POST
The Critics Are Not Divided
Monday January 12th, 2009
Jennifer Pottheiser, one of Wonderful Machine‘s excellent sports and people photographers based in New York, has received a lot of attention from her 2008 ad campaign for the NBA.
From one of two PDN articles featuring Jennifer's work for this campaign
Suzee Barrabee, of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, proclaimed the NBA project one that she is “most proud of from this year.” Perhaps this is in part due to the campaign’s popularity: in addition to two PDN articles (most recently the Dec. issue), the images made the Communication Arts Advertising Annual, and the campaign was parodied by Saturday Night Live, Sports Center, marketing for the Adam Sandler film Zohan, and the images even inspired a Time magazine cover. The latter featured a split screen of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, stealing the NBA ad’s title, “There Can Only Be One.”
Jennifer’s experience shooting sports celebrities came in handy for the ads. “The campaign had me and my crew traversing North America for 7 weeks. We shot 49 NBA players in 17 NBA cities and the athletes were great as I had shot all of them for past assignments. Only Allen Iverson (at that time on the Denver Nuggets) chose to “skip” the shoot.”
From the Communication Arts Advertising Annual
Yet somehow, amongst all of the shoots, Jennifer managed to train for her first marathon. She said there wasn’t much downtime, but she had promised herself to run it this year. She completed the 26.2 mile race only one week after the ad campaign debuted.
You can see more of Jennifer’s work on her site, which includes a behind-the-scenes video from her shoot with New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning.
[...] she’s not shooting. Graduated from Duke. Makes sports celebrities feel at home. Recent NBA ad campaign was parodied by SNL, Sports Center, marketing for the Adam Sandler film Zohan, and the images even [...]