Born and raised in Flint, Michigan, Ogden studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving to New York City. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, working and traveling frequently on assignment. His photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Rolling Stone, W, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, Vogue, Teen Vogue, Details, New York Magazine, Men’s Journal, Interview, Glamour, Spin, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine, as well as advertising for USA, ABC, A&E, Turner, Fox, Syfy, Sleuth, and the CW television networks, Discovery Channel, Nissan, Nike, Sean John, Atlantic Records, Sony Music, Warner Bros Records, RCA Records, Miramax and Paramount Pictures. Looking at an Eric Ogden image is a lot like looking at an independent film. He favors mysterious, atmospheric illumination. His portraits of actors, musicians and athletes are sometimes illuminated by nothing more than a flickering television screen, the embers at the end of a cigarette, the puddle of light spilling from an open refrigerator or the glow of a red traffic light at night and a bit of orange from a flashing “Don’t Walk” signal. “I don’t like to overlight my images,” he explains. “I think it destroys the mood. Shadows in a picture can be like another character in the story.” Ogden, a boyish-looking 34-year-old who resides in Manhattan but retains the low-key Midwest style of his hometown of Flint, Michigan, is an intuitive lighter, a photographer who courts the “happy accident.” Even when Ogden resorts to more traditional lighting tools, he uses them in unorthodox ways. How many celebrity portrait photographers use an Elinchrome Octabank tabled above a subject’s head, for example, to replicate the brooding lighting on Marlon Brando’s face made famous by cinematographer Gordon Willis in The Godfather? That was Ogden’s inspiration for a photo of Matthew McConaughey. Whether he’s shooting Pearl Jam or Pierce Brosnan, Ogden brings a cinematic quality to his images, intimations of an ongoing drama. In every shot, you’ll find a story lurking in the shadows. Unlike the bold, heroic, brightly lit celebrity portraits so popular with magazine editors in recent years, Ogden’s portraits of subjects such as Ralph Fiennes, Kevin Bacon, Mia Farrow or Anderson Cooper and others are contemplative, luring the viewer in rather than grabbing your attention. Visual storytelling seems to be woven into Ogden’s DNA. As soon as he could hold a pencil, he began drawing. As soon as he could write, he began stringing words together into stories. He even dabbled in music, playing, he says, “a lot of instruments not very well.” He devoted a considerable amount of time and energy during his high school years to conceiving and shooting low-budget videos with his friends. “We loved the fact that we could take a video camera anywhere and create these wild stories,” Ogden confides. “We’d do our own stunts and put in music that we liked. It was a very satisfying thing to do.” As a fine arts major at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, he took life drawing classes, performed in a series of bands and made short films. During his sophomore year, he enrolled in a photo class, which “opened up a whole new world.” By the time he graduated in 1994, Ogden had dreams of becoming a photographer, a filmmaker or an illustrator, or maybe all three. He was sure about one thing: He needed to be in New York or Los Angeles to be successful. On the advice of family and friends?who told the young art school graduate that his personality was definitely “more New York than L.A.”?the 22-year-old decamped to Manhattan, where he moved into a friend’s “filthy, cockroach-infested, sixth-floor walk-up on the West Side.” He adds, “But I was excited to be in New York; I thought it was romantic.” One day, while returning from a job assisting a wedding photographer, Ogden happened to pass by the set of a movie director Spike Lee was filming in Brooklyn. “I walked right onto the set and kept striking up conversations with people until somebody gave me a phone number,” he recalls. “Then I called every day for a week until I got a few days of work as a production assistant. I was that crazy, that persistent…” For more information or to get in touch with Eric just visit his website below the pictures.
www.ericogden.com
