DC: Besides having a successful career in photography, you’re also a filmmaker and author. Share your creative process when making a film or writing a book compared to a photography session with a fashion model.
NB: Although very different from still photography both making films and writing books are also about storytelling -only the medium is different. I started making films first and went on to direct several commercials, documentaries, and videos for a whole host of clients. Similarly, to when I shoot a fashion editorial over 12 or so pages, I always story board my scenes out so that the whole crew knows and understands the story we are trying to convey and how to best set that scene up for success.
The books I wrote and illustrated, The Beauty Equation and Models Of Influence were both labors of love. The first was a self-help book designed to guide people to see the beauty in everyday life and themselves by encouraging them to appreciate their inner beauty attributes like compassion and confidence. Models Of Influence was a retrospective of the Fifty models I believed truly defined an era by making ground breaking changes to the business and to the beauty and fashion landscape. It went on to become a New York Times Best Seller. For each book I would basically lock myself in a room and write for several hours a day pouring all my thoughts on to pages and pages of diatribe which I then worked with a team of editors to make sense of. Unlike a photoshoot that is normally a one-day experience with perhaps a week of pre and post production, both movies and books takes months if not years to come to fruition. The results also last longer so are well worth the effort.