It’s tough to make it in New York.

Famously tough. People write songs about it. It’s fucked. Especially if you want to do something creative, and even more difficult, if you want to do something in photography. Photographers in NYC are a dime a dozen. They scurry around with their grandpa’s Leica M’s shooting the same photo of the same drug addicts in midtown like it’s an original idea, or worse, hang out on Canal and photograph pictures of ‘aesthetic’ and ‘vibes.’ Rubbish.

To actually make a living in the photography world and be worth anyone’s time, you need humility, patience, and a perspective that goes beyond a skinny white girl on a roof at sunset or the kids at Tompkins, because anyone with an iPhone can take a beautiful photo, but only a few can take a good one. Steven Stinson takes good photos. From commercial look-books to studio shoots to skating to partying to portraiture, the guy has developed a style that possesses as much glamour and beauty as humanity.

He also fucking rips at skating. So that helps.

Meet Steven Stinson, a man who showed up to this interview thinking it’d be just an Instagram carousel and not the in-depth, honest, mildly shit-talking conversation you are about to enjoy.

Is this just like a social post or something?

No this is an interview, a full editorial post on the site. 

Oh, wow, I thought this was going to be an Instagram post or something. Oh, this is serious. Fuck. 

You’re going to do great. How’d you start in photography?

I remember my friend Keith had a Canon Rebel and I kind of just took it from him and never gave it back. I remember I didn’t really like it because you needed editing software and I didn’t know how to do that. Digital is like a blank canvas, where you shoot it and then you go in and start upping colors and hues and I was just- I didn’t know any of that shit. So my exgirlfriend bought me an Olympus Stylus when we were dating and I forgot about it for a long time, so I found it and shot a roll. 

What year is this?

This has got to be maybe 2016, or 2017. It’s been a little while. 

Crazy how in my head 2016 was yesterday but in reality it was nine fucking years ago.

Fuck yeah, man. It’s been a minute. I just shot that roll around Chinatown and was tripping out on how sick the photos looked. I liked it way more than digital. Toward the end of my days working at In4mation, I was shooting a lot of their content for social media and lifestyle stuff with that camera. I loved that camera. It was like, blessed. Every roll looked great and I was like, ‘shit I’m good at this’, but really it was just an incredible camera. 

So when I moved to New York, I made a shitty website, and I made business cards for my photography. I bought like three thousand business cards. I gave them out and people were like, ‘who is this guy with business cards? Fucking idiot.’ I started giving it to people to use as a crutch for smoking joints because at that point I realized how ridiculous it was that I even made that shit. Anyway, I started working at Saturdays NYC and my buddy was on the marketing team. He needed some photos of these graphic T’s, so I shot my buddy Tino in them, and everyone loved them. To be honest, those photos came out really good, and they were shot on that same Olympus Stylus!

How much of your career do you think you owe to the Olympus Stylus?

So, alright, people always say it’s not the camera it’s the photographer; I think that that is fucking bullshit, I think it is 100% the camera. I also want to shout out Evan Mock, because we’d go out and I noticed how close he would get to people to take their photos. You know how people are shy about it and stand twenty feet back? Evan gets in people’s faces. I always liked his photos, and so I tried to do that, too. The camera itself just shot better that way, I don’t know. 

Your photography has its own approach. Even looking at purely your studio lookbook stuff, each series is very different but makes sense together as a collection - they are all stylistically unified. They look like Stinson photos. 

I mean, that’s good. This probably isn’t good for jobs or whatever, but honestly, I have no idea what I’m doing. I have three pretty janky cameras - my equipment is not good. I’ve been branching out and trying the things my favorite photographers like to use, like getting into medium format more and more, which has been fun and I’ve learned a lot from that experience of trying new things and formats. 

I think that my approach is just to try and get genuine reactions from people - trying to get genuine moments. If I were to shoot a photo of you right now, I’d try and get someone else to say something funny to you and photograph your real laugh. I try and get something out of the people that I’m photographing, rather than trying to direct them. Colin [Tunstall] at Saturdays NYC explained that to me once about my photography. He said I’m not a very strict compositional photographer, I’m more about getting good moments, and I’m good at that. 

How do you recognize what you like in a photo? Not even just your own, but across the board. 

I like underdogs, I like weird shit. I’m bad at going to art shows or photo shows, but the things that I gravitate toward are things that aren’t staged - interesting moments or strange people - I like energy and action in a photo. I think that every year it changes a bit, but I like to see something genuine and real. 

I have a very specific question for you. You are good at incorporating skateboarding and skate culture into things that aren’t necessarily skateboarding. You can bring skate elements into a fashion lookbook and it doesn’t look fucking cheesy. How do you think you’ve been able to straddle the line and make things look authentic?

Thank you, man. I think that’s just from skating for over twenty years. I had mentors who would traumatize me growing up telling me what to do and what not to do. I had older people bullying me and I learned these rules for what’s wack and what isn’t. If something feels weird or wack, I have to project that out and make a note of it and correct it then and there, I can’t let it slide. Maybe a model is posing all crazy or the set isn’t quite right, I will let that be known. 

I also think that it’s helpful to know a ton of people from a full spectrum of cultures. Haters, cool kids, private school people - exposing yourself to all personalities and backgrounds and cultures, you get to develop a gut feeling for what is cool and authentic and what isn’t. 

There was this one shoot we did that I love. I had a concept for doing this summer shoot in California where my friend Louie has a motorcycle, so I was thinking he could do wheelies going down Venice boulevard. We just built this team that killed it. We hired real people - people who are actually doing cool shit rather than models. It was important to get people who are actually doing shit instead of teaching models to pretend to do cool shit. You know, we all see the same shit over and over: a beautiful guy and girl standing on the beach walking around, being hot: boring. Louie, slow motion doing a wheelie down Venice Boulevard, it killed. Great team, great creative people, everyone knew what was up and what they were doing. 

So I would call that art direction and, no offense, but there are millions of ‘art directors’ and ‘creatives’ in New York. Every asshole with a beanie on Raya is a fucking art director or photographer or creative whatever bullshit thing.

Did you say ‘on Raya?’

Yeah-

Holy fuck that’s so good. 

You are actually good at what you do and work in the industry, which is more than those assholes can say. How do you think you did that? 

That is a good question. I think about it all of the time. That’s my biggest anxiety, thinking about how there are so many photographers and art directors. I think about how all of my friends believe in me, but I don’t. I’ve been trying to think of how to angle myself, what makes me engaging and what my niche is. I guess in my head - this will sound cliche - I want to be able to tell some other idiot kid who is lost in this industry that if I can do it, you can do it. I come from nothing and live in New York and do a creative job. It is incredible. If I can do it, you can do it.

Advice for the youth who want to be you: go.

My advice to people moving out here and wanting to do this: don’t ask for money right off the bat. You haven’t done anything yet. You gotta just be easy and cool to work with and things will come. Go out and do it. Earn it.. Put in the work. Don’t expect shit. People move out here and have never put in a day’s work and are demanding thousands of dollars and that’s a bad mentality. Build up a body of work and learn for a while. If your homie asks you to come assist on a shoot and you’ve never been on set in your life, your first concern shouldn’t be how much you’re going to get paid, it should be about how much you will benefit from that and being there. I get it, you need to survive, but at the start, it should be about having fun.

Even for projects later on when you are successful. Don’t think about money, think of how fun the idea will be. If your idea starts with ‘fuck this will make us so much money,’ it’s not coming from a good place and people can see through that shit. Just think of a fun idea, and people will see the fun in it - the money will come.