Management! by! portraiture!

Welcome to my management style, which is called…MANAGEMENT BY PORTRAITURE!

STEP ONE: Engage Keith Bridges Media. Could be somebody else, I guess, but Keith is the one who says “pick a place you like, you should like the place we shoot, cuz that’ll come through in the photos.” He tells you, “look normal, look like yourselves or it’ll be weird when you show up for whatever you applied for and you don’t look like your headshot.” Plus, many other things that make it seem the most normal thing in the world, some weeknight, to stand in Stephanie’s driveway smiling and smiling.

STEP TWO. Show up. Everybody show up after a long day, no exceptional primping. Accidentally coordinated necklines a BONUS!!!

STEP THREE: Now. Now comes the management piece. Tell your team: “We will all now apply for something that requires a professional headshot.”

Can be anything. Solo exhibition of your profoundly emotive photos of organic vegetables? Yes. Solo exhibition of your wrenchingly wrenching sculptures somewhere other than the gallery where you work? Yes yes.

Leader of a movement to replace the custom of coloring gray hair with the new custom of weaving in dreadlocks made from the felted shearings of an equally-or-more-graying alpaca from Golden Meadow Alpacas? [Which is kind of near Amboy, a beautiful drive, I got a speed warning last time and the cop was like “ma’am is there some reason for the speed” and I’m like “well it’s really pretty out here and I was just really enjoying myself.”]

Anyway. Yes. This is the intended focal point of my personal headshot. “Leader of a movement” doesn’t have an application process requiring a portrait but I’m not concerned about that right now.

Pick your thing. An exhibition, an audition, a job you don’t hate, a movement (but not my movement, mine is taken). You have options. For starters, though, get the shots. Look like yourself. Get the shots and then do the thing it forces you to do.

A portrait gives you more information than you can stand, sometimes. Because it’s not your own (possibly warped) version of you, it’s actual-you, through the nonfilter of generous human vision and talent. So. Here is Keith’s stuff.