I had the pleasure of photographing the author Rebecca Makkai for The New Yorker.
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The School of Beauty and Long Life featured on Nowness...
Honored that this film was selected as one of Nowness.asia ‘s best short films of 2020.
See it here…
https://www.nowness.asia/story/the-school-of-beauty-and-long-life
Hundreds of trainees from all across China enroll in the Wenfeng Beauty and Hairdressing School to realize their dreams under the tutelage of Chen Hao
At the Wenfeng Beauty and Hairdressing School on the outskirts of Shanghai, hundreds of trainees from across China have enrolled themselves to follow their dreams of becoming hairdressers and beauticians, all under the tutelage of its enigmatic founder and CEO, Chen Hao. With classes on facials, hair perming, and eyebrow grooming, the curriculum offered seems like standard beauty school fare. But the sight of students dressed in military uniforms, practicing drills in the courtyard reveals that the school is far from a typical institute of beauty.
“Originally I’d been interested in exploring the idea that hair is a tool for social mobility in China. For many, owning a salon is the ultimate occupation for entry into the middle class,” director Noah Sheldon explains. “Across the country, factory workers and teenagers growing up in rural areas dream of having their own salon one day. For those students enrolling at Wenfeng, they are taking their first momentous steps towards that goal and their optimism is palpable. It wasn’t until we started shooting at the school that we realised the centre of the story would be Chen Hao and the tactics he employs to capitalise on this optimism.”
Raised in a working class family, Chen Hao’s mission is to “make people 20 years younger and live 30 years older” through his work, travelling across China to harness the knowledge and techniques of the country’s great health and spiritual virtuosos. The Wengfeng Cosmetology Group, which was founded in 1995, aims to create a military-style, "unified standard" for its salons across the country. Most employees of its various salons, and cosmeticians, must take courses and pass examinations at the school. Zhou Jie, a student of Wenfeng from central Hunan province, says that the military style of education at Wenfeng has been advantageous for his career. “I have adapted well. When I was at home, without strict rules, I used to get up very late everyday. But after I came here, there is a really strict atmosphere, which will be a huge help for me in the future,” said Zhou.
Yet, despite his apparent charisma and behavioural grandeur, securing an interview with Chen Hao proved to be the biggest challenge during the filming process. “We had many interviews scheduled with him that ultimately all ended in him changing his mind at the last minute and deciding he didn’t feel like appearing on film. We were told he was very camera shy and, despite having his image plastered all over the school, rarely liked to be in front of the lens,” Sheldon shares. “This experience was extremely at odds with the personality he presented, and when finally interviewed, he roundly critiqued (and offended) each member of our crew in turn and talked for a solid 20 minutes with almost no prompt.”
Not Nostalgic, Kim Jones on Tokyo
I made for Nowness with Kim Jones of Dior for Nowness.
Featuring Seika, Kazunari, Yu Ishizuka, Yoshitsune, Makito (Light Model Management), and Mash Shimizu
Executive Producers：Shaway Yeh and Yaohui
Production and Casting: Taka Arakawa
Production Coordinator: Qian Tang
Music: Nick Zinner
Styling: Emma Schwarz
Makeup: Yuka Hirata
Makeup assistant: Lee Hyangsoon
Shot in Tokyo
Ryan Hemsworth - Special Girl ft. SK & Tomggg (Official Music Video)
Happy to share a video I made for Ryan Hemsworth.
Performers: 姜⽟玉莉 (Jiang Yu Li) 王明超 (Wang Ming Chao)
Camera: Noah Sheldon, Daniel Szeto & Nathaniel Brown
Producers: Jean Liu & Rosalind Coleman Editors: Jia Li & Marc Ressang
Choreographers: Oliver Hornsby-Sayers & Steven James Apicello
Make-up: Virginia Chen
Color Grade: Julia Gao & Noah Sheldon
Lettering: Melissa Thuy Lin
Additional thanks to Chen Hao, Milk and Honey Productions Shanghai, Eddie Pak, Vincent Taylor, Vivian Sangsukwirasathien, Maggie Peng, Elsa and Lina Sheldon
Shanghai Tower project featured on "It's Nice That"
I am very happy to share this piece about my Shanghai Tower work. Please check it out here - http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/noah-sheldon-shanghai-tower-photography-060717
My film Styrofoam at the AFI Documentry Film Festival
Very happy to be in D.C. for the AFI Documentary Film Festival. My film Styrofoam is playing on June 15th at 4:00 at the Landmark. Sound track by the great Nick Zinner. http://afi.com/afidocs/shorts.aspx#styrofoam
You can see the films at my site for the project - http://work-is.xyz
New drone...
I got a new drone and I am really happy with it! The camera is great. I have been shooting drone footage on projects for a couple of years but it has always been a complicated balance between having a drone that was easy to travel with and one that took decent pictures. Finally, it all comes together. Not that the world needs more drone footage but I am excited to have it.
Nike sock racer for you…
A video I made for Nike of the new SockRacerByYou featuring 90 color ways!!! Video editing done by Sartoria Comunicazione with Sean Hung. Thank you to @angeline_chen and @drieke3ke for making it happen!
Shanghai Tower in The Financial Times Magazine
There is a nice article in the Financial Times magazine about my Shanghai Tower work. Thanks to Emma Bowkett and Gabriel Wildau for making it happen. Click here to see a pdf of the article and here to see more work from the project.
Conversation with Noah Sheldon and Eve Reed on Tea & Water
An interview...
Thanks to Eve Reed at Tea & Water for the nice interview.
Check it out here...
http://www.teaandwater.co/insights/interviews/conversation-with-noah-sheldon
A film I made on the artist Amalia Ulman
This is a short film I made on the artist Amalia Ulman about her piece "Rescue", an interactive sleepover, where 15 strangers were asked to dispose of phones and personal belongings and were left stranded in an art gallery for an all-nighter. The film was made for AirBnB
A story for California Sunday on biking in Sichuan
Some pictures from a story I shot for California Sunday on long distance biking in Sichuan China.
Check it out here...
https://story.californiasunday.com/long-distance-biking-in-china
Ms. Jade for Modern Weekly
It's been too long since posting here but it's nearly spring and I have a lot of recent work I would love to share. Here is a photo I took for Modern Weekly of Ms. Jade.
Domus Mixtape #9: The Sound of Las Vegas
This is a piece I originally made for a show at PS1 MOMA. Happy it has a new life as a Domus magazine mixtape.
A binaural immersion into the environments of winning, and losing, in the gambling-as-spectacle capital of the world.
We hear a room full of hundreds of slot machines making their appeal. Occasionally we hear the machines paying out in the clinking of coins. My path was guided by the sounds of winning. In this recording I would get as close as possible to the people and machines that were paying out. I recorded this piece with a pair of tiny homemade microphones hidden in a hat while walking around the casinos in Las Vegas. One microphone on each side of my head in front of my ears. The technique is called binaural recording. My head becomes an obstacle for the sound so that a sound coming from the right has to travel a greater distance to the left ear, creating a slight time delay which our brains use to locate the source of the sound. The shape of our ears allows our brains to figure out if a sound is coming from the front or behind of us. With this recording technique—which is ideal for reproducing the "live" sensation of a concert hall or any type of ambient or naturalistic recording—my ears become reflectors and obstacles for the sound before it hits the microphone, which creates a very detailed and immersive stereo field.
The Domus Mixtape series is curated by Daniel Perlin.
check it out here...
http://www.domusweb.it/en/specials/2011/10/10/domus-mixtape-9-the-sound-of-las-vegas.html
Nice write up in The Picture Professional...
Article by JOHN W. W. ZEISLER from The Picture Professional Art direction by Ophelia Chong
NOAH SHELDON HAD BEEN TRAVELING back and forth from China to New York for work, where he is represented by Julian Richards, but when his wife, an architect and artist, was offered a job in Shanghai, they jumped at the offer. Aside from being able to raise his daughter bi-lingual, Sheldon would also have the opportunity to ingrain himself in a culture not often photographed. Now, when you look at Sheldon’s photographs, one of the most apparent things is what’s missing. He often refuses to show a finished product. Instead, he brings the viewer into a moment of process; an empty stadium, the politician on his way to the stage, models receiving last minute instructions backstage before heading down the runway. There is something unnerving but also invigorating about this, and Sheldon’s new project Weightlifters continues in this vein.
For this collection, Sheldon got the opportunity to photograph members of the Chinese national weightlifting team preparing for the London Olympics. It is a precise and captivating essay on the process of training the body for a Herculean task.
He blends relaxed portraits of the men and women with staged shots that show off the athletes’ statuesque bodies. There are also several compelling images of the artifacts of the gym, where the athletes have spent most of their lives—damp towels, the daily log book of accomplishments, the fading colors of weights. A sweaty, humid light pervades the images. The effort and preparation of the athletes is palpable.
In China, photography is sometimes a difficult passion. A crumbling wall or old building may call out to a photographer, but such documentation is not always welcome. Sometimes the sight of Sheldon setting up his tripod draws the attention of Chinese officials who don’t want him photographing old things. He says, “I’ve gotten really good at taking quick pictures of everything my minder wants me to, then I go and photograph what I want to.” Sports photography can be even more difficult because the athletes are important representatives of China’s image abroad, and access to them is limited. As in much of East Asia, sports academies are common in China, and Sheldon had been trying to do a project about them for a while. When he was finally granted access to photograph a school in Beijing, he hopped on a plane only to arrive at the location and be turned away for being a foreign photographer.
Undaunted, Sheldon turned to an art director friend who had just been asked by Nike to do a shoot. The Nike imprimatur had enough cachet to get Sheldon over the hurdle of “sensitive matters,” and he was able to visit a sports school for weightlifters. Although Sheldon had limited access, only two minutes with each athlete, he was able to snap enough to cull into the sixteen images he finally chose. Many of the lifters he photographed went on to cover themselves in Olympic glory, but somehow these before shots tell a more intriguing story. They are relaxed, down-to-earth, and atmospheric, eschewing the spectacle of sport for the quiet moment. Even the photos of the athletes as statues have a playful quality, displaying the humility and dedication of the men and women.
He’s made the most of his time in China. In addition to his professional work and artistic projects like Weightlifters, he maintains the photoblog Far East Broadway where he displays photos, often portraits, of his time in China. Spending a good deal of time in factories, he often thinks of Lewis Hine’s photographs, and these photos carry a casual, everyday quality, documenting the diversity of the country. He says, “When the West thinks and depicts China, it is so often huge masses of conforming people.” However, living there has allowed Sheldon to contextualize and sympathize. He has come to believe that China is “a land of eccentrics with a quiet kind of individualism expressed in small gestures.” Weightlifters, with its soft-spoken candidness, gives viewers one such glimpse into this unexpected perspective.✹
Converse’s Get Dirty campaign...
I had a great time shooting Converse’s Get Dirty campaign for greater China. It was super fun. We set up a seamless backstage at a concert in Shanghai sponsored by Converse - I photographed each member of all the bands that played right before and after their set. We featured band members from Hell Yeah, New Pants, Queen Sea Big Shark and more.
Biosphere in Icon Magazine...
The recent issue of the excellent magazine "Icon" is about space.I am honored that they featured 6 pages of my biosphere photos.
Click here to download a PDF. Check out the magazine at http://www.iconeye.com/
N>O>V>E>M>B>E>R> mix tape
November Mix Tape...
China Cat Fancy for Nowness...
More cat news - I photographed the China Cat Fanciers 15th annual competition in Beijing last week for Nowness.com
Here is a link to the story on Nowness and some outtakes from the day...
2013 United Bamboo Catclub Calender...
Be the first of your friends to get the new 2013 United Bamboo Cat Calendar that I shot and Alex Lin designed. The calendar will feature super thick pages drilled through for hanging on a wall. We need your help! Please support our project via Kickstarter.