Joe Giacomet mostly works in advertising. It’s an area that has allowed him to do what he wants. And has given the spare cash to be able to focus on personal projects from time to time. Marcus describes Joe’s style as photography on steroids. He says Joe is known for vibrant, quirky, comedic ideas. Joe has studies graphic design and worked with a lot of influential people and those have come together to get him where he is. His shots have a lot of humour in, but he says clients can sometimes reign this in. Joe says when he goes into a shoot he likes to remind himself that he is there to have fun.
Joe studied graphic design initially and photography was a hobby. He then found he was enjoying the photography more than the graphic design. At university he studied photography, but also worked as a freelance graphic designer. He then moved to London, started assisting as a photographer and the graphic design work drifted away.
Joe worked as an assistant for Mark Denton and he has been very influential in Joe’s work. He assisted for Julia Fullerton-Batten
and she really pushed him develop, especially around lighting. Joe says it was fascinating assisting as he learnt so much from seeing how other people work.
Joe says what a lot of people don’t realise is how planned
everything is for a shoot. Every detail is planned out in advance. He tries to leave space for creativity, but the planning needs to be in place. Working in advertising can be very prescriptive.
Joe did a personal project based on football cards with Mark Denton. This was a long running personal project making comedy football cards. This project brought Joe’s work to Marcus’s attention. They did the shoots for 6 days over a couple of years. The cards started as thirty portraits. They then invented the teams, got woven badges made, printed huge backdrops, and spent a long time on casting. They looked at over 5000 people to find the right people for the cards. Then post production was done over Covid. This was a huge amount of work that probably wouldn’t have got done without Covid. All of this was simply for a personal project. The time spent on it was certainly not commercially viable. Joe thinks he landed work at the Qatar world cup due to this project. But he says don’t always believe that personal projects will always turn into work.
Before the football cards Joe did a parody of a Tretchikoff painting, Chinese girl . A friend of Joe’s, Kate is Chinese and she needed a business card, so they decided to make a parody of this painting. This was just for fun, but ended up in the Royal academy, was on TV and Paloma Faith has a copy on her wall.
What comes across from these projects is Joe’s intense attention to detail. He says this is a great quality, but sometimes needs reigning
in. If he does a job he always gives 110% he never gives half effort.
Joe’s style has allowed him to move into other genres, so his style comes across in whatever he does. Joe has a process for whatever he does and thinks he could apply this to projects outside photography.
Joe says he came to London in his twenty knowing no one. So all his contacts he now has in the advertising business have come through building a network over time. He has also found that as he has been in the industry for a good number of years now, his contacts have been moving up the corporate ladder. So, the people who were very junior when he first met them have started to become much higher up in the business. That means now he is able to get higher level
work with the contacts he has. He has been nurturing these contacts over time and without this nurturing over time he would not have these contacts.
He did have a time a few years ago where he gave up photography for a month or so as he was making almost no money. He felt sometimes like he was banging his head against a wall trying to get work. But he then got a commission for 3M which took him forwards.
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free