Today we’d like to introduce you to Bill Wisser.
Bill’s best known for his beautiful photography of food, chefs, restaurants and resorts.
He’s also an historic preservationist who’s written about and photographed our region’s amazing Art Deco and Miami Modern architecture.
Bill’s lavishly-illustrated, coffee table book — South Beach, America’s Riviera, Miami Beach, Florida, — which he wrote and photographed told how a gang of preservationists, artists, hip entrepreneurs and fashionistas bucked the local establishment and dragged Miami Beach — kicking and screaming — into the preservation era that helped spark the transformation of Miami into a world art capital.
The theme of the book’s 35,000-word text is that “preservation pays,” and it reflects Bill’s background as a Berkeley-trained historian and an award-winning newspaper reporter.
Bill started out as a general assignment reporter on a small-town daily, The Peekskill Evening Star. With his first paycheck, he bought a 35mm Olympus camera and began illustrating his own stories. Later Bill wrote prize-winning, in depth, investigations at The Pittsburgh Press and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Plus he wrote about and photographed all sorts of other stories.
Along the way, he freelanced as a photographer in India, with Time and Newsweek publishing some of his photos. Later Bill wrote business articles for Barron’s and national TV broadcasts for CBS News in New York.
In 1992, Bill moved to South Beach and soon began photographing features and portraits for a new magazine named Ocean Drive.
Editor-in-Chief Glenn Albin and Creative Director Carlos Suarez also asked him to shoot food, which he had never done before. But these shoots went well, and soon Bill’s other clients included General Foods, Food & Wine and Chef Daniel Boulud’s db Bistro Moderne, to name a few.
Meanwhile, Bill’s images of Miami Beach’s remarkable Tropical Deco architecture, and the South Beach scene in general, were published all over the world by many leading publications including The New York Times, GermanVogue and Casa Vogue Brasil.
Bill’s currently working on two new books: one on Art Deco architectural details; and the other on the art, history and religion of the Kathmandu Valley.
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’m mostly self-taught, but I’m super-thankful for the training and inspiration I got from wonderful photojournalists I worked with, especially John McElroy in Peekskill and Lynn Johnson in Pittsburgh. Also, Life magazine photographer Howard Sochurek and Newsweek photographer Bernie Gotfryd were mentors.
One difficulty I had early on was that, in those days, newspapers and magazines were structured so that writing and photography were two, totally separate departments, while I wanted to work in both. One paper where I was on-staff as a writer, wouldn’t allow me to use their darkroom, though they would publish photos I printed in an outside darkroom that I rented.
http://www.billwisserphoto.com/ – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I specialize in the fine lighting and photography of food, restaurants and chefs, plus the architecture of hotels and restaurants.
I’m particularly interested in lighting, and have studied the techniques of the great Hollywood glamour photographers and cinematographers of the 1940s, and have adapted their techniques to modern equipment to create exciting and dramatic food photography and also portraits.
I have many other lighting styles that I also employ, depending on the circumstances. To see, visit http://www.billwisserphoto.com/ and click on the various portfolio galleries.
Despite the broad range of subject matter I’ve shot, most of my work — commercial or editorial, food or photojournalism, portraiture or architecture — has a certain dramatic quality with rich tonalities, graphic composition and sophisticated lighting. And some of my best shots are quiet and very simple.
I think the subject, not the photographer, is the hero and I want to tell the subject’s story.
I shoot RAW files and usually do my own editing and post-production. To paraphrase landscape photographer Ansel Adams, who was a darkroom virtuoso, the RAW file is like a musician’s score, while the transformation of it into a finished tiff or jpeg is like the musician’s performance of it.
These days I make these performances in the digital darkroom on my Mac, which provides far greater control than in the old, wet, chemical darkroom.
While I love and use the latest technology, I also strive to uphold the old-school values of professionalism, craftsmanship and dependability on deadline.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
The publication of my South Beach book.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.billwisserphoto.com
- Phone: 305-672-2448 Studio, or 305-632-0840 Mobile
- Email: bill@billwisserphoto.com
- Instagram: billwfoto
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bill.wisser
- Twitter: @billwisser
Celebrity chef, “New World Cuisine” guru, and cookbook author Norman Van Aken photographed in his reastaurant, Norman’s, in Miami’s Coral Gables
Image Credit:
Bill Wisser
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