I photographed North Carolina beauty Reneesha McCoy for Marie Claire’s Beauty Roadshow feature. Love those freckles!
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Behind The Scenes at Joint Base Andrews for Washingtonian Magazine online
Kyle Gustafson, the web director for Washingtonian Magazine, called me up a few months ago with an interesting proposition. He wanted me to shoot behind the scenes at Joint Base Andrews and show the receiving process for the wounded warriors coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. The end result would be an online slideshow featuring my work. I just assumed it would be just a regular little online slideshow with the requisite little pictures, so I was surprised when I saw this. Now is that a great interface or what?! Major props to Kyle, who put this together special for Veteran’s Day and set up the access for me. It was a privilege to be allowed to shoot this process, which runs with dignified precision on a regular basis as the wounded are ferried home in giant planes.
Now for lots more pictures.
Stefani Rash and Rina Shah’s Workday Diaries for Marie Claire
I shot a two-part assignment for Marie Claire this summer that had me running up to Delaware as well as more familiar territory on Capitol Hill. The Workday Diaries feature is a regular section in the magazine which chronicles the 9-5 workdays of young women around the country. Day-in-the-life assignments are a bit of a specialty of mine, so I really enjoyed these shoots. I first spent the day with Stefani Rash who is a group sales executive with the Wilmington Blue Rocks, a minor league affiliate of the Kansas City Royals baseball team in Wilmington, DE. She does a little bit of everything around the stadium and it was exhausting to watch her run through a typical day on the job. Keep an eye out for her- she’s likely to end up running a major league team someday.
Rina Shah is an independent political consultant and the Communications Director for the Fred Karger presidential campaign. She’s based in Washington, DC, where she worked on Capitol Hill before striking out on her own this year. In the spirit of full-disclosure and to keep my j-card in good standing, I do have to say this entire day had to be treated like an extended portrait series. Not a single thing wasn’t set up. I would have loved to just shoot Ms. Shah doing her job as she would any other day, but thanks to deadline, bad scheduling and perhaps a lack of proper communication, the whole shoot was more of a representation of her typical day. That’s not to say there weren’t some real moments in the tableaux, the shoe-check being my favorite. I have a feeling that like Stefani, Rina will be one to keep an eye out for in the future. She’s one of the Republican Party’s best fresh faces I’ve seen in a while- and doesn’t she just look fabulous in that dress?
Dr. Brian Traynor for Genome Technology
I shot my second cover story for Genome Technology in October. They sent me to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD to photograph Dr. Bryan Traynor. He, along with his crack team of researchers, discovered genetic markers for ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. I love science and research and labs, so it was a fascinating assignment for me. The good doctor even taught me something pretty interesting about the human brain and how it can function during a photo shoot. Apparently, people use different parts of their brain for different types of smiles. If you’re being told to smile or are smiling just for the camera, you’re using one part, but you use a completely different part when you smile involuntarily- hence the magic of the genuine smile. It can’t be beat.
Dr. Traynor is seen here with a brand new machine that is much more powerful than its predecessors and is changing the face of genome research. He reckoned it’s so new that it hadn’t really been photographed outside the facility in which it was manufactured.
NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith for Fortune
DeMaurice Smith is the Executive Director of the NFL Players Association and is easily the funniest, sharpest person I’ve met in a very long time. I always have fun on my shoots (almost always) but this shoot was fun. He had the energy and enthusiasm of a truck full of toddlers. He also had a beautiful hat. I wish more people still wore hats like that.
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate for Esquire
Craig Fugate is the man redeeming the disgraced federal agency that is FEMA. We’ve come a long way from the notorious “heckuva job” his predecessor did with Hurricane Katrina. America keeps getting slammed with natural disasters and FEMA, rid of its cronies, steps up to the plate with determination each time.
After my father retired from a long career with the Coast Guard, he took a part-time gig with FEMA. He’s a disaster logistics specialist, so when mayhem descended upon the good citizens of America, he was exactly the kind of person you’d want helping to pick up the pieces. He assisted FEMA with a hurricane or two, and after September 11th, was one of the very first people on the very first flights to NYC where he did what he could. My father was very proud of his work with FEMA and he wore his FEMA hat as often as his Coast Guard hat. After Katrina, he couldn’t wear his FEMA hat anymore. Because of this, I was more disappointed than most to see how the agency had fallen. It’s not a glamorous agency like the FBI or CIA, but it’s at least as important as either. The country deserves the best disaster management agency it can get, because we’re unlikely to get a break from the mayhem anytime soon.
Mr. Fugate does not like to be photographed. He’s a true public servant who very obviously prefers to work behind the scenes. He came to DC from Florida, where he was Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. This is a fact that turned out to be the key to the entire shoot. When I started photographing him, he was as stiff and uncomfortable a subject as I’ve ever had. It was clear he was just HATING the shoot. I too hate to be photographed, so I do understand when my subjects get like this. My job, of course, is to make them comfortable. My job is to distract them from the abject misery of being photographed. I tried all my usual tactics, asked about his family, how he likes DC, what he likes to do when he’s not thinking about disasters. None of it was working. Then, I remembered the Florida connection. I asked him about Florida, and he practically melted. The man is a real Floridian and he misses it like crazy. Thanks to my seven-month internship at the St. Petersburg Times, I was able to riff with him on all things Sunshine State. When I mentioned that I had photographed Tropical Storm Fay, I got a lesson in how small the world is. Turns out we’d ridden together in the same vehicle with Gov. Christ during a tour of a flooded trailer park.
I really like the portrait that ran with the article (and my God, I love how big it ran) because I deliberately placed him between Florida and an approaching storm on the live-view map. Read the Esquire profile here.
Paul Equale for the Wall Street Journal
One of my favorite shoots this year started off rocky. It went from my editor telling me “you’ll have very little time to make a few portraits” to “wow, I just spent four hours with my subject and we had fun.”
Paul Equale is a true Washington Insider. He makes a living as a consultant with a lucrative side-job spinning his knowledge into actionable intelligence for Wall Street players. Check out the article here- it’s a great read.
We started off on the National Mall near the recently closed Washington Monument, made our way to Capitol Hill, and then dropped by one of Paul’s favorite watering holes for a drink, which led to a nice portrait. A lot of shop-talk takes place in bars like this around DC, so it was an appropriate venue for sure. For those of you wondering “did you have a drink, Melissa? Is that ok/ethical?” Hell yes, I had a drink. It’s the grown-up equivalent of breaking bread and I wish I had the same opportunity to do so with all of my subjects. Photo shoots can be very trying for most folks and what better way to take a break than to pull up a chair at a bar and trade stories over scotch? I had one drink, and yes, I paid for it myself. No breaches of ethics, kiddies.
After the bar break/shoot, Paul was completely on board with my next idea. It was a little stormy outside and getting darker and I wanted to go to the Tidal Basin to get some real nice moody pictures. We headed over to the Jefferson Memorial (my favorite) and went to town. I wish all my portrait subjects were as easy-going (and as full of amazing stories) as Paul. Good times.
Dr. Novin for the Wall Street Journal
I photographed Dr. Neil Novin for a disturbing story on the state of the Social Security Administration. The agency has a stable of doctors that review cases of the people who apply for federal disability benefits. This year, they told those doctors that the number of applicants was too great and in response, the Administration restructured the review process in such a way that it would be unlikely a case would be reviewed adequately. Dr. Novin took a stand and was fired. Read the article here.
What it’s All About
This.
This Year on the Road
I wasn’t on the road this year as much as last, but here are some frames from my travels through California, Wyoming and New York. Next year I’m looking at trips to China, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. I haven’t been out of the country in almost 4 years and it’s time to make up for that. If any of my readers overseas think I should visit their country and want to play host, shoot me an email. melissa@melissagolden.com
Melissa Golden
