Pop Is Personal: The photography of Joseph Cultice

Comments (0) By Annie Zaleski Wednesday, Jun 16 2010

Joseph Cultice shot this cover for the Jonas Brothers' 2008 release "A Little Bit Longer"

Cultice's self-portrait

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It's a mixture. I market myself to the management and to the bands and to every pop star I know once I get their e-mails. I've been doing it for a long time. I do have a pretty good reputation in the business, but a lot of times it's word of mouth. How a project usually happens, most times, it comes from the record company. And they're basically the middleman between me and the artist, if I don't know the artist. 3OH!3 is a good example. The band had an idea that they wanted to have gold bodies and hands coming out of gold water. I took that and figured out they wanted to have the album cover be their 3OH!3 hands, which is two hands put together with the "O" in the middle. We figured out in Photoshop how to do all that stuff, because they didn't have a very large budget to do it, [and] it would have been really hard to do it real on set. And I had to put it all together.

I've always said, I take every pop star — and I'm not trying to put them in my photographs, I'm basically trying to make a new image for them. I'm not a cookie-cutter photographer. A lot of photographers, you can instantly look at their picture and go, "Oh, that's an Anton Corbijn," or "That's a Danny Clinch." I couldn't do that, I think I would go crazy doing the same picture over and over again. There are definitely styles and stuff I like to do. I do like repetition. But when it comes shooting Marilyn Manson the same way I would shoot Ozzy Osbourne, I wouldn't do that. Not only are they both the same kind of pop star, but it would be too similar. They would be ripping each other off.