Respect The Shooter: Douglas Friedman

Douglas Friedman is known for his glossy photographs, shooting the likes of Dontalla Versace, Donald Trump, Tommy Hilfiger and Amy Poehler, but, with his new self-produced publication released, titled The Facinator, it’s all about the gritty photographs he documents on his iPhone. With Volume 1 already released, Friedman gave Life+Times some exclusive images from next year’s release, as well as some insight into his latest personal project.

Life+Times: What’s behind the name The Facinator?
Douglas Friedman: I was at a wedding in London a few years back, and so many of the women came to the church ceremony with these extravagant little head pieces fastened to their hair. Some of them were so wild and complicated and fantastic. It was difficult to draw my attention away form them. I was told they were called Fascinators. It didn’t take more that a few seconds for me to decide to name my new website The Facinator. I dropped the “s” for no other reason than the correct spelling was not available as a domain name. I think I like it better misspelled.

L+T: Why did you decide to launch this publication?
DF: I needed an outlet for all of this work I had been producing. Most of my commercial work is glamorous and glossy and produced and hyper styled; I wanted to show people a raw and loose side to my work. The intention, in the beginning, was a small “digest” of the images…but it quickly expanded to 200 pages. It was important to experiment with a process that allowed me to do everything on my own; I shot the pictures, laid them out, captioned them, designed the cover, and published this book on my own. It was satisfying.

L+T: What is the mission behind it?
DF: This was an exercise in creativity. It was never intended to be bought, sold or marketed. But you can’t control everything, and this project has some legs to it. The project sells and pays for itself. Its not driven by profit, as the entire first run was given away as a gift.

L+T: Over 3,000 photographs, how did you make your edits?
DF: This was a difficult process in the beginning. I threw all the images into a folder, and then opened them all up as a grid across three enormous computer monitors. They were tiny, and I started to see patterns emerging in color and shape (not content). I started organizing based on this, and then as the groupings began to form, I went back and started making adjustments and layouts based on content.

L+T: You have 12 different covers . Why did you decide to choose these 12 images?
DF: I originally had one cover chosen, and the day before I went to press I realized that a bare woman’s breast might be offensive to some people. So I needed to make two covers. Well I quickly realized that if I was going to print 2 different versions, that it would be just as easy to make 15. So I ended up making 15 different versions off The Facinator, and then printing 12 of them.