Rangefinder Magazine
April 2005

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Profile: Steve Begleiter by Michelle Perkins
Getting Bigger Is Not Always Better

For most business owners, success means more—more clients, more assignments, more equipment, more employees. Photographer Steven H. Begleiter has been there, travelling around the country photographing celebrities and running a very successful New York studio. By the late 1990s, however, after years of fast-paced work, he decided it was time for a change and a new set of priorities. Many people would find this daunting, but for Steven it was a chance to seek new challenges and reinvent his work—something he’s done several times.

Steven began his career as a photojournalism student at Kent State University. However, a newspaper internship spent chasing ambulances and going to VFWs quickly convinced him he was on the wrong track. “It was interesting,” Steven says, “but I realized that’s not where I was, creatively or photographically.” Although he went on to work as an Associated Press stringer in Boston and New York City, he grew frustrated and eventually took work in other fields.

It wasn’t long, before a friend suggested a new route: he should seek work as a photo assistant. “I didn’t even know what that was,” Steven laughs, “They didn’t teach you that in college—at least not back then!” So he started making phone calls. “When I moved to New York City in 1980, someone told me that there were 12,000 photography studios there—so I figured there must be a job somewhere,” he says.

His first full-time photography job was with Peter B. Kaplan—it lasted only six weeks, but they were eventful weeks. On one occasion, Kaplan (known for his images from on high) called to see if he could borrow Steven’s car to go bridge climbing with Jay Maisel. Steven consented, but the next call he received from Kaplan began with the ominous words, “I have bad news.” Kaplan and Maisel had topped the bridge, and then looked down helplessly through 300mm lenses as the car was “dismembered” by a group of teenagers. Steven, a cup-half-full kind of guy, remarks, “I ended up realizing I didn’t need a car in New York.” (And, naturally, he spent the insurance money on photo equipment.)

Wanting to gain some studio experience, Steven moved on to a position with Tommy Weihs, who he describes as an excellent teacher. “I felt it was a lucky break for me,” he says. “We worked on national accounts, and I learned strobe lighting, fine art black-and-white printing, and how to do production work.”

A year later, Steven received a call from a friend who was assisting Annie Leibovitz and wanted to know if Steven could take his place on a shoot in progress with Debra Winger. The job went well, and Leibovitz offered him a position as her full-time assistant. “Now I hear she works with a staff of 20 people,” says Steven, “but when I was working for her it was just me and a studio manager. We traveled around the country, and I lugged 11 cases of equipment with us. It was fun—I met a lot of celebrities and stayed in nice hotels—but it was really hard work.” Steven describes Leibovitz as demanding, but remarks that, “It was a great experience. There was a lot of pressure, and I learned to work very quickly and decisively.”

After a year with Leibovitz, Steven got calls from some pretty well known photographers. (He laughs, “Once you survive that, other photographers sort of gravitate toward you!”) One of them was Mary Ellen Mark, with whom Steven worked on stories for Life magazine.

By 1982, though, Steven knew it was time to start his own studio. One of his first breaks was with Forbes magazine. From this exposure, he won work from other business magazines, like BusinessWeek, Manhattan, Inc., and Fortune. These, in turn, led to jobs on annual reports and brochures for companies like Campbell’s Soup, Lehman Brothers and First Bank of Boston.

Soon, Steven also published his first book, Fathers and Sons (Abbeville Press, 1989). Featuring images of celebrities like Bill Cosby, Kirk Douglas, Mario Andretti and Ed Asner, the book led to editorial shoots for Us, Elle, and Esquire, as well as ad campaigns for Reader’s Digest and USA Today. “Thing were going well,” he remarks, “I was running a studio and sometimes doing two or three jobs a day.”

Steven maintained this hectic pace for quite some time until, in the late 1990s, he began to feel he was burning out living in New York City. “You can make a lot of money in Manhattan,” he says, “but it costs a lot to run a business there. As much as I was making, I wasn’t putting anything away.” He decided it was time for a change.

In 1997, Steven and his wife made the move to Philadelphia. “There was more opportunity as far as lifestyle here,” he says, “and I was only an hour by train from New York.” For a time, Steven actually kept a studio in New York and commuted, but in 2000 he cut his ties and started his business in Philadelphia. The key to the move was downsizing, he says. “I wanted to get more into my creative work, and you can’t do that when you’re worried about overhead. Now I have time to pursue more fine art work, write books—to do what I want to for the most part.”

Since the move, Steven has published The Art of Color Infrared Photography (Amherst Media, 2001) and The Portrait Book: A Guide for Photographers (Amherst Media, 2003). These go hand in hand with yet another new turn in his photographic career: teaching. “I got inspired to teach because I had taken some terrible courses, and I always thought, ‘I could do better than that.’”

When he began looking for teaching positions, Steven interviewed at the University of Pennsylvania. As it happened, soon after his interview, Mary Ellen Mark (his former employer and an alumna of the university) had a one-woman show on campus. “Mary Ellen took me by the arm and introduced me around,” says Steven, “telling them, ‘If you don’t hire this guy, you’re foolish.’” He quickly joined the staff and found himself designing a syllabus. “Once again, it was something I’d never done before,” he says, “but it was very exciting.”

Steven now teaches three courses (beginning black-and-white photography, advanced black-and-white photography, and large-format photography) and says that today’s college students are still ex-cited about working with film. “The only difference between now and when I took film classes in the ’70s,” he says, “is that we always had the radio on in the dark-room; they all have iPods.”

Having clearly embraced his role as an educator, Steven has nothing but praise for his students. “Most of them will probably not go into photography, but they are very bright and enthusiastic,” he says, “They inspire me.” He also appreciates the effect that being in a learning environment has on his own work. “Most photographers work in a vacuum because they work solo,” he notes. “Working with other photographers who are teachers, we all share ideas.”

This inspiration feeds into many ongoing personal projects. A few years ago, Steven received a grant from the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Association that has enabled him to spend time photographing his neighborhood and the people in it. Here, his training in photojournalism is an asset. “I still have that sensibility of being very narrative,” he says. “As a photojournalist, you have to work very quickly. You have to go into a situation, assess it, decide what’s important visually, and come away with a great image.”

In addition to serving on the board of the ASMP in Philadelphia, Steven continues to do editorial and commercial photography. As such, another personal project is making the transition to digital—something his clients are demanding. It’s a process he’s excited about. “Adobe is the DaVinci of our century,” he says. “They created a whole new genre of visualizing.” Digital also ties in nicely with his creative goals, allowing him to further control his images and take on some interesting smaller projects. “Since there are no film costs, I have less overhead and more options,” he says, “so I find I can take on jobs that don’t pay as much.”

That’s not something you’ll hear a lot of photographers say, but after years of running a busy commercial studio, Steven seems pleased to be doing what he does—working at home, teaching, writing, and exploring his neighborhood, camera in hand. “For me,” he says, “I’ve found that getting bigger is not always better.”

Michelle Perkins is a professional writer, de-signer and image retoucher. She has written for PC Photo and Rangefinder, and is the author of Beginner’s Guide to Adobe Photoshop and Tra-ditional Photographic Techniques with Adobe Photoshop (both from Amherst Media).