While photographing a private political event in Sedona last March, I met Jerry Hirsch, Chairman, The Lodestar Foundation. He was clad in a brown blazer with a long white ponytail and a turquoise bolo tie, which made his stand out amongst the international backdrop of the event. We had a great conversation and he mentioned he had a project that I would be interested in. Several months later we met to discuss his ideas about creating a book about his Spanish Colonial furniture collection. Jerry is my neighbor so we met at his home to look at the pieces he would like photographed. Jerry’s home is something like a very comfortable museum, containing artifacts from across the seas, beautiful tapestries and several outdoor garden areas with water and trellises.
Due to the preciousness and fragility of these handmade relics we decided to bring the studio to his home and photograph the furniture one by one. Our trusty intern, Laura Marks, was in charge of logging each piece’s caption including title, material, time period, location and provenance. She was also the designer that worked on the book layout and typesetting.
This book was a collaborative project that required several rounds of fact-checking with dealers, commissioning a historical essay, and writing a forward with Jerry to acquaint readers with the contents of his collection. Jerry’s ultimate goal for this hard cover, 80 page book is to use it as a portfolio of his collection to send to potential buyers and dealers.
I worked on a project like this one years ago with the Phoenix Art Museum, which was a book titled “The Art of Turned-Wood Bowls”. In those days, books like these were produced by McMurray Publishing and I did the photography portion. Now, I use the same program to develop the digital files and create a book layout in studio.
Vermillion 