Two weeks ago I had a great time photographing Los Angeles-based VJ and video artist Jesse Nikette. I first met Jesse as he was standing in a dark doorway on Market Street, wearing hot pink glasses reminiscent of Star Trek’s Geordi LaForge (I had to look that up) and jamming on a silent piano guitar that, rather than play music, controlled video projections being thrown on the wall across the street. Photos from that encounter, which happened while he was participating in the Venice Art Crawl, are a few posts back. After that night I invited him over to shoot some portraits that incorporated his video creations. I wanted to shoot him because I thought his work was interesting and I have a few ideas about a series of portraits on local artists. On the night of the shoot he brought over his gear, which included a laptop, a high-quality video projector and a few components I’ll, for lack of a better term, call thingamajigs, and we spent a good hour or two throwing up different projections and figuring out ways to incorporate him into the patterns. Most of his work was actually very colorful, and we even used a smoke machine at one point to cut across the light rays, but this one stood out the most to me for its graphic quality as well as his stance. It’s always fun shooting portraits just for the sake of doing it. It’s fun having the freedom to create without any guidelines and I’m almost always happy with the results. If you want to see more of Jesse’s work and learn a lot about video art and projection mapping in general, definitely check out his site, www.jessenikette.com!
totally cool use of shadow!