Today, he regrets nothing. “I should have
made the move before. I think I needed that
drop to just hit the ground running.”
Schoonover nabbed regular work for
the denim company Haikure, and those
lookbooks (and the occasional graphics
project) kept him afloat for the first few
months. Personal work helped him dig into
his style: “All these little decisions I made
in my personal work became my style,”
Schoonover says.
One day, a big gig dropped in his lap by
an unexpected source. “Somebody reached
out to me at some point and said, ‘Hey, I
love your work, I’d really like to assist you at
some point,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, that’d be
awesome!’” Schoonover recalls. “And then
she said, ‘Oh, by the way, I work for Google.
Could you do this job for us?’” Call it luck,
or Schoonover’s good nature and friendly
attitude—as he says, “The important thing is
just to be nice to people. You never know
who they are.”
MOTION MOTIVATION
Schoonover hasn’t gotten around to as
much personal work lately—he shoots a
couple big jobs a month and attempts
to keep up with the weekly requests
for interviews and the countless coffee-and-questions appeals from emerging
photographers—but another medium that’s
been perking him up is filmmaking.
In fact, Schoonover would classify the
From Indian Lakes video as more of a
passion project. He met the group last
summer when they went on tour with a
band he had been photographing for a few
days called Tokyo Police Club. “I’m friends
with Dave Monks [Tokyo Police Club’s
frontman], who I randomly met at a bar,”
Schoonover says. “Dave was coming out
with a solo record at the time.” He passed
Monks his Instagram account; the following
week, they were shooting photos for his
solo record, All Signs Point to Yes (2016).
Loving the resulting photos, Monks
tapped Schoonover for music videos. At this
point he’d never made one before, but he
gave it a try anyway. A quick one-off video
for Monks’ single “Gasoline” was filmed
in a day, and a video for “The Rules” took
another few days. Watching the latter is
sort of like experiencing what Schoonover’s
photos would look like in motion.
“For video, my brain doesn’t really work
in that way,” he says. “I knew where I wanted
Dave to stand for a seven-second clip, but
I didn’t know what to do with all the extra
time.” Rather than forcing something that
didn’t come naturally to him, Schoonover
realized he could use his mind as a still
photographer to his advantage. “A still
scene with one thing moving, sort of like
a cinemagraph,” he says, had interesting
impact.
“People on set were like, ‘You can’t do
this! This is going to be so boring!’ and
I was like, ‘Well, that’s what I want to do.’
We ended up adding some motion and I
kind of agreed at that point, so I embraced
it a little bit in the end.” The takeaway,
ultimately: Listen to advice, but still do you,
because “you’re not going to be somebody
else,” Schoonover says.
UP NEXT
Besides his From Indian Lakes video, he’s
been keeping busy with a Refinery29 editorial,
a NYLON/Nordstrom collaboration and an
assignment shooting HYPEBEAST’s founder
Kevin Ma, but he’s also making another push
to shoot more personal work. There are artists,
musicians and actors who Schoonover finds
PYSK: CHRIS SCHOONOVER
ABOVE: “This shot is all about contrast,” says
Schoonover, who shot this in collaboration with
his brother, Jonathan. “Styling played a huge
part in making this photo great.” They used two
Profoto strobes with two umbrellas.
