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Photo District News
Eric Myer gets Booked
By creating such a well-designed self-promo booklet, this photographer dared clients to throw it away.
By Carroll Lachinit / Photo District News
In the waning days of summer, Eric Myer gave himself an assignment: spend a few hours at Zuma Beach, near his Malibu studio and home, photographing Californians in their most familiar form – as sun-, sand- and surf-loving creatures.
Myer's richly toned summer shots became the centerpiece of Portraits, a self-promotion booklet that has brought him great results so far. The cover girl is an insouciant teenager, wearing sunglasses, a daisy-trimmed bathing suit, a Band-Aid on one finger. She perfectly captures what Myer regards as his signature portrait style: clean, ungimmicky, character driven shots of real people on location.
Myer got one assignment just two days after his booklet landed on a designer's desk. A second job was sparked when an art director decided the Zuma Beach pictures, with their exquisite lighting and modern feel, were the perfect approach for an ad campaign featuring portraits of Los Angeles business innovators.
Myer, who spends the majority of his time in advertising and design work, does a self-promotion campaign every three to four years. His mission is always the same: to create a piece that dares the recipient to throw it in the trash.
That's because Myer knows the ignominious fate that awaits most promotional pieces. He visualizes art directors with trash baskets anchored between their feet, consigning booklets and cards to Recycling Hell. All that work. All that money. All for naught.
"They're inundated," he says. "Pieces go into the trash because they've only got so much much wall and file space."
So, whatever Myer sends these picky ADs has to be something that sticks like Super Glue.
Portraits riveted Patty McNair, senior art director for the Los Angeles-based DavisElen advertising agency. She was looking for someone to shoot Los Angeles business stars, including fashion designer Shelli Segal and Richard Zamboni, the creator of the ice-grooming machine.
In addition to to Myer's technical acumen, McNair liked the on-location concepts he employed for three celebrity portraits in the book: actor Dennis Franz, spiritual writer Maryanne Williamson and Congress for Racial Equality president Celes King III, whom Myer photographed in front of his central Los Angeles bail bonds office.
Finally, the booklet itself was impressive, McNair says. "It was big, well printed, good quality," and that made all the difference. "You can throw promotional cards away and not feel guilty about it," she says. Not this piece, though. And when told that this was Myer's strategy, McNair laughed. "It worked," she says.
She hired Myer to shoot a campaign for the New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership, a non profit group formed after the 1992 Los Angeles riots to bolster the city’s image as a place to do business. McNair was delighted with the results. “He’s a smart guy, with a lot of energy. It was quite a pleasure to work with him.”
What designer Kimberly Baer saw in Myer’s promotional book was a black–and–white portrait of a violinist rehearsing in a sun-dusted salon, a picture he originally shot for Samsung’s annual report. It sparked an idea for one of Baer’s clients, whose project had stalled, lacking the right direction.
“I look at a lot of corporate photography, and [Myer’s piece] blew me away,” says Baer, of Kimberly Baer Design Associates. “We sent them this image, and it immediately took off. We hired Eric and he shot the job. You can’t ask more than that of a self promotion.”
The people-on-location focus of the self promo presented a new aspect of Myer’s work to Russell Banks, senior designer at the Los Angeles office of Siegel & Gale, the New York-headquartered branch consultancy. What Banks liked, he says, was Myer’s ability to capture his non-professional subjects.
“There’s an art to shooting people who aren’t used to being in front of the camera,” he says. “In L.A. you get a lot of pieces with famous people and they’re comfortable with the camera. But the art of a great portrait is getting a person [who isn’t famous] to be comfortable, and capture that. I look for that honesty in the image.”
Banks also praised the booklet’s pacing and scale. It opens with four Zuma Beach pictures. The quartet, shot in black and white, is arranged across the center of two white-space pages. A little later comes the two-page, full-bleed portrait of the violinist. Then there is a page of four closely clustered color images of Las Vegas visitors, all posed before the town’s garish marquees. They are paired with a facing page that carries only the name of the series. Later the viewer comes to a two color portrait of children, shot for the cover of Mattel’s annual report. Myer came in so close on the little faces that you can almost count the kids’ eyelashes.
To produce the book, Myer teamed up with Kerry Leimer, of Leimer Cross Design Corp. in Seattle. It was Leimer’s choice to feature the Zuma Beach series at the front of the 20-page, 33-picture book, Myer says. But the focus on location portraits was Myer’s decision.
Leimer opened the book with a page of toned letters layered against a white background. In a sort of optical trick, the letters gradually sort themselves out to spell “Portraits.” Myer’s name is presented in a neat, small-and correctly ordered-type on the lower third of the page. Leimer also repeated the design against a black background on the inside of the mailing envelope.
The reply card is where Myer goofs around a little. It has four check-off choices for the recipients, instructing Myer to call them, send them this book, keep them on his mailing list or take them out for “a free lunch.”
For Myer, reply cards are critical to a promo. “You’re putting a lot of energy into something that costs a lot of money,” he says. “The cards are a good way of gauging the mailer’s effectiveness.”
Self-promotions are “always a labor of love,” Myer adds, but they’ve never let him down. “Every time I’ve done a promotional piece, it’s paid for itself. It raises your profile. It’s always good.”
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