Don’t Expect Him to Stick with the Plan

The first casualty of Giuliano Bekor’s photography is the plan. When you hire him, you can expect passion and complete dedication to his work; certainly, also expect a detailed imagination, and great sense for the mixture between high fashion and humor. But do not expect him to stick to the plan, whatever you thought that was.

“Nothing’s really set until you’re actually doing it,” says Giuliano, who is now in his 40s, but has been shooting in Los Angeles and around the world since he was a child. His commercial photos—known for their high fashion, sharp wit and surreal emotional energy—have been published in prestigious magazines such as Vanity Fair, Elle, Harpers Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Glamour, Time, People and InStyle.

His subjects, many of whom are celebrities, have included Adrien Brody, Paris Hilton, Jim Carrey, Jessica Alba, Mary J. Blige and Snoop Dogg.
In creating images that stay with you long after you’ve stopped looking at them, it is impulse and flexibility that are absolutely paramount to Giiliano’s work.

Trendsetting Tennis
Paris Hilton discovered this the hard way. On his website, Giuliano displays a series of fashion shots of Hilton on a tennis court. She’s wearing a voluminous red dress of vertiginous fashion, pushing a lawn mower over the court.

She’s beautiful, the dress is amazing and the lighting is pristine. It’s what you’d expect from an accomplished high fashion photographer. And still, the set is not at all what she thought it would be when she arrived that morning.

Originally, the tennis court shoot was supposed to be in a mansion with portraits, grand furniture and signifiers of wealth in abundance. The background was slated as classic, faux-Victorian.

Giuliano was told the mansion was beautiful, with a tremendous number of things that could easily be used as photo backdrops. He arrived at the house the morning of the shoot and immediately knew it wouldn’t work at all. He would have to build a set somewhere else—and quickly. In a pinch, he moved the shoot outside to the tennis court. He and his crew put up a background, lighting and grabbed some nearby props.

The last minute change tested the other crucial aspect of his work: his relationship with the model.

“If you don’t have the respect—the trust—you will not be able to lead them where you want to go,” Giuliano says.

“Still photos are unforgiving, unlike motion photography. People spend time gazing at pictures and the shots offer a lot of detail. That makes mistakes very obvious,” he continues. “With motion photography, mistakes are harder to see and easier to hide.”

According to Giuliano, so many models come to a shoot terrified, worried that the slightest defect will be damaging to their careers if the still pictures aren’t perfect. This makes the first Polaroid you give them crucial. If it’s not sterling, the model’s confidence dips and the shoot degrades.

That said, hand them the “first, best Polaroid you’ve ever done in your life,” Giuliano says. And from there on out, be flexible when you come on scene and things are not as you wanted. They never are, he says.

Self-schooling
Giuliano started taking pictures when he was a child and came to it professionally by accident. He was working as a DJ and while visiting New York in 1984, he was hired to work at a shoot. He saw the photographer in action and it changed his life. “This is what I want to be,” he thought. “This is what I want to do.”

He returned to Europe after only a year—his mother is Italian and his father is Israeli. He traveled extensively throughout the continent shooting, taking any job he could get. Giuliano moved to Los Angeles in 1988. Having once attended photography school for only a week, he says he has always learned more “by doing.”

Light it up
Giuliano started with a 4 x 5 camera and a certain amazement at “the magic of what light can do to something that looks so simple.”

He is now sponsored by Phase One and shoots with a Hasselblad 645 H, using 50, 80, 100 and 150mm lenses, depending on the shoot.

Giuliano considers the quality of digital images to be identical to film, but for him, equipment pales in importance to technique. “It’s all about the way you light the subjects,” he says. What’s clear in his images is that lighting is perfected and his subjects are luminous, displaying only their beautiful qualities.

Playing with Perception
Giuliano does quite a bit of set building, so he’s a master at using perspective to enlarge spaces and sets. He can make a 10 x 12-foot area look 30 x 40. And he’s big on detail. He wants viewers to see, hear, smell, taste and even feel his work. “The more elements you use, the better the shot,” Giuliano says.

Ready, SET, Go
As an example of using elements to his advantage, Giuliano’s shoot with actress Alicia Witt (left) incorporates butterflies, a hot pink dress and a swing. Envisioning another fantasy-style shoot, similar to Hilton’s, he used a swing set he found outside the old Victorian house and bold colors. Choosing to work outside the house because it gave him more control, Giuliano promised Alicia that “it would be the best shoot she ever did,” something he promises to every subject in fact.  

The Way They Are
Giuliano likes to do all his photo editing in-camera, on set. He’ll take the face and the body he’s given to work with, he says. They won’t be digitally altered after the shoot.

Although he’ll use a computer to go after the occasional blemish or wrinkle or dust, “People are beautiful the way they are,” Giuliano affirms. “There’s only so much that a machine can fix. Most of the problems in a photograph happen on the set during the shoot, which is the only place they can be fixed, often times by the sort of relationship-building work no computer can replace.” He continues, “If a model isn’t happy, the computer can’t make them so. You can fix the look, but the face will still be uncomfortable.”

Influences and Advice
Giuliano lists famous fashion photographer Richard Avedon as his most significant influence, and calls film director Stanley Kubrick “a genius with light.” Beyond that, he admires photographers Patrick Demarchelier, Helmet Newton and Tim Walker.

And Giuliano has some influential advice of his own for photographers and clients: Don’t obsess too much over choosing a site for your shoot. As evidenced by his shoots with Hilton and Witt, he can make anything possible.

“You’ve got to be open-minded. You can shoot anywhere,” he says. “You just need to really look. When you really look, you see.”
Also, he advises focusing on your client and their shoot completely. It may sound cliché, but Giuliano gives 150 percent. He’s the first person on the set the morning of the shoot and the last to leave. He gives everything a five-star treatment. Great food and great accommodations make for a great project.

“I treat it like it’s my first and my last shoot I will ever do in my life, and that means I’m giving it my all.”

Beyond that, Giuliano admits that he doesn’t concentrate much on the business side of photography. He takes pictures all the time, whether or not he’s got a job. (His website represents only a very small body of his work.) Shares Giuliano, “When you do creative 100 percent of the time, there’s nothing left for anything else.”

Relying on a very small staff—three in his studio and an agent in New York—on set Giuliano tries to keep the number of bodies to a minimum. Usually there’s only two or three people helping at most, so he can move quickly.
The final and most important advice he has to offer? “Shooters should treat the profession like it is a part of them. It’s got to be an adventure,” he says. “It’s not a job, it’s part of your life.” To see more of Giuliano Bekor’s imagery, visit his website at www.giulianobekor.com.

Chris George’s work has appeared in a variety of magazines, including fast food and sign trade magazines. Most of his professional life has been spent in newspapers, including The Bakersfield Californian and the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, in Cheyenne, WY. He’s currently the managing editor for the Tehachapi News, in Tehachapi, CA.