Today we’d like to introduce you to Joshua Sterling Bragg.
Joshua, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I went to college for musical theater because acting was the only thing that made sense to me as an 18-year-old looking at his future. My parents wanted me to go to a liberal arts school, and the way it worked out the only school I got in to was Fairleigh Dickinson University. I loved college, I got to travel the world, I learned a little bit about everything, and I met so many diverse people. But like most theater majors, when I got my degree I was exhausted by the lifestyle- the constant rejection of auditions- and I felt like I wanted more of a voice in any form of art that I was going to be a part of.
I tried directing, and did a decent job, but didn’t feel like it was a perfect fit either. I didn’t have that ‘type-A’ personality that you need to have to command a legion of people like that. Two years out of college I went to see an indie film that was playing at FDU and ended up talking to the director Ryan Gielen for a few hours afterwards. He invited me to spend the summer with him doing some guerrilla marketing for his movie down in Ocean City Maryland. I had nothing better to do, so I packed my video camera and some clothes and left for the summer.
I’ve always been the type of person that tries as hard as he can (well, as long as I’m interested in the project, because why do anything if you’re not interested? This mentality is exactly why I only got into one college). Ryan made his movie from scratch, with money that he was able to raise and work for, and when it was done he dove right into marketing it himself. I had never seen anyone work as hard as he did to accomplish his dream and I wanted so badly to do that too. I just didn’t know what that dream was for me.
At the end of the summer, Ryan took me for a drive, told me his life story, and made note of how hard I worked all summer. I had a lot of fun, but I didn’t really feel like I was working. Sure I sold the DVDs and the t-shirts and soundtracks, but I felt undeserving of this appreciation. That’s when Ryan pointed out that I had been taking photo, filming and editing videos the whole time too. I mean, that was something I just ‘did,’ I had always done that.
But as he continued to explain to me that I had a strong work ethic, I looked back on my middle school, high school and college years… I always had a camera in my hands. I was always filming and editing and taking photos, but I had never thought, in a million lifetimes, that you could get paid to do that. I thought that was just the weird little thing I did. In middle school I took photos of my friends skateboarding, posing them to look like the pros. In high school I was filming play practice straight to VHS tapes and then scheduling time in my friend’s dad’s video shop, editing tape to tape to make behind the scenes videos.
In college, I was making short films with every spare second I had, and I was taking portraits of my friends across Europe as we traveled for school. After college, I was making stop motion films frame by frame and making my own music videos and short documentaries. I was documenting everything, always, and it never occurred to me that any of it was important, or worth looking at and I certainly considered all of it the farthest thing from art. That car ride with Ryan changed my life because from that moment on I had found my calling.
I worked for Ryan for years after that, freelance shooting and editing while I worked a full-time job, soaking up as much as I could from his wealth of knowledge. I moved in with him and his girlfriend in Manhattan, and eventually he helped me leave my job to freelance full time for him. As time passed, he moved to LA and started a company that I continued to work for as I built up my own client base. And when the time was right, he hired me full time as the Head of Production for Believe LTD, his production company that he started with Patrick James Lynch.
At Believe LTD I make documentaries, web series’ and feature films, as well as doing journalistic and documentary photography around the world. In the past few years, I have also discovered my love of portrait photography and have ventured back from digital into a lot of analog photography (which is where I started). I spend a lot of my free time buying and selling vintage cameras, handcrafting and binding my own zines, and taking portraits of people I think are amazing.
I develop my own black and white film and have built a dark room at work with my lead producer, fellow photographer and good friend Rob Bradford where we plan to start making our own prints as well in the weeks to come. And, I am a year into my first big personal photography project, Great American Women.
Great, 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?
I’ve been very lucky that I found the people in my life that have helped me to get to where I am, but that is only a part of the equation. For those first few years in NYC I was living in Harlem, and Inwood and Crown Heights, on the outskirts of the city where I could afford to live while building my career. It was a lot of cheap Chinese food and rice and beans.
I lived in five-floor walk-ups, lugging my lighting and camera equipment up and down flights of stairs, across several city blocks, down into the subway, transferring at least once on my hour-long ride into Manhattan often to make $150 for 12-15 hours of work. Because of this, I was throwing my back out 3-4 times per year, stuck on the couch for weeks at a time. But I always said yes to every job because I knew I was working towards something.
Moving to California was my big step into adulthood, where I got a house and a car and a full-time job doing what I love, and I feel like those five/six years in NYC were worth every second. I learned SO MUCH just by working as hard as I could and struggling for a few years. That being said, I feel like I had so much help along the way that I got off pretty easy, and that’s exactly why I try to pay it forward as often as I can. I’m an open book and will help anyone who’s on any part of their path as an artist.
We’d love to hear more about what you do.
There are two sides to what I do. My full-time job as Head of Production at Believe LTD is a dream job. We work to create unique experiences, often with young people through online videos, feature films, and special events. We do a lot of work with people suffering from chronic illness, and our goal is always to empower, lift up and spread awareness.
Our work started with bleeding disorders but has branched out since. We have two feature documentaries coming out this year, Bombardier Blood (about the first person with a bleeding disorder to summit the highest mountain on each continent, including Mt. Everest) and My Beautiful Stutter (following five young people who stutter over the course of a year in their lives). We also do a lot of work internationally, traveling several times per year to document what life is like with chronic illnesses in developing countries…
My personal work is not that different, but it is based mainly on photography. Like I said, I’ve always photographed to document my life, and in a lot of ways, I use it to practice my cinematography on a daily basis. The two go hand in hand. With photos, I still get to focus on lighting, framing, focus, and exposure, but it costs less, which allows me to do it more often than cinematography. I like shooting portraits, and especially environmental portraits because I enjoy the process of meeting someone in their safe space and getting to know them. I have trouble speaking to strangers, but that barrier is broken by the camera. I am the most sociable when I have a camera in my hands.
Recently I’ve moved a lot of my personal work back to analog photography, particularly with my current project called Great American Women. G.A.W. is a series of portraits of women who I come across who I think are amazing humans and role models. I owe a lot of who I am to women. While my Dad sparked my interest in photography, my mom showed me great films when I was young, and helped pay for college by planting flowers and designing people’s gardens. In NYC a lot of my clients were mom bloggers (Mom Trends, Project Nursery, The Baby Book with Alecia Whitaker to name a few). I’ve always felt closer to women than men, and I felt like I needed to do something to give back to all the women that helped shape me as a human and an artist.
My incredible fiancé, Courtney Barber, helps a lot as well. She has an eye for hair and makeup, and her energy can lift anyone’s spirits. But her most helpful skill, even beyond all of that, is her eye for styling clothing. A lot of my portrait sessions rely heavily on her eye as a thrifter. Her shop, Clementine and Daisy (on Etsy) shares a studio space with my photography and is the main source for a lot of the wardrobe in our shoots. She shops for women of all sized, finding incredibly unique vintage pieces and turning them into full outfits. I owe a lot of the look and feel of my more recent projects to her incredible eye.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
I equate any level of success that I’ve experienced to my ability to adapt. If something needs to get done and no one else is able to do it, I’ll be the one to figure it out. That goes for everything from running audio on a shoot to taking a certain kind of photo I’ve never taken before, to rigging lights in odd places, filling in for a karaoke song I’ve never heard before and at one point in my life playing competitive co-Ed renegade roller derby. If it needs to happen, I’ll figure it out. A prime example is after college I was directing Godspell, and I couldn’t find a bass player to play those funky 70’s jams… So I learned bass and directed the show from the pit. There is ALWAYS a solution.
Contact Info:
- Website: joshuasterlingbragg.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshuasterlingbragg/
Image Credit:
Lucia Doynel, Patrick James Lynch, Natalie Rose Lynch, Kate McCracken, Jocelyn Jolley, Jessica Richmond, Melanie Forrest, Juliana Damiano
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