Daily Inspiration: Meet Mark Robert Halper

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark Robert Halper.

Mark Robert, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My first interest was Super 8 filmmaking in high school. I studied international relations at USC and took one or two photography courses I enjoyed but never took seriously. The day of my last college classes, I felt lost and found myself pulling my camera out of my sock drawer, going out, and taking pictures.

In 1987, I got a job photographing homes for an interactive videodisc system. When the company went out of business about a year later, I took photography classes at UCLA Extension.

When you find that you are disappointed when the teacher doesn’t give you homework, you know you’re in the right place. I started getting small jobs in 1989, and in 1990 I moved into a downtown loft and began building my commercial career. I went from headshots to magazine covers and annual reports. My friends were concerned I was too focused on my work, but I don’t have any of those regrets.

Just before everything went south in 2008, I started creating images for families. I was still a photographer, but it was an entirely different business.

In March 2020, I was stuck in the house like everyone else, and I started photographing the creatures around me. I did portraits of the creatures, then made my way through the house and began photographing other objects. That became ARTIFACTS. It was a gradual realization. I experimented a lot and discovered how fertile this ground was for creativity.

I’m effectively entering the third act of my career, and Artifacts is a satisfying and amazing creative outlet. I’m also in the process of developing a few new fine art personal projects as well.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
First off, I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been able to do it. The hardest thing was in 2008. I was doing annual report work, client-direct work, corporate work. When the recession hit, the vast majority of that work went away, and I didn’t want a career with the corporate headshots that were left.

I’d started creating images for families just before everything went south. I could see it coming in the distance, but not the way it hit in September of 2008. I’d always felt that a lot of the family photography out there didn’t rise to my standards as an artist. When I decided to start doing it, I said, “I’m either going to do this to my standards or not at all. If it fails, it fails.” Making that leap and that transition was probably the most challenging single thing in my career.

I wasn’t attracted to the painterly style or the jeans and white shirt photographs that were popular at the time. Rather, I chose to reference early and mid-century photography, especially Irving Penn, and create something that was very much intended to be part of the art collection that many of my clients owned. I didn’t want to end up on the wall next to the laundry room because what I did was important, but not appropriate to an elevated aesthetic.

When I photographed for companies, I was hired based on my past work and paid to do it. With family photography, I had to bring in clients at effectively a retail level, work with them as the subjects, sell the work and produce the finished pieces. Hiring people on a more permanent basis was new, as opposed to a makeup artist or assistant for the day. Bringing in the people was complex, doing the sales was complex, producing the work was very complex. The added complexity in the consumer business was probably the hardest thing.

I had to be not just an artist who finds work, but an entrepreneur who then needed to learn to be a leader. Leadership was really, really hard.

Now I’m moving from doing the families because I’ve said what I’ve had to say. It’s not that they’re not challenging, but it’s the same challenge again and again. I’m trying to do something in a completely different way. That’s exciting and scary. It’s where I am right now.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m a portrait photographer by nature. If you dig down into ARTIFACTS, it’s still a portrait project.

I call my process Refractive Alchemy. I use light, focus and refraction to transform real objects in front of the camera, then add color to the black-and-white images through toning. These images never even see Photoshop.

When I started ARTIFACTS, it was about me. When I decided to create images for others, I phrased it as being about imagination and memory, and they didn’t know what to do with it. I found that for them it wasn’t as much about childhood as it was about honoring and remembering someone they had lost, or about celebrating a relationship. Working with clients deepened and broadened the project.

When I work with someone else’s story, I begin by listening to what they want to reconnect with. We find the object through that conversation. One woman brought me her late father’s glasses, then his books. I photographed the glasses on one of his books written in Armenian. The glasses and the book reveal what was important to his daughter about him. It’s my rendition, but it’s also his daughter’s portrait of him.

In the end, I am most proud of the work I’ve created for well over a thousand families. I believe it has become very, very important to them, that they love it very much, and that it’s meaningful. I’ve created that meaning in their lives.

I am hoping to continue that with ARTIFACTS, filling the same need but approaching it in an entirely different way. This enables me to reach beyond simply photographing the people who are with us as they are now, to reach back through time to other parts of their lives and capture what simply isn’t in their faces.

I have both a facility for art and a facility for business, and that’s been really, really useful. I’m an artist first, but the business comes at least semi-naturally to me. It makes sense to me, and I’m good at it, which is why I’ve been able to make this work.

As an artist, I’ve got a specific vision and a recognizable style. That was largely true in my corporate work. With the family work, clients would recognize photographs I’d made for another family. It could have been work from a decade ago. My vision holds. In ARTIFACTS, Refractive Alchemy is unique. There’s not much like it. Creating something that has a style of its own, by definition, sets me apart.

Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
I was kind of a geeky kid. I was the kid running around with the Star Trek technical manual. I could very often be found riding my bike, which often meant making little wooden jumps and jumping it off cinder blocks. I didn’t have a lot of friends. There was definitely an interest in sci-fi by that point.

I’m not someone who’s got a lot of clear memories of childhood, which is interesting. For most of my clients, these images are doorways to memory, but those doors are unlocked. They’re open. They’re easy to get to.

For me, the series helps me access things that are harder for me to see. My doors are locked, and the images are the keys.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mrh.art
• Instagram: @markroberthalper

Image Credits
Mark Robert Halper