Fashion, Photography, Interiors, Food Laura McLaws Helms Fashion, Photography, Interiors, Food Laura McLaws Helms

Episode 29: Susan Wood

Susan Wood is a New Yorker born and bred. She started her career in the early 1950s, working in the lab at LIFE magazine before having her first photo published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1955. Over the subsequent decades, Susan photographed for everyone and truly across all genres. Fashion, interiors, portraits, food, travel, crafts, documentary, and movie stills—Susan did it all at a time when there were very few female photographers in the industry. Among the magazines she worked for were Vogue, New York Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Mademoiselle, People, LOOK, Good Housekeeping, and Glamour. We discuss her 60 year career, what it was like working as a female photographer at that time, her creative process, the many famous people she has photographed and much more.

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Photography, Art Laura McLaws Helms Photography, Art Laura McLaws Helms

Episode 25: Meryl Meisler

Meryl Meisler is an acclaimed photographer known for her street and documentary work. Meisler began photographing in the mid-70s, focusing on the Jewish community in her hometown on Long Island as well as the nightlife scene in NYC. After becoming an art and photography teacher at a public school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, she continued to shoot the world and people around her. Following her retirement in 2007 that she began to delve into her old, boxed-up contact sheets and negatives—revealing a New York that was long gone, captured in a totally individual and unique manner. Since then Meisler’s photographic career has had a renaissance; publishing three books of her photographs—centering mostly on Bushwick, disco and Long Island suburbia—and has participated in countless gallery exhibitions.

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Fashion, Photography, Art Laura McLaws Helms Fashion, Photography, Art Laura McLaws Helms

Episode 18: Robert Farber

I had the opportunity to chat with famed photographer Robert Farber in his Upper East Side studio. Rising to prominence as a nude and fashion photographer in the mid-to-late 1970s, by the late 1980s posters of his photos were everywhere and are a defining memory of that time. Robert developed his signature soft focus aesthetic in the early 1970s by experimenting with different films, filters and development processes with the goal of creating a painterly effect on film. A must listen if you interested in photography, Robert opens up about the many aspects of his career as well as the sometime difficulties of balancing this hectic lifestyle with a family.

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Fashion, Photography Laura McLaws Helms Fashion, Photography Laura McLaws Helms

Episode 15: Willie Christie

When I was in London in May I spent the afternoon with photographer and commercial director Willie Christie. A wonderfully gossipy conversation, Willie discusses his career from photo assistant to photographer to commercial director to screenwriter to today. Full of interesting stories and memories about his time as a fashion photographer in the 1970s when he was married to Grace Coddington and shooting primarily for British Vogue, Willie then went on to direct videos for Pink Floyd and have a highly successful commercial directing career that spanned decades.

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Fashion, Photography Laura McLaws Helms Fashion, Photography Laura McLaws Helms

Episode 13: Tony Vaccaro

Now 96, Tony Vaccaro is a legend in the photography world. Drafted into WWII at age 20, he brought his 35 mm camera with him to the frontlines in Europe—vividly capturing all aspects of an infantryman’s life: the chaos, the boredom, the destruction, the death. Tony stayed on in Europe after the war, documenting the reconstruction, before returning to New York where he established himself as a very in-demand fashion and celebrity photographer for Life and Look magazines. To all of his work he brought a love of symmetry and a deep humanity.

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