In Ezra Petronio’s world, no man is an island and collaboration is king. Accordingly, the primary words the celebrated art director and co-founder and artistic director of Self Service magazine pens in his recent monograph are quite literally, ‘a shared journey’. Similarly, when his publisher suggested some friends might provide quotes about his work, he dismissed the idea for something more universal. “I said no way – if you happen to want people then I’ll ask them to answer questions on creative integrity,” he explains.

Subsequently, Ezra Petronio: Visual Pondering & Image Making features, alongside the various campaigns and artistic projects he’s played an important hand in over the past three many years, a dedicated section of industry voices reflecting on their very own processes. “I’m interested in people who have the identical obsessive dedication to their craft as I do,” continues Petronio, who brought in everyone from designers, photographers and stylists to CEOs, actors and other art directors, a lot of whom he’s also photographed for his long-term body of labor with a Big Shot Land camera [exhibited in Zurich last year as Ezra Petronio: Stylistics].

Born in Recent York but a Parisian for many of his life, Petronio established his first agency, Petronio Associates in 1993. Co-founding the physically imposing French title with Suzanne Koller the following 12 months – initially stapled, modern iterations of the bi-annual Self Service read as pretty exquisite coffee table volumes – and more recently, in 2016 he launched the digital-specific agency, Content Matters with Lana Petrusevych, his partner with whom he also edited the brand new book.

Working across fashion and sweetness predominantly, Petronio’s handwriting is everywhere in the front pages of any glossy you would possibly’ve grazed on the hairdressers, while if you happen to’re a seasoned fashion girlie it’s not unlikely you’ve in some unspecified time in the future ripped one in every of his campaigns from a magazine to Blu-Tack to your bedroom wall [FWIW, the Chloé SS07 campaign was a stellar addition to any house share interior]. A multi-hyphenate whose early work precedes the term’s frequency, and who has a prudent relationship with icon-focused language, below Petronio shares his thoughts on art directing, nostalgia, and learning from Miuccia Prada.

Hi Ezra! Are you able to tell me first about your introduction to fashion, publishing, and art direction?

Ezra Petronio: My father was an art director within the 70s and 80s and would take us on shoots – not that we necessarily desired to as kids – so I exposed early. My mom’s a faucet dancer, so I used to be infused with a number of creative environments, and I believe that builds something in you. In highschool I began the college newspaper, then I used to be editor of the Parsons [School of Design] paper. I realised early that a magazine could represent the values you share with people; it inevitably led to Self Service. And fashion in the beginning of the 90s was having a revolution. England had a head start with magazines representing youth culture, and people were inspirational to my ex-partner Suzanne [Koller] and myself. We threw ourselves into it, representing a complete scene in Paris. France was far more conservative than the UK, so it was really felt like us versus them. Fashion wasn’t so infused with money then, the entire context was very different then it’s today.

Serious about art direction specifically, how would you describe the role of an art
director to someone outside of the industry?

Ezra Petronio: Art direction is an accumulation of several skill sets, that is sort of what the book is about. The way in which I view the job is typography, graphic design, product design, motion design, but in addition copywriting – that you must know use language – and photography, an understanding of the visual world. I wanted the book to speak and transmit all of this, and likewise that image making is a mix of talents that you just put together, it’s very collaborative. I’m not a solitary person, I’ve at all times had creative partners, and there’s all of the people you get to satisfy too. It’s a really privileged world, our bubble, and that you must have gratitude.

What do you think that are among the biggest misconceptions across the title of art
director?

Ezra Petronio: It’s grow to be very fashionable, and is applied to everyone and anyone. The way I grew up, I needed to have many skill sets. Today, and I’m not being critical, people consider themselves art directors but they will’t design. There’s a misconception that it’s just coming up with an idea and selecting a photographer, however it’s also your mental capability to know and challenge a client, or to challenge them to know what your designer really wants and best express that. It is a heavy duty job, to hold through a project, and you will have to be open today to the changing industry – it’s now not a
campaign but a content campaign with many assets. So that you must have a comprehension of a large vision of things, and that requires work and having the ability to apply the identical level of integrity to all the things you do.

In a recent interview with Mel Ottenberg, you said “there’s no nostalgia looking back”.
Are you able to expand on that, within the context of the book and reflecting in your profession today?

Ezra Petronio: I’m, hopefully, at the center of my profession, so the book was really about turning a page. Things are going so fast, I felt the will to transmit certain things to other people. Frankly, I don’t have any nostalgia. I’m very grateful to have lived through several eras. After I began Self Service, it was pre-desktop publishing: we had no web, no social media, there was no Eurostar. There was a special way of accessing and processing information and culture. So, if there’s nostalgia, it’s more for the context of that point – it enabled you to work in a more serene way. Today, we produce a campaign and the social disappears in a void. In those days, a designer needed to encapsulate all of his vision in a single
shoot, and people images would exist for six months. It’s disruptive now, and it’s modified the way people construct their personas or creative profiles, because they should be really impactful immediately, whether it’s good taste or bad. It’s vital to offer yourself time to try things, which isn’t easy, but to not be a victim of this appetite for novelty and immediacy.

All the various areas of your profession are covered within the book, and I wondered if you happen to could
speak in your Polaroid series and what initiated it?

Ezra Petronio: We were meeting so many individuals through our magazine, at one point I used to be like ‘we’ve got to document these people’. I spoke to a photographer who said ‘I’m not gonna be available day-after-day of your life, do it yourself’. I had studied photography and loved Andy Warhol’s social documentation, so I purchased 50,000 flash cubes and commenced documenting. I took real pleasure in photographing people, and for ten or 15 years built this whole body of work documenting all the various layers of our industry, from stylists to the people behind the CEO, but in addition the satellite industries around fashion, like music. It was such a joy, and it sort of represented our world. You actually need to have empathy and love for people
since it’s a really intimate process, and I’ve shot about 4,000 people.

There’s obviously a uniformity to the portraits with the white backgrounds, but is there an image or situation that stands out?

Ezra Petronio: You show me one in every of my Polaroids and I’ll remember the moment. Vivienne Westwood, I shot her in Milan in a backstage bathroom because I needed a white background; Louise Bourgeois, in her townhouse there have been 1,000s of things on every wall and so she had her assistant take out white gloves and for an hour remove the things on the wall. She was very generous. Tom Ford had a really precise idea of wanting his sunglasses below his eyes, the camera. I at all times move across the person and each time I moved, he moved too. I opened the 25 Polaroids and in each one he had mastered it. He’s such a picture maker that he adapted his body position for each single frame.

You shot Miuccia Prada too, with whom you worked for a few years across campaigns for
each Prada and Miu Miu. What was that relationship like?

Ezra Petronio: She was one in every of my mentors, a tremendous character. She taught me about perfectionism, about never being satisfied, and at all times attempting to go a step further in all the things. It was a really intense relationship, but she’s like that with herself. She was never content, at all times desired to be a modernist. Once we were doing a campaign and we’d built these huge, expensive sets. Fittings were in a little bit studio, which had this really cheeseball 50s wallpaper. We’re sending her the looks and she or he calls up, ‘Ezra, this is gorgeous, forget the opposite set let’s just should the campaign there’. The room was so small, the one way you could see the outfit was if the girl laid on the ground… One other time we desired to do a
perfume campaign with Irving Penn. He scribbles his idea and she or he says, ‘I need something different’. Obviously you are not going to get something different from a 93 year-old Irving Penn, he’s a master. I even have so many stories like that with Mrs Prada. 

Returning to Self Service, which you and Suzanne began in 1994. There are some really amazing covers, but are you able to speak on those that feel most important?

Ezra Petronio: The early ones were very meaningful. For issue 13 we put Nicholas Ghesquière on the duvet. We had spent several years defending, believing and supporting our generation, really putting all of our guts and love into representing them, and for issue 13 we did a series of portraits with Dutch photographers Anuschka Bloomers and Niels Schumm where we shot everyone from Jefferson [Hack] and Melanie Ward, to Sarah from Colette and Hussein Chalayan – all the upcoming players. It was nearly saying that is who we’re, these are the players which might be going to be leaders; there was no pretense but a number of raw ambition. The Stars and Styles issue too, after we began to make use of paparazzi and backstage pictures, enlarging them to offer them a recent meaning. Then some pure, hardcore fashion issues like Joe McKenna’s guest edited issue. A number of these were impactful since you carry on remembering them.

Buy your copy of the book here.