Celebrity
Editorial portraits, campaign imagery, album covers, and entertainment-marketing portraiture for studios, streamers, record labels, and talent representation. Past work has included sessions with Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, Bebe Rexha, Ludacris, Charlie Puth, Keith Urban, Lindsey Stirling, and the casts of major TV and film campaigns.
Sessions are run with the calm and adaptability built from 15+ years inside campaign production — efficient with talent time, technically consistent across rapid concept changes, comfortable directing under executive review timelines, and prepared with lighting setups that can pivot quickly. Pre-production consultation, on-set capture (studio or location), tethered review with the creative team, retouching oversight, and multi-platform delivery are all part of a standard engagement.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of celebrity photography do you shoot?
Editorial portraits, campaign imagery, album covers, and entertainment-marketing portraiture for studios, streamers, record labels, and talent representation.
How do you approach celebrity portrait sessions?
With the calm and adaptability built from 15+ years inside campaign production. Efficient with talent time, technically consistent across rapid concept changes, comfortable directing under executive review timelines, and prepared with lighting setups that can pivot quickly.
What’s included in a celebrity portrait engagement?
Pre-production consultation, on-set capture (studio or location), tethered review with the creative team, retouching oversight, multi-platform delivery (print, social, streaming, billboard), and asset organization for downstream campaign use. in Los Angeles
One-person operation
I work lean by design. No ensemble crew, no rental theater, no lighting kit chosen because it photographs well in the BTS reel. Every lighting choice has a job. Capture One tethered, intentional setup, compositing-ready capture from frame one.
Reasonable pricing comes out of that. You pay for the work, not the production size.
Fast without losing quality. I came up working with multiple art directors giving different notes at the same time. You learn to change lighting style in minutes, sometimes seconds. The shoot keeps moving when the brief shifts.
Journal: The Photograph Is Never Just the Photograph
A memoir about Sonita Alizadeh, rural Utah, and what photography actually is.
Every January I go to the Sundance Film Festival. If you have been you know what it looks like. Park City in the middle of winter. Snow on the boots. Coffee going cold between screenings. The specific tiredness of watching four films in a day and still choosing a fifth. Half your conversations happen in line for something and the other half happen in someone's rental car on the drive between venues.
The thing about Sundance that surprises people who have not been is how little you know about the films going in. Most of them have no trailers. Some have no posters. You pick based on a paragraph in the program guide and a whisper from a friend who saw an earlier screening. You show up not knowing whether the next hundred minutes will disappear from your memory the next day, or follow you home for a decade.
The year I saw Sonita, everyone was talking about it. Nobody could explain why. That is not a figure of speech. I asked several people what the documentary was about and every one of them stalled on the answer.
"You just have to see it."
"It gets you."
"I cannot describe it, just go."
So I went.
The film
Sonita is a documentary about a young Afghan woman named Sonita Alizadeh. She had left Afghanistan as a child. She was living in Iran without papers, cleaning offices, going to school in the evenings, and writing rap songs when she was supposed to be doing homework. Her mother wanted to sell her into marriage. Her mother was not evil. Her mother was operating inside the economics of a system that treated a daughter's marriage as a family transaction. The going rate for Sonita, at the point where the film begins, was nine thousand dollars.
Sonita is an Afghan rapper and an Afghan activist and a teenager who liked hamburgers and had a laugh that tipped her whole head back. She wrote a song called Brides for Sale. She recorded a music video in secret. The video reached the wrong people, or the right people depending on how you want to tell the story, and eventually reached a scholarship at Wasatch Academy, an international boarding school in a small town in the middle of Utah.
I sat in that theater with my hands over my mouth. I was crying and I did not know I was crying until my scarf was wet.
I have Middle Eastern roots. Iranian. My family came out of a similar cultural world and none of us had faced anything remotely like what she was facing on the screen, but the language, the intonation of her mother's voice, the pattern of the family dynamics, all of it registered somewhere I do not usually let anything register. I was not watching a documentary. I was watching my own diasporic imagination in a body that had had to fight harder than I had ever had to fight.
The plane
Near the end of the film there is a shot of a plane. Sonita is on it. She is leaving Iran and coming to the United States. She is going to Utah for school and for a scholarship and for a future that had not been available to her six months before the plane took off. The camera holds on her face and then on the window and then on the runway and then the plane lands in Utah.
The theater erupted.
I have been to a lot of screenings in a lot of rooms and I have heard a lot of applause. The applause in that theater was different. It was not applause for the filmmakers. It was not applause for the craft. It was applause for a human being who had survived something none of us in the room could really imagine, and had gotten another chance at her own life.
I could not stop thinking about that applause for weeks.
The Facebook message
I flew back to Los Angeles and went back to my regular work. Entertainment marketing photography, celebrity portrait sessions, editorial commissions. The kind of work I had been doing for a decade at that point. It is meaningful work and I am grateful for it, but it is engineered work. It has briefs and deliverables and executive review processes. It has a shape.
Sonita would not leave my head.
At some point I searched for her on Facebook.
I sent her a message. I introduced myself. I told her I was a photographer who worked in entertainment marketing and portraiture, that I had seen her film at Sundance, that I was of Middle Eastern origin, and that her story had done something to me that I did not have language for. I told her I was not writing to pitch a campaign or offer a commercial project. I told her I would love to make portraits of her, one human to another, if that ever felt right.
That was it. Five paragraphs. No agenda beyond honesty.
She wrote back.
Deema
The person I called first was Deema Alansari. Deema is an art director I had worked with for years on campaign photography, and she is one of the sharpest visual minds I know. Her taste is a real thing.
I wanted her.
I wanted her because I knew she would understand. I did not have to explain why this trip mattered. I did not have to justify why we were flying to a small town in Utah to make a portrait of a documentary subject with no client and no budget and no downstream deliverable. Deema said yes and started asking about styling and lighting and where we would sleep. That was the whole conversation.
We got on a plane.
Mount Pleasant
Wasatch Academy is a boarding school in a town called Mount Pleasant, Utah. Mount Pleasant is inside the Sanpete Valley, which is a long narrow valley in central Utah with the Wasatch Range on one side and the San Pitch Mountains on the other. The town sits at around 6,000 feet of elevation, which means the light is thin and the air is thin and the sky feels closer than it is anywhere in Los Angeles.
Wasatch Academy was founded in 1875. That is not a typo. Six years before Wyatt Earp arrived at Tombstone. Twenty-five years before the automobile became a commercial product. The school has been operating longer than the state of Utah has been a state. Today it draws students from more than thirty-five countries, which means when you walk through the campus you see flags representing dozens of nations. Chinese students, Ethiopian students, students from Kazakhstan and Belarus and Vietnam and Brazil. And in the middle of all of it, that year, a young Afghan woman who had made it to Mount Pleasant on the strength of her voice.
I do not know how to explain what it feels like to walk through a campus like that. You are in a town of maybe three thousand people, surrounded on all sides by mountains and quiet, and you are also somehow inside a small United Nations. It is one of the most disorienting things I have ever experienced, in the good way.
The drive
I am from Los Angeles. Los Angeles is loud. Los Angeles is everyone-is-doing-something-else while doing something with you. Los Angeles is a city where the rear-view mirror gets more use than the horizon.
Central Utah is the opposite of that.
The road from Salt Lake to Mount Pleasant goes past dry lakebeds and cattle fields and small towns with a single stoplight. The sky opens up around you and does not close again for the entire drive. There are hours where the only other vehicles are pickup trucks moving slowly in the opposite direction, and their drivers all lift a hand as they pass. Not a wave. Just a lift of two fingers off the wheel. Everyone does it. I do not know when I noticed I was doing it back.
By the time we pulled up to the academy the light was doing the thing it does at that altitude in that season, where the shadows are long and the highlights are almost blue and everything looks like a Wyeth painting.
Meeting
Meeting Sonita was one of the least awkward introductions I have had with a subject in fifteen years of doing this work. I have photographed celebrities. I have photographed executives. I have photographed music artists and film cast members and product lines. Almost every session starts with a small stiff dance where the photographer tries to establish trust and the subject tries to figure out whether the photographer is safe to trust.
With Sonita there was no dance.
She hugged us. She asked what we had eaten on the drive. She wanted to know how long the flight was. She wanted to know how far Los Angeles was from Iran on a map. She wanted to know if I had ever been to Herat. We talked about family for the first half hour. My grandfather. Her aunt. The specific texture of a Persian mother's disapproval. She laughed like a person who had earned the right to laugh at everything.
At some point during that first afternoon she looked at me with something like concern and asked why I was not married. When I told her I was not sure, she declared that she was going to find me a wife. She said this with the seriousness of a professional matchmaker, and then broke into the laugh that tips her whole head back.
Think about that for a second. A young woman who had run from a forced marriage now sitting in a Utah boarding-school common room enthusiastically trying to arrange one for me. She did not see the irony. Or she saw it perfectly and thought it was funny. I still do not know which. Either answer is generous.
Her favorite meal was a hamburger. I do not know why I remember that, or why I think it belongs in this story, but it does.
The second day
Something had shifted overnight.
I do not know what she saw in the frames from day one, but by the time we started day two Sonita was a completely different collaborator. She was arriving at each new location with an idea. She was suggesting poses. She was pointing to a wall or a stairwell or an open field and saying we should try there. She had opinions about her own hijab, about how it should fall, about which angles gave her the presence she wanted.
She was directing.
Sonita became a second engine. She was seventeen or eighteen at the time. I have worked with celebrities in their forties who did not have half her instinct for the camera.
The storm
The Sanpete Valley in the shoulder seasons is famous for weather that changes on a five-minute schedule. The wind comes down off the Wasatch Range and turns the light in the fields into something entirely new every few minutes. Thunder rolls across the whole valley at once, not directional, just a low pressure that arrives from every direction. Sun. Rain. Sun. Wind. Rain.
We were shooting outside when the storm caught us.
The right move for a normal shoot would have been to pack up. But we had two days and we had a partner who was suddenly all in on the work and we had a landscape doing the most cinematic thing a landscape can do. So we shot anyway.
Deema stopped being an art director. She became my light stand. She was running through fields in the rain holding a strobe on a boom, one hand on the modifier, the other on the pack, soaked through in the first ten minutes and still moving. She never complained. Not once.
One of Sonita's friends came out with us that second day. She wanted to learn photography. By the end of the shoot she was carrying equipment, moving stands, taking notes. And at one point in a windy field between two long showers, she lifted Sonita's hijab into the air by exactly the right amount, at exactly the right moment, so that the fabric could catch the wind and hold for one frame.
Meanwhile I was face down in mud trying to get an angle.
We were, all four of us, working. Nobody was performing a role. Nobody was doing what their job title said they should be doing. Everyone was doing what the photograph needed at that specific second. That is the most useful definition of a working team I have ever encountered.
The frame we made in that field has been published internationally, including editorial contexts such as Pristine Magazine. It is the image people ask about when they see my celebrity portrait work. But I do not think of it as one of my photographs. I think of it as a photograph the whole valley helped make.
The strangers
Something happened almost every time we pulled the car over to shoot on the road.
We would find a fence line, or a wheat field, or a bend in a canyon that looked right, and I would get out and start setting up. Within a few minutes a pickup truck would slow down. Sometimes it stopped completely. The window would come down.
Coming from Los Angeles, both Deema and I made the same assumption every time. We assumed the driver was about to ask us what we were doing on their land, or tell us we could not park there.
That is not what happened.
Every single time, the driver asked if we were okay. If we needed help. If we had run out of gas. If we needed water. Every single time, without exception, the reason a stranger stopped their truck in the rain on a Utah county road was to check on us.
I could feel my brain working to catch up. The Los Angeles part of me kept scanning for the angle, the pitch, the transaction. There was not one. There was just a person in a truck who had seen a car pulled over in the rain, and their reflex was to make sure the humans inside it were fine.
I did some reading later about the Sanpete Valley. It has been settled since the mid-1800s by communities whose value system was built around neighborliness in a way most modern American places have long since lost. In rural Utah, checking on a stranded stranger is not virtue. It is default. It is the thing you were raised to do without thinking about it. It is the thing you are still doing at eighty because your mother did it and her mother did it.
What photography actually is
I have been doing this for fifteen years. I have shot key art for HBO and Universal and Sony and Netflix and YouTube Originals. I have made images that ended up on the sides of buildings in cities I have never been to.
Sonita's project did not fit inside any of that. There was no client. No brief. No approval process. No downstream media buy. Just a Facebook message and a boarding school in central Utah and a young woman who had already survived more than most people I know and a team of two friends who agreed to go on the trip because I asked them to.
What I learned there is something I have been trying to say back to myself in different ways ever since.
A camera records light. Photographs are actually made by people.
The Sundance audience clapping in that dark theater is part of the photograph. The Facebook message is part of the photograph. Sonita's willingness to reply is part of the photograph. Deema getting on a plane is part of the photograph. Wasatch Academy trusting two strangers with their student is part of the photograph. Sonita's friend lifting the hijab into the wind is part of the photograph. The rain is part of the photograph. The mud is part of the photograph. Sonita's laugh is part of the photograph. Every truck that pulled over to check on us is part of the photograph.
The frame I put on the wall of my studio is the last one percent of a stack of choices that mostly happened before the shutter opened.
This is the thing I try to remember on every commercial shoot I have done since. When I am on a studio lot in Los Angeles working on a franchise campaign and there are twenty people on set and the number of variables is in the hundreds and I feel the pressure to make the hero image happen right now, I remember Sonita in the field in the rain, and I remember that the image was already being made months earlier by people who did not know they were making it.
Every photograph, at every scale, is made this way. Documentary photography, editorial portrait photography, entertainment marketing photography, humanitarian photography, celebrity portrait photography, environmental portrait photography. All of it. There is no photograph without the whole net of humans who show up along the way.
Home
We flew back to Los Angeles on a Tuesday.
The processing of that shoot took months. I could not look at the frames without feeling every part of the trip. Deema in the rain. Sonita laughing at me for being unmarried. The strangers in the trucks. The plane landing at Sundance. The plane landing in Utah. My grandfather's voice inside my head every time Sonita spoke.
I do this work commercially. I make a living making campaign images for studios and streamers and record labels and I love the discipline of that work. This piece of writing is not an argument against commercial work. It is an argument for staying honest about what commercial work actually is. It is people making things with other people. It has always been that. The rest is just deliverables and infrastructure.
If any of this has landed for you, and you find yourself wanting to send someone a message you would normally talk yourself out of sending, send the message.
I sent one. It changed everything.
Related
Read the long-form piece on how entertainment marketing photography works: Inside the Hidden Machine.
Award-winning case studies: Game of Thrones · Catfish · Whiplash.
Related services: Key Art Photography · Entertainment Marketing.