Stockland Martel

What do you call business-related photography, the kind used in annual reports, business magazines, ad campaigns for companies like investment firms, etc.? Here at Stockland Martel, our shorthand term is corporate photography, and we think of it as portraits of executives, pictures of people out in the world dressed in business attire, shots of work environments (offices, labs, conference rooms with marker boards), and the like. But the genre, if you want to call it that, is actually much broader: Lifestyle, still life, travel, and food photography are all essential to business-related marketing and advertising campaigns.

In this post, Leslie Smolan of the New York City–based branding and design firm Carbone Smolan Agency, explains how her company (which she cofounded with Ken Carbone) uses photography to meet the needs of its clients. Leslie was kind enough to spend an hour on the phone with me for this post. What follows is a condensed version of our conversation, along with a look at several recent Carbone Smolan projects—from websites to branding materials to ad campaigns—where great photography was key.

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How the Carbone Smolan Agency uses photography.

At Carbone Smolan, we’ve always been very involved with photography and love it. We specialize in five different business sectors: law and financial services (Morgan Stanley has been a client for over a decade); real estate and hospitality (like the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group); photography & technology (we just developed and designed an app for Canon); art & design (we did the signage for the Musee du Louvre 30 years ago, and they still use it to this day); and food & lifestyle, which syncs up with our hospitality work (with companies like Aether Apparel). We bring an equal mix of content, strategy and art—photography!—to all of our projects.

In the food and lifestyle sector, for example, we just launched a new brand called SPE Certified, a certification program that recognizes restaurants that stand out in sourcing, preparing, and enhancing their dishes. It’s kind of like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The whole design system is based on an illustrative logo and lush, beautiful food photography—saturated, macro shots of fresh fruits and vegetables that really show the story of the brand.

In the corporate sector, we do a lot of work for law firms and financial services, and we use photography for their websites, but we stay away from typical headshots and business-suit imagery. Often, the biggest use of photography in this sector is for marketing financial services to individual investors and for recruiting. Photography is crucial for our work in hospitality. With more opportunities on the web, more customers use a hotel’s website as an editing and sorting device to choose where they want to stay, so photography is incredibly important.

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The role of stock photos.
We often use stock when the project calls for fewer images and more-diverse subject matter. For example, we recently did marketing materials for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney that targeted individual investors. We called these materials “life-cycle brochures.” They’re about managing your finances during a divorce, or how to plan your estate for your children. We very selectively purchased stock images and created composites so the photos told the right story and all showcased key design decisions we made: They needed to have a certain sky and horizon, etc. We originally tried to photograph the images we needed, but there were too many variables, so photo illustrations off of stock photography made more sense. They key to using stock photography well is that the images need to have a signature point of view—style is essential to building a brand—and that can be hard to find.

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How Carbone Smolan works with, and finds, photographers.
We hire photographers who have a signature style, so we know they’re going to deliver a certain look and feel. When it’s stock, we’re still looking for a very high level of photography—composition, color, lighting… Also, we do tend to manipulate the photos and integrate graphics on top of imagery to give the stories more meaning. We’re very strategic about art directing images, and we take great care in reproducing photography.

I’m picky—I definitely have my own sensibility and bring that to my projects. All of the designers at the agency have their own styles and sensibilities, and this comes through in how they tell our clients’ stories.

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On discovering photography.
If I see something I like, it all goes on my Pinterest page. From personal connections, many years in the business, and from designing the first five Day in the Life books, I know a lot of photographers from that world. [Note: Leslie’s husband is photographer Rodney Smith, and her brother is photographer Rick Smolan.] Ken [Carbone] and I have been together for 35 years, so we’ve worked with a whole range of photographers.

We’ve received tons of promos, and it takes a lot to excite me from those. The real talents with the high-quality work stand out. For instance, I got an email from Stockland Martel about a new food stylist, Victoria Granof. I remember the work well—it was really fantastic. Based on where Carbone Smolan is headed, we’re definitely interested in food photography.

I also love Carl Kleiner, who photographed the baking books for Ikea. Rodney does workshops, so I’ve met photographers who’ve come and studied with him. Like Heidi Lender. I love her work. It’s so creative and inventive and like nothing I’ve seen in a while.

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For our hospitality clients, I’m always looking for architectural photography and people who can make it feel like there’s a sense of life within them. I once hired Oberto Gili to shoot the newly renovated—this was many years ago—St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue. He brought in big movie lights and made it look like there was an abundance of natural light. I loved it.

I don’t look at photo blogs. I do look at photo shows, and I love judging competitions to see what’s out there. I’ve judged PDN competitions, and last year, I judged the design awards at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

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Advice for photographers promoting to Carbone Smolan.
A lot of photographers use a scattershot approach—they buy a list of contacts and just send out their promos. Specificity and targeting are important: They would do better if they understood what we did and tailored their promos to our interests. I’m not particularly fond of flat imagery or the on-camera flash look for portraits. I’m more of a classicist. I don’t really like the reportage style of portraiture, where the subjects look like they’re suffering or unhappy, either. I like photographs to make the world look better than it does—work that enhances the world.

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CASE STUDIES

Website for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group

“The Residences at Mandarin Oriental offer the best of both worlds: the comforts of a private home combined with the unsurpassed amenities and legendary service of the Mandarin brand. The website that CSA designed for this exclusive facet of the company features the company’s signature high aesthetic quality with lavish imagery of their international properties, amenities and benefits of ownership. The site features locations from exotic Marrakech to cosmopolitan London and provide an alluring glimpse of the possibilities of living the Mandarin Lifestyle.” (More info here.)

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We were lucky with this website: the Mandarin provided us with the imagery, shot by Melbourne-based award-winning photographer George Apostolidis, and it was incredibly beautiful, high style, and right on brand. The Mandarin does it right—they work with a single photographer who does 90 percent of all of their photography. I’ve been interviewing a number of brand directors about their use of photography in hospitality. We recommend that clients build up photo libraries. Lifestyle images, photos of food, details of fixtures and furnishings, architectural photographs of rooms, bars, restaurants. These companies need to communicate the experience of their brand, and nothing does it better than an image. The Mandarin is one of the best in terms of curating fabulous image libraries.

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Brand identity, books, ad campaign, and website for Nizuc, an exclusive resort with private residences in development on the Riviera Maya

“Nizuc, located on the Riviera Maya, an exclusive resort property and series of private residences, incorporates world-class architecture and design, ecological preservation, and a level of service, hospitality and warmth that redefines luxury. A team of design and hospitality visionaries, led by developer Alan Becker, were tasked with creating Nizuc before it was even built. CSA developed and designed a luxury brand identity complete with a logo, product design, hardcover books with evocative lifestyle photography, a multi-million dollar global print and interactive ad campaign, and a website featuring a short film by the producers of 21 Grams and Babel.” (More info here.)

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We worked with photographer Quentin Bacon for Nizuc. I chose him because I loved his work—it was very naturalistic and has a beautiful palette. I found Quentin from the many food and cooking books he’s created with Ina Garten. They’re so luscious and so delicious—I could almost smell the food when I looked at those photos. I knew he was the perfect photographer to bring Nizuc to the world, even before people could experience it themselves.

We went on site to the Riviera Maya to do the shoot, and there was nothing there. It was basically dirt. We had a weeklong photo shoot where we brought in all the props, models, jewelry, clothing, food. We even brought a food stylist. The appeal of the destination has to do with the fantasy of the place: mangroves, the weather. This is an amazing piece of property that bordered an inland waterway. It was a playground for us in terms of what you would do if you were actually visiting the resort. So we created from scratch a vision of what this place would be when it’s built. It was so powerful. Our vision unified the entire team—the builders, the architects, the investors. Before, they knew the resort only as numbers: square footage, number of rooms, acres. All of a sudden, the place was real. It was really quite incredible. We created paradise. I got so many calls from people asking, “Wow, can you get me a discount?” And I would say, “Yeah, in a couple of years.”

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Global ad campaign for Morgan Stanley
“Morgan Stanley was once seen as a premier firm for individuals seeking a career in financial services. Over time, however, standard recruitment efforts had grown less effective, and the company needed a global message that would restore the ‘wow’ factor back to the brand and spark the interest of top talent from around the world.”

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We hired Seth Smoot to shoot portraits representing a cross-section of the best and brightest college students who might be interested in joining Morgan Stanley—the talented, smart future leaders who want to go to Google, Microsoft, Facebook. Casting was a major part of this assignment. Having people identify with the campaign was key to its success, so the model selection was crucial. Their nationalities ranged from Indian, Chinese, Latin American, and Filipino to Caucasian.

Seth is a young photographer who is close in age to the recruits. He had worked for my husband, which is how I first met him and started working with him. Every year, he sends me a Christmas card of his family—a beautiful black & white portrait. That’s the reason I knew he’d be right for this project. His work has a human quality but also a nice sense of design. We shot at Princeton because we wanted to include small visual cues that said “college campus,” like stone arches, labs, blackboards. He did a beautiful job, though we ended up cropping the images pretty closely for our design. The campaign is doing incredibly well and is featured across college campuses nationwide.

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Thank you, Leslie!

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