Seeing Red Model Bernadette Jurkowski surprised Rodney Smith by dramatically cutting her hair prior to this shoot, but he rarely needed an excuse to include the hat.
I always associated Rodney with hats after being inspired by The Hat Book, says Creative Director Janet Froelich remembering The New York Times Magazineāsthird āYear In Ideas ā issue. I called Rodney because this was an assignment that wouldnāt box him in.
If you look at the cover image, which had to be much more illustrative, there’s a picture of Bernadette with a book in her hand and a big Red Hat. Shot in the Rose Reading Room at the storied New York Public Library, the hat’s shape was reminiscent of all those studious library lamps illuminating every table. By donning her new accessory, Bernadette had the allure of a stylishly mysterious woman and it hid her shorn head.
The props were wonderful. In addition to the hat, we made about four of those books and they were really huge.
When I think about it, using the props that we developed together for the shoot was all part of his experimenting with color. I was able to give him a platform to shoot a little differently and I felt good about being a part of that growth, that new vision.
Rodney would transform the image by the way that he positioned things. They were part of Rodney’s marvelous centrality. It’s his understanding of what classic distance and depth perception does to image making. He knew that stuff intuitively.
He created a world thatās kind of timeless. And what I love about his photographs is that they populate that world, and you live in it for the time youāre looking at them.
Rodney’s work has always elevated to a place where you’re interested in it beyond its position in a magazine to illustrate a concept. Whether it’s art or not, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The art is in the uniqueness of Rodney’s sensibility.
Read about why Rodney placed hats on the heads of his subjects here.
