one of the few who have been interested in it from the start, since my mother is a catalog art director. Growing up, I used to sit for hours at my mother’s photo shoots just watching and knew it was for me. Now I’m looking for an opportunity to learn more about styling.”

Generally, photo stylists emerge from creative fields like fine art, graphic design, theater, or fashion. Many have a college degree in these fields, but what is really required is a visual aesthetic, an independent spirit, with an organized and practical nature. Most stylists have a desire to create something visually pleasing, while earning a good income.

THE REAL LIFE RÉSUMÉ

When you create a résumé, you don’t tell the whole truth. You only tell the good parts, the skills and accomplishments that qualified you for your present goal. You’re not hiding the truth when you leave out the various forks in the road and side trips that you’ve taken in your life; you’re just getting to the point. And as you grow, you will take more side trips—that is, if you’re adventurous. And if you are reading this book, you probably have a penchant for adventure. It is not an easy business—it’s never easy to work for yourself, to wonder what job you will work on next, to work long and hard, and to have responsibility for your part of the project. But it is still the best career in the world.

All those trips you’ve taken won’t be wasted. The dead ends can teach you skills that will surprise you later. After the long hills…the potholes…even the crashes, you learn that you have experienced the worst that can happen, and you survived.

You meet people that turn up again later in your life. You find out you weren’t wasting your time fishing when you know the strengths of various monofilaments and where to find them. Your brief interest in embroidery, your study of perennial plants, your experience driving a motorcycle, your time in nursing school—they all come back to you in your styling career with some useful knowledge or skill. Because in this field you don’t only deal with fashion or gourmet food. You work for clients in such diverse enterprises as pet stores, window blind companies, software designers, nursing homes, fork lift manufacturers, or ice cream shops. The more you know, the better you will understand why they need a photograph taken and how it can help them sell their products.

So your “real life résumé” is mysterious at times and confusing at others. The older you get, the more you will accept your path and realize it was all really worth the trip.

MY BACKGROUND

I wish I had discovered styling earlier. I think I would have had a delightful adult life as a photo stylist. Instead, after finishing a fine arts degree, I put in thirteen years of waitressing, off and on. It was a job I could always find, with ready cash. At the same time I owned a house-plant store in Kent, Ohio, in the 1970s, the decade when young people were rediscovering their grandmothers’ house plants and placing them in macramé plant hangers. I was able to live for five years on an initial investment of $50 from my waitressing money, supporting quite a few employees as well.

I was a substitute art teacher in the Akron Public Schools. I sewed samples for a small designer in Venice, California. I constructed one-of-a-kind shirts for a Melrose Avenue boutique. I made custom lingerie for Trashy, a famous private-membership store in Los Angeles—but it was a small room in a shoe store at the time, and I had a sewing machine set up between the shelves in the stock room. I held a job in a fabric store. I worked part-time in a darkroom for my brother who was making copy prints of old photos. I started a mail-order t-shirt company with another woman. We sold sushi T-shirts from our ad in the now-defunct Wet Magazine in New York and Los Angeles. I designed the ad and didn’t even know I was doing graphic design. I drew the silkscreen design of the sushi by hand on seven sheets of tracing paper, which all fit together to print seven different colors. I sewed and marketed soft sculpture TVs and guitars out of satin.

A FEW DEAD ENDS

If all of this sounds like I flitted from success to success, it is not true. There were lots of dead ends. That is why the waitress skills kept coming in handy. The economy in Northeastern Ohio grew steadily bleaker in the late 1970s. I gave up on the beloved plant store. California beckoned me, as it did many of my generation and I found myself in luxurious Montecito, near Santa Barbara. It was the home of a rock star friend and I was able to camp there in a guest room for three months—too long. It is not as it sounds. I literally spent my last dime while helping his wife shop for antique furniture with royalties from a major album. I found another waitress job and then the lingerie opportunity in Los Angeles. I left that job to start my own line of silk lingerie, Suzy, which I took to Beverly Hills boutiques. I didn’t get a single order. It was around that time that I met a photographer from Kent who shot for “girlie” magazines. He told me there are people whose job it is to actually shop for the props and other items that are used in photo shoots. A stylist! I was amazed but never imagined it would later be my profession. First I had a different road to travel.

THE LONG ROAD

I found a waitress job in a jazz club in West Los Angeles. I spent my days roller-skating at Venice Beach and worked at Snooky’s at night. It was the best job I’d ever had. There were famous musicians playing and a real nightclub atmosphere. The cash was good and my boss, Gary Cox, became my husband. We fell madly and truly in love, and I left my job to stay home and be a newlywed. Eventually I got serious and started to face the idea that I was about to have a child who was going to need my support and I didn’t even have a sensible career yet!

After my daughter was born, she enthralled me. Fortunately, I didn’t have to leave her and go to work full-time like many mothers do. I did want to do something, though, and worked part-time at a day-care center where we could be together. At night I parked cars for an all-women valet parking service. What a contrast!

Finally, when Elizabeth was three, I found the career I’d been looking for and that career led me to styling. I became a graphic designer. When I was in art school, “commercial art,” as it was known then, was somewhat repugnant. It was “selling out.” We all wanted to be artists and had no idea how that might support us. The art department didn’t offer much practical help.

THE FLORIDA YEARS

We had moved to St. Petersburg, Florida. Gary worked in developing property, and I was hired by one of those chains of TV and appliance companies that place a big ad in the newspaper several times a week with lots of little boxes showing all the microwaves, refrigerators, and televisions, and their prices. I sketched out the ads and the newspapers produced them. The company advertised “Christmas in July,” and I got to be involved in a TV production. The owner was dressed as Santa and was sitting in a sleigh with a group of children, including my own darling daughter. While helping him with his costume, I searched for a pillow to fill in the jacket. I found a throw pillow in his office that was embroidered with a Jewish star and used that. It was my first real styling experience and I enjoyed the irony.

After another graphic design job, I was familiar with the tools of the trade, an X-Acto® knife, T-square, triangle, and waxing roller. We sent copy to typesetters and printed halftone photos in the darkroom. When I was hired, it was assumed I knew the basics of graphic design, having done all those complex ads, but my lack of experience with these tools was nearly my undoing. Luckily, my coworkers trained me, and I repaid them by going out on my own after a year. (I’m being facetious, of course.) Now I was getting somewhere. I had clients and loved the process of graphics, designing ads, brochures, and catalogs.

ONE STEP CLOSER TO STYLING

Next, we moved to Portland, Oregon, so my husband could continue his equally indirect career path. He had returned to the field of education and was hired as a counselor in a middle school. I found a freelance position with a major catalog company, Norm Thompson. I liked being there and they liked me. I was hired just as computers were being introduced. The computer training was hard—we were all pretty attached to our X-Acto knives.

Soon the company had cutbacks due to postal increases (we’ll talk i...