Rangefinder Magazine
February 2006

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Profile: George Simian Michelle Perkins
Making a Personal Connection in Commercial Photography

Simian uses careful lighting to craft images that look spontaneous (even though they aren’t). He wants the control and ability to bring a lot of visual impact to them.	Annual reports have gone heavily into stock photography, according to Simian. Most are pretty skimpy compared to what they were before 2000.

George Simian, now a successful commercial photographer living and working in Los Angeles, CA, came into this world under somewhat less fortunate circumstances. Born in Romania, life was pretty tough economically, he recalls. Despite the challenges, it was during these early years that his interest in photography took root. Says Simian, “My father was an amateur photographer, and I was fascinated with it—especially as a 10- or 11-year-old when I watched him photograph my schoolmates’ singing and dancing performances.” He adds with a laugh, “I also discovered that you could actually possess pictures of the most attractive girl in class!”

Simian’s images are mostly pictures of people—the executives, the chief scientists, or the satisfied customers. Some of the images are more formal portraits, while some of them are “candids” of people pretending to work. (“Of course, nothing is that candid!” he laughs).

Simian was a teenager when he and his parents made the move to the U.S., and he recalls it as a tremendous liberation. “As an only child, I was pretty much at my parents’ beck and call,” he says. When he got to the U.S., however, he discovered he could make decisions without them. “I was actually free to pick and choose,” he says, “I made a lot of left turns and a few right turns, and I wound up here instead of where my mother would have liked me—a doctor with a wife and kids and my mother living upstairs where she could run my whole life,” he laughs. “Unfortunately for her, and I guess fortunately for me, I’m in a completely different place.”

As a teenager in New York City, photography was a favorite hobby for Simian. Toward the end of his college career, however, he met a graphic design professor in the school of architecture at Cornell who was to prove instrumental in his move from amateur to professional. “Even though I was going to a huge school,” he recalls, “there was no photography offered, but this professor offered it as part of his graphic design course. I took the class and then offered to be his teaching assistant. He took me up on it, and I started teaching a photography section within his course. I loved it and stayed on to teach photography for a couple more years.”

“Once I was teaching,” says Simian, “I had to take myself more seriously as a photographer. I discovered what I really liked was documentary portrait photography, so I went out and started making it.” This influence is still visible in much of his commercial work.

Simian was soon asked to do some PR photography by Polaroid Corporation. “Ironically,” he says, “the job interfered with my teaching schedule, and I had to get a substitute for a couple of classes. I soon got called by the department chair and asked to choose between being a ‘photographer,’ implying an art photographer, and a ‘hack.’ So I did a little math in my head. I was getting paid $200 a day to be a PR photographer versus $200 a week to teach—that was in 1977. I reluctantly agreed that I was going to be a hack. That was the beginning of my commercial career.”

Through Polaroid, Simian met a graphic designer who took him under his wing, first as an assistant and then as a second shooter. That relationship continued for over a dozen years, and Simian ended up doing the photography for many of the designer’s annual reports. “That spread my reputation and led to other annual report clients,” he says, “which led to a career in shooting annual reports.”

“Once I was teaching,” says Simian, “I had to take myself more seriously as a photographer. I discovered what I really liked was documentary portrait photography, so I went out and started making it.” This influence is still visible in much of his commercial work.

Before he started doing commercial work, Simian was a “handheld, black and white, street photography kind of guy.” This sensibility continues to be reflected in his commercial work. “My images are portraits,” he says. “Some of them are quiet, some of them are more spontaneous, but they’re all an encounter. They’re all my looking at someone and getting excited and saying, ‘Look at them—aren’t they wonderful? Aren’t they interesting?’ It’s really about making this connection and seeing something extraordinary in this person and in this moment.”

As a result of this passion, a small subset of Simian’s work is photographing children. “Children represent the most dramatic representation of that moment of discovery,” he says. “Every second is unique for a kid; they’ll never be that same age again or have that particular relationship to the world again. Each photograph is a wonderful moment that’s worth preserving.”

Simian’s wife serves as a second set of eyes and a reality check on each shoot. “When my ego gets too big,” he says, “she comes up behind me and quietly whispers in my ear, ‘You’ve overlooked the most obvious thing.’”

In this way, Simian’s current work still bears a close relationship to his father’s photographs— the images that first intrigued him back in Romania. “I was inspired to start in photography by the example of my father, who was basically creating a family album,” says Simian. “Now, even though I’m photographing other people’s kids or corporate executives, I still have a sense that these images are meaningful, both personally and as historical documents of what someone felt at a particular moment in time. I love creating them because they are valuable both to me and to the subject.”

While he may look back for inspiration, Simian is forward-reaching in terms of technology; in fact, he was one of the early adopters of digital technology. “I really embraced digital right away,” he says, “I loved the quick feedback and especially the short cycle between taking the photographs and delivering them.” Simian reads voraciously about digital imaging and always enjoys the opportunity to play with new tools.

Today, Simian is also making teaching a bigger part of his life. “The teaching It’s not a new idea, but it is new for the fastest growing magazine in professional I’m doing now is primarily centered around digital photography,” he says. “This summer I led a workshop where I taught digital photography to teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds. They were the best and the brightest—very motivated and perfectly ready to take a concept or direction and run with it. They made wonderful images and it was very satisfying for me.”

Simian intentionally keeps his images of children much simpler than his other photographs. “Most of the time I shoot kids in natural light and just try to keep the attention on them and not so much on the technology,” he says

After spending most of his adult life in Boston, MA, Simian and his wife recently made a move to Los Angeles. He has already begun new teaching assignments at the Julia Dean Photography Workshops and courses at UCLA Extension, but the rest of his business is changing, too. In the wake of numerous corporate scandals, annual reports have been scaled back dramatically. Add this to a change of venue, and Simian recognizes that many challenges lie ahead. “Obviously, I have to expand and find a new direction,” he says. “I’m slowly meeting new people, but I think it’s going to take a while before my business picks up and takes off again. I’m not sure where it will be a couple of years from now, but I have a sense it will still be very business- centered.”

Looking to the future, Simian also brims with enthusiasm for the changes and challenges inherent in the photography industry as a whole. “It’s definitely a learning curve that doesn’t flatten out—in fact, I think it gets steeper with time,” he says, “But I think that’s a good thing; there’s something to look forward to. We’re not going to be bored!”

For more information on George Simian, visit www.georgesimian.com.