Today we’d like to introduce you to Arun Nevader
Hi Arun, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’m a fashion runway photographer. It’s been a long journey, which began in 2001 when my son founded a new photo agency called WireImage. “Dad, dust it all off. I want you to come to work for me as one of our photographers. At the time, I was a full-time lecturer teaching in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, so celebrity photography was the very last thing on my mind. I began my current photography career with WireImage shooting major entertainment news events, like the Telluride Film Festival, the Emmys, all kinds of movie premieres and a host of other celebrity driven events. But not long into this new career, WireImage needed a fashion runway photographer and I was it. No one else wanted to do it because traditionally celebrity photography is far more lucrative than shooting runway shows. I was never in this business for the money anyway so I took the assignment and I’ve never looked back. I was immediately struck by the overpowering beauty of a runway show and simply witnessing 30 different versions of womanhood appearing in the space of 17 minutes–knowing I would never see that look again or that model in the same way. My career developed quickly, mostly from being lucky. There are a ton of great photographers out there who never get the chance. I understood that privilege and I’ve respected it for 24 years now, thousands of runway shows later. For a thumbnail overview of my career, here it is:
Arun works as a fashion photographer for Getty Images and has covered major fashion, celebrity, and film festival events for WireImage and Getty since 2001. His clients have included leading agencies, fashion designers and corporate sponsors in the entertainment industry. His syndicated photographs have appeared in magazines and newspapers worldwide, including People Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The Boston Globe, Us Weekly, Stern, Glamour, Vogue, Z!NK, InStyle, W, Women’s Wear Daily, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, The International Herald Paris, Vogue Paris, Cosmopolitan, Teen People, Rolling Stone, Apparel News, TV Guide, New York Post, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Vogue Italia, Vogue Britain, Vogue Mexico, Famous and Savage, and many others. He has worked as the house photographer for numerous designers; former and current clients include IMG, Dan Lecca, Kevan Hall, Vera Wang, Carolina Herrera, Telluride Film Festival, Cinevegas, Sundance Film Festival, Chopard, Bulgari, Ralph Rucci, Rodarte, Peter Rothschild, the Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York, Victoria’s Secret, Creative Nail Design, The Blonds, Libertine, Phuong My, Art Hearts Fashion, Vancouver Fashion Week, Global Fashion Collective, London Fashihon WeekParis Fashion Week, Milan Fashion Week, Tokyo Fashion Week, Costa Rica Fashion Week, Seoul Fashion Week, Jordan Fashion Week, among many others.
Arun lives in Berkeley, California and teaches at UC Berkeley.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has never been a smooth road. People unfamiliar with a runway photographer’s lifestyle never get how difficult the travel can be, dealing with tens of thousands of images every night, negotiating shooting space on the photo riser, and the general, consistent abuse leveled on the physical body. These are just the drawbacks from simply dealing with the job. The fashion photography runway world poses its own set of many challenges. Competition is fierce among photographers–for those of us in the middle of the riser, we are all getting the same shots, more or less. So a photographer’s affiliation is everything. I’ve been extremely lucky to have begun my career with a tier one agency, WireImage, which provided me access to almost any show, and since joining Getty Images in 2007, I’ve been very fortunate in how many career developed. It has been long in coming, but I now have a client base worldwide, and I shoot roughly 300 shows a year, much of which is syndicated through Getty to the international publication industry. So my work is widely distributed and seen. It would be disingenuous of me to say that talent is not important–of course it is, and I’ve worked hard at perfecting this craft. But that’s only one part of it. The other part is sheer luck, and I’ve been very lucky.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m a fashion runway photographer. I accept other assignments, and I do shoot some fashion editorial when I’m moved to do so, but I’m known for my runway images. I cover runway events around the globe and it’s a job like no other. For those of us who value beauty as some physical embodiment worth seeing and capturing, runway photography has it all. Someone once asked me, “How come you don’t shoot video–it’s so much more exciting?” Well, that’s a matter of opinion. Capturing life in a visual medium such as photography and film entails two different processes, as far as I’m concerned. I consider the world as we know it to be in a constant state of imperfection and flux. That’s not a value judgment but simply an observation. When that world is captured on film, the goal is to capture its verisimilitude–to portray usually the distillation of experience as we know it in this world. The capture on film by its intent is to recreate that imperfection that motivates all human action toward our goals in life. Okay great! I love great movies and the art of filmmaking. But still photography is different. When a photographer captures an image, the camera freezes that moment and what remains imperfect in our material world is transformed into a single instance of perfection in that solitary frame. Perfection has its registers, so an ordinary moment caught in the frame will remain ordinary, but “perfectly” ordinary in how that moment is lifted out of time itself and frozen–reified into a concrete visual instance of perfection of some order. Think about the chaos of a sports event, or a big news event, or a celebrity receiving an Oscar, or in my case, a model coming down the runway. I choose my subject because to me, seeking and capturing beauty elevates my experience in life and those who follow my work see what I see–it improves our lives in however fleeting or superficial that moment may seem. Perhaps it’s in that sense of the fleeting moment, never to be seen again, that draws me into my chosen field. There is something very rare about the experience, which I can’t seem to shake. Despite all the pain leading up to capturing that moment, once the show starts, I’ve entered another world for 17 minutes–a dream state that elevates me out of that imperfection in life.
Are there any apps, books, podcasts, blogs or other resources you think our readers should check out?
I’m a well-read student of fashion history. We need to understand how we got here to understand the here and now. So I have an extensive fashion library that I go to daily for both knowledge and the sheer pleasure of opening a Vogue from 1938.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.gettyimages.com and www.wireimage.com
- Instagram: @arunnevader
Image Credits
Photo credit: Arun Nevader
