Summer Intern

Here's a story about my 2019 summer internship

I had my first summer internship when I was freshly 20. This was the summer after my sophomore year at USC. I was in art school and trying to be a photographer. I was wasting so much money on film because I never had the patience to rig or learn studio lighting. June was fucking hot. It was 2019 and the sidewalks felt like tar.

Test Polaroid from a Martin shoot in my Levi’s back pocket

My oversized Levi’s became a hotbox during the day and the clunky black boots I bought from Depop were like bala bangles weighted to my feet. I really needed work and money for the summer. At the recommendation of a friend I cold-emailed a photographer working in Tribeca. her documentary work struck me as raw and I was eager to see if she needed extra help. When she didn’t I felt discouraged. But she was kind enough to recommend me to an editor friend for the future.

Not able to sit still, My aunt suggested I go to a photoshoot set and help the photographer’s assistants with gaffing. I found myself awkward and underutilized there. We were gaffing for a Barney’s editorial web shoot which featured one famous Dutch model who chain smoked on the chaise lounge outside the Pier 59 studio.

Gaffing on the Barney’s set at Pier 59

I stole some leftover set food in brown to-go boxes and ate it on the Metro North home. I complained to my mom it was no use. She told me to go back the next day and just show up.

So I did. But this time I wanted to be taken seriously so I bummed a Malboro light from one of the boys and tried to join in on the conversation. These guys were talking about their old assisting days with “Bruce” (Weber). They had this one crazy story where in Bruce himself lost a Hasselblad camera meant to be a gift for the Queen of England while on an international flight.

It was clear to me that I was not in on the joke but rather at the periphery of these men’s laughter. But because I was young and eager to belong it did not matter at all.

The Pier 59 Shoot

It was 2 weeks later when I got an email from the editor who said she knew a photographer looking for a paid summer intern at $500 a week.

So that’s how I ended up interning for Martin Schoeller. You know Martin’s work, it is often the same: blaring lights form a well-lit close cropped portrait shot of the subjects. Martin uses film for these photographs with a gorgeous Mamiya camera that to me always looked like a royal Onyx stone.

Martin's office and work

My first day on the job I got an iced chai at this place called Interlude. My train got into Grand Central around 8:25am then I hopped on the S to a quick downtown 1 train transfer. Easy enough. The chai was really good. I still frequent Interlude to this day (but for their matcha). Martin’s office was close by in an old wooden floor brownstone. There was a rickety elevator in the building so I ended up taking the stairs most occasions.

My tasks there were simple. I would enter the office early around 9am, unload the dishwasher, turn on the coffee machine and sweep a bit. Then I would sit down at the desktop and go to work photoshopping huge large format negatives to spot-tone specs of dust from their surface. I worked alongside Jan and Jill who had been there awhile. They were both kind and eager teachers, patient with my intern (in)abilities. We shared some happy lunch breaks together, munching on gyro sandwiches in the office.

Once I was sent straight out to the plexiglass store to pickup a measured panel for our office AC to stay put. It was a reminder that old buildings don’t care who you are. That in the rumbling stomach of history and brick you can be burped at just the same.

Hauling plexiglass along Hudson Street

I grew to love this internship. But I also developed a JUUL addiction. It was 2019 and that was the fashion. I went through mint pods like water and would savor the first pod crackles like a poor man did food. Once, clumsy and anxious from a bad morning’s commute, I dropped my JUUL in the employee bathroom toilet then promptly fished it out and dumped the liquid residue to start hitting it again.

What I enjoyed so much about the internship experience was the people, the pictures and the pay. Martin had started as Annie Leibovitz’ first assistant. This was back in the heyday of Magazine when editorials had budget out the wazoo. His technical training, mathematically precise and very detailed, was one I totally missed at my conceptual art school. So it was very cool to witness. And to be in the mix with these fancy cameras and a fridge full of film all felt elevated but somehow accessible. Afterall, it was just equipment sitting on shelves above dusty wood floors. It was a stark contrast to the antiseptic Pier 59.

The film fridge, contact sheets, stand in test shot from a set

For several shoots we hauled this same equipment to and fro. These days were marked by July sweat and more nicotine. It was around this time that I started to make a film of my own which I worked on for the whole summer. I visited my Grandma sick with dementia and took a nice still of us embracing hands.

I picked up a nannying gig in East Hampton that I would report to on weekends when not at my internship. And that was the way of my summer for awhile, sweaty and JUUL filled.

There was one time I came quite close to tears while interning but it was not for the reasons you would think. It was August 5th and Toni Morrison had just died. When the news broke, I was sent to the contact sheet room to find the ‘Toni Morrison’ labeled box so that a popular Magazine could use her portrait in their obituary. It felt weighty to hold an image in a box like that. The pictures, like her, in eternal rest. It was beautiful and very sad.

I went back to USC the very next week. I finally finished my summer movie. I stopped JUULing that December. It was a weird adjustment back to the West coast where the pavement did not smell of tar but of burnt sugar. I missed the East coast air and my mother who believed in me so much.

So I write this now with summer nostalgia. As I sit at my desk in New York, in my first post college corporate job. I can tell my younger self that she will return to photography after a 3 year hiatus because she wants to not because the sardonic Bruce Weber assistants told her it was no use. I can remind her of divine timing and the sweet joy of now modeling to talk shop with photographers. I can praise her for the discovery of Interlude where I was yesterday to get Matcha from peppy baristas.

And I can salute young me for showing teeth and chasing work she thought was too far from reach. The work was there and it reached right back like the friendly shadow of a face. And all opportunities from my past feel like that shadow. I did not know what it was then but I know it now. That sometimes opportunity looks like a familiar face.

And to the NYC Intern Class of 2024: Have a ball and do NOT hit your vape after it falls into a toilet.

Holding my Grandma’s hand