Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Amico.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. My dad was a television producer and for most of my childhood I thought I’d work in the film and TV industry. Then I discovered music in high school when my friends’ started a garage band and I was sure that I was meant to be a rockstar. By the time I headed to college, I honestly had no idea what I wanted to study. A film career seemed like something in the past and I had no formal music education so I spent my first year undeclared and waiting for something new to call out to me. In transferred schools for my sophomore year and decided I’d spend one semester taking electives in all the areas that had interested me – film production, music performance, audio production, and randomly photography. I had never really used a camera and had only vaguely heard terms like shutter speed, f/stop and depth of field but had no idea what they meant. I was lucky that in 2008 an introductory photography class was still a traditional wet lab darkroom and so I learned entirely on analog processes and this turned out to be the calling I was looking for. I absorbed information like a sponge and spent a ton of extracurricular hours in the darkroom. It was the most engaged with a class I’d ever been and ultimately set me on the course I’m on today.
I decided I also loved the film production world and luckily at Cal. State Long Beach they had a film production program where I could emphasize in cinematography which felt like the perfect marriage of my new and old passions. I continued taking photography courses alongside my degree and graduated in 2011. I sent a few years after college living in Long Beach, playing in a band, and making money as a waiter and these were some of the most fun years of my life so far. I managed to pick up some odd photography jobs along the way – enough to build a basic portfolio and I eventually landed a great opportunity to shoot on an excavation in Tuscany for a summer. I was just shooting artifacts and a little bit of promotional material for the student run dig but it was a great experience and gave me some confidence to continue seeking out more professional work. I was then hired as a photographer for a documentary promotional tour and spent five weeks living on a bus with twelve other people touring the midwest and east coast. This job connected me with a documentary director who loved my work so much he hired me as a second shooter on his next documentary which shot in a refugee camp Dadaab, Kenya for three weeks.
This was an incredibly intense experience for me at 25 and looking back I definitely had no idea what I was really getting into – but I sure learned a lot. Throughout all of this, I was still working as a waiter in Long Beach and I realized that could very easily become my entire future if I didn’t make some changes. I decided I had to make a clean break with my whole life in Long Beach so I decided I’d move to Paris in 2014 for as long as I could and when I came back, I’d start my life somewhere else. Paris was and is one of the greatest experiences of my life so far and was the perfect buffer to start my adult professional life. I came back to the U.S. when I was 27, moved to Los Feliz and threw myself into freelancing full time. I figured I’d go as long as I could and whenever I ran out of money I’d look for another restaurant job to keep my afloat. But somehow, I scraped by in my first year by trolling Craigslist and every other online forum I could find for photography gigs.
In 2015, I filed my taxes as a photographer for the first time which was an incredible milestone for me. Since then, I’ve continued to shoot documentaries and the occasional short film but mostly I work as a photographer. I honestly think I’ve shot a little bit of just about everything but a lucky connection to Live Nation has centered a lot of career in the music world which I love. There’s also and incredible theater company called Fourlarks based in Downtown LA that I shoot for a few times a year and it’s really an honor to collaborate with them. These days I’m exploring fashion a little bit to see where that takes me, nude portraiture as a personal side project and I generally take one big international trip per year to continue building my travel portfolio. If I could get paid to travel and document what I see around the world all of my dreams will have come true so I’m just chugging along in LA working to make my dreams my reality.
Has it been a smooth road?
I would not say it’s been a smooth road exactly. I still struggle with some aspects of the freelance lifestyle – mainly the financial instability and general emotional rollercoaster. It’s still hard for me in some parts of the year to separate my professional success or failure from my overall self-worth and I think that’s something a lot of freelancers can relate to. The highs are high and the lows are low but I can’t imagine working a more traditional job now with set hours. My life has never really had a lot of routine to it and I’ve grown to like that. A good friend of mine is an author and he said something I think about a lot. He said that the artists who make it are the ones who have the grit to stick it out when things get rough. It may not sound like the most profound or original thought but it’s really kept me going through the times when I’m living on a credit card and have no idea what’s coming in the future. In a saturated market like LA, it sometimes feels like a war of attrition and I have no plans of surrendering. It’s also been hard to grasp some of the business aspects of a freelance photography lifestyle. I’ve never thought of myself as being particularly entrepreneurial and I didn’t have aspirations to start my own business but it turns out that just comes with the territory of being a photographer. So there’s been a steep learning curve in terms of taxes and bureaucracy. I’ve paid a lot of fees for not filing something with the city or paying my taxes late.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Michael Amico Photography – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of and what sets you apart from others.
I really pride myself on being able to shoot a little bit of everything. Even times when I felt sure I was stepping into uncharted territory I’ve ended up creating something I’m really proud of. I definitely prefer to shoot people above everything but generally I’ve found that the same rules apply regardless of the subject matter. If light falls on something in a nice way and you position it in a pleasing way in a frame then it doesn’t really matter if it’s food, landscape, or portraiture. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like the market agrees with me and I constantly feel pressure to specialize further and further. I love the challenge of shooting new things all the time but I’m actually worried that at some point down the road in my career, I’ll basically be making thousands of copies of the exact same image because that’s what I’ll be known for. I’ve been told that the greatest challenge for a working artist is to stay inspired and I think that can get harder the longer you are in your field and the more specialized you get. This is why documentary travel photography appeals to me so much because it can encompass so many things in a constantly changing setting. I think my background in film production taught me a lot about storytelling and I think one of my strengths as a photographer is my ability to quickly identify what makes someplace, someone, or something unique and then capture that. Even when I’m shooting concerts, I can quickly pick up on a gesture or a movement a performer does and know that that’s what I need to get to show everyone who this person is.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least about our city?
What I like best: the weather
What I like least: the weather (and lack of good public transport)
Contact Info:
- Website: michaelamicophoto.com
- Email: [email protected]
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