When Catalina Kulczar got word from Louise Mason, the art director at the UK-based DIY Magazine, that the music publication wanted her to shoot October’s cover story featuring experimental rock musician Annie Clark (better known by her stage name, St. Vincent), the Brooklyn-based photographer knew she wanted to create something beautiful, but also get at least a little weird—that is, create portraits that would make you look twice.

The shoot was to take place at her studio in The Pencil Factory building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and knowing she had 45 minutes to do it, Kulczar and her partner Juan Miguel Marin began to brainstorm ideas. They came up with five different setups and made scrupulous notes on camera settings and placements so that come shooting day, her studio floor was marked for tripods and light stands, and she was ready to go.

“Annie was a delightful person to work with,” Kulczar says. “She walked into the studio and asked what my vision was for the shoot. When I shared the test shots, she remarked, ‘That’s bitchin’.’ During the shoot, she requested we turn the laptop her way so she could see the images and make adjustments in real time. This was helpful—she had some ideas and variations to the shots we created, and it gave the shoot a feeling of a true collaboration.”

Kulczar’s vision for this particular image was rooted in color play and in-camera effects. She set up Savage Background’s 9-foot Orange no. 24 backdrop and had her two assistants, Amber Estherpeace Doerr and Mélanie Duault, shine high-powered LED flashes into her lens. “As you’d imagine, the effect of shining lights directly into a lens is like looking into the sun—not something you should do without proper gear and protection,” Kulczar notes. “Amber stood about 6 feet away from me, camera left, holding an LED with an orange gel, while Mélanie stood camera right about 4 feet away holding an LED covered with a purple gel. There was also a medium softbox camera left in the lowest possible power setting to give a little bit of fill on Annie’s face.”

The challenge here was focusing on Clark while Kulczar’s assistants were shining lights directly into her lens. But she found a solution: “I ended up focusing on Annie, then setting the lens to manual focus, then having the lights shine into the lens with me stepping away from the viewfinder while I clicked the shutter.”

(Shot on a Canon 5D Mark III and 50mm f/1.2 lens at f/2, 1/100th of a second and ISO 200; tethered into Capture One and edited in Lightroom.)

View more shots from this session and other new work from Kulczar here. Also, check out more Photos of the Day, and email [email protected] for submissions.