James Franco

Monday June 20th, 2011

San Francisco based photographer Annie Tritt doesn’t own a television and rarely watches films. In spite of this, her favorite photography subjects are celebrities. Even though she loves celebrity assignments, Annie rarely has any idea of who the subject is. Once assigned a celebrity shoot, Annie always researches her subjects to learn all she can about them. She learns about their careers, their personalities, and how they’ve been represented before so that she can try and show them in a non obvious way.

Recently, Annie received an assignment from The Bay Citizen, a nonprofit news organization who’d teamed up with the New York Times, a long time client of Annie’s. She learned she would be shooting a celebrity, so she immediately got to work researching her future subject. The more she delved into her research, the more impressed she became. She realized this celebrity had a long list of the notable accomplishments. That was because she was researching actor, director, screenwriter, author, painter, producer, Academy Award nominee, and PhD candidate, James Franco.

Annie was excited to meet such an accomplished person. She learned that it was not a portrait shoot, but that she would be documenting James as he created an art piece for the publication The Thing Quarterly. The Thing is itself interesting as its an object based publication that invites artists to create everyday objects that somehow incorporates text. James was this quarter’s artist, and would be writing with lipstick on a small mirror in each of The Thing’s 750 issues. His art piece was a tribute to friend and late actor, Brad Renfro and also included a small picture of Brad along with a poster of James with the name Brad carved into his arm.

Below is a video of Annie and James on the shoot day:

The shoot lasted around two hours. The challenge for Annie was to artistically create enough images for a dynamic and interesting slideshow of one person, standing in the same place, doing the same thing, and mostly looking down. However, she says that James actually made it quite easy. Annie was amazed with how relaxed and natural James Franco was,

He did not seem to care what I shot or what I did.  This was very different for a celebrity, in fact for anybody really. He really didn’t seem concerned on how he was represented. He chatted with most people there but was really focused on getting the work done.

When I went home, I thought about how unusual it was for him to be so unconcerned with how he was presented just being himself. I also thought about the bravery it takes to make a piece of art like that. I really learned a lot. I walked away with a really profound insight into a better way to be in the world.

Annie was glad to have gotten to opportunity to meet James and states that he, “changed my life.”

- Maria