Rich-Joseph Facun Photography :: my (Favorite) Best of 2012

January 1, 2012 rang in the New Year inaugurating my fourth month of self-employment as a photographer. Just a few months earlier I was a staff photojournalist for an English language paper in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. I wasn't the cliche of a starving artist or the poor liberal photojournalist. For once, I was earning a decent living; poolside country club dining, five star hotels and European vacations with the family became the norm. I wasn't filthy rich, but lets just say I was no longer counting my change to buy a candy bar. Know what I mean?

After three years of kush living while reaping the benefits of another country's petroleum based economy my wife Jasmine and I decided to bail. As the stifling heat of a Middle Eastern summer arrived we relocated her, our baby girl Opal and young son Levi-Joseph back to the States. We agreed that I should stay behind for just a bit longer to earn a little more before permanently jumping ship. 

During this transition in my life (2011-2012) I shot the essay Coming to America. It takes the form of three acts. Act one looks at the formative years of an American expatriate boy, my son, returning to his native country. In act two, I follow with images from a time of solitude during my last two months in the UAE. Act three closes with a cautious celebration of my departure from the unfamiliar and a reunion with the familiar. I've included a small sampling of this essay in this year's my (Favorite) Best of 2012 .

Another essay I've extracted work from is my portrait series Child Hope. Simply stated, I paired portraits of at risk youth in Haiti with their favorite or most valued possessions. These images were made at Child Hope International, a non profit organization based in Haiti. The group provides orphaned, abandoned and needy children with physical, educational, spiritual and personal care through homes, programs and ministries. 

The remaining work consists of four images taken from editorial and commercial portraiture assignments. I close the final selection of my (Favorite) Best of 2012 with singles made on assignment for clients like the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press and Distinction Magazine. Lastly, I've also included some frames from personal work and even a few photographs made through my fine art wedding photography business Love Minus Zero. 

Thank you for looking, all the best!  

Troubling Heart Defibrillator: for The New York Times

More often than not news photographers are faced with assignments where the shooting situation is not ideal. Sometimes a last minute assignment comes in or the story just isn't that visual. However, you do your best to try and make lemonade out of lemons.  Some factors often faced are access to the subject, the lighting in general, or the location, lack of planning and so forth. 

My recent assignment, for The New York Times, to make a portrait of a high school football coach Greg Jessee offered a couple of those aforementioned challenges. Originally I was set to meet Mr. Jessee in Norfolk, VA and grab a portrait of him that somehow connected him to academia, communicated he was a coach and also conveyed a more serious tone. I was told that the coach had experienced a malfunction in his defibrillator that caused him to become unconscious on the sidelines of the football field during a game. 

Once I called Coach Jessee I was grateful to find that he was willing to meet me on the field where the misfiring of his defibrillator occurred, awesome! Now I just had to beat the rain. 

Upon arrival I knew we would only have a few minutes to shoot - rain was imminent. For the most part, the light was flat and lacked any character. I popped off a few frames and as I expected, there wasn't anything too exciting happening in the photographs. 99.9% of the time I shoot using strictly available light but that approach wasn't working this time so I moved on. In the end, I pulled out my strobe and connected it to the camera with an off-camera sync cord, it helped. I shot for about ten minutes and then the rain came. 

In the end, I wish Mother Nature had given me more time to get to know the coach and to really work the assignment. I reckon you win some and you lose some. 

You can read the article here.