Todd Macmillan
It’s simple:
As long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by photography. Fascinated with the ability to capture both clarity and mystery in a single moment, with the power to tell a story... and yet leave the viewer wanting to know more. This is what has guided me throughout my personal and professional life. I have found it is the one artistic medium that really moves me.
I was just a kid when I looked through my first prime lens, an experience I’ll never forget. The sharpness and vividness of that image was like magic to me. Suddenly, I had found a visual language for the world around me. It was a world now transformed: into both a palette and a canvas. Nothing ever looked quite the same again.
Later, there was another moment that really made everything click. My great-grandfather had bought a camera during the Depression to document his life on a farm outside Dallas. I found it one day while digging through my grandmother’s old things, and I was transfixed. Here’s the thing: they weren’t the usual family photographs. He had an eye. I could tell he’d had fun with scene-setting, composition and framing. They were thoughtful photographs, like something you’d see in a modern-day ad.
My great-grandfather wasn’t just capturing moments of his family life; he was telling a story: their lives from his own perspective, and used the camera with a level of intention that made me think differently about how the past looks to us in the present. That’s the power of photography. It was then I knew that I was going to document our time period.
Working at a movie trailer company here in Los Angeles, I bought my first professional medium-format camera. I practiced by pulling images from magazines that caught my eye, and on weekends I’d try to emulate them as best I could. What techniques did they use? Why did they choose certain framings? How did they get the light to look like that?
It was around this time that I really found ‘The Light’. Literally. Nothing else is so simultaneously fundamental yet complex as lighting. Controlling light, one can transform any subject and dictate mood and tone with the subtlest of variations. There is beauty in what it reveals and hides. I believe those artists who can thoroughly understand and manage light are the true masters of the medium.
After eight years in the Theatrical Marketing Department at Universal Pictures, and working in the trenches of dozens of campaigns, learning the nuances of positioning and selling films through AV, I have dedicated myself fully to one thing: pursuit of the powerful kind of photography that has always moved me.
My sincere hope is that my work has the power to move you... as well.