Beauty: A Photographer and Her Muse Lee Hershey I met Jennifer Keany on a winter evening in January of 2010 after a series of correspondences. I discovered her through a friend of mine, and queried her politely if she would ever need a model, I would be happy to work with her as a time for print. She sent me back an email. Would I be available this week? She had a project she was completing. Since then, Keany and I have shared circles. Keany, who goes by JenniferRose Photography (www.jen-rose.com), is Boston-based and growing more and more popular. In the two years that I met her, I worked with her as model, styling director, creative consultant, as well as writer. I would be subject to many last-minute shoots and projects, just as she would be subjected to last-minute requests from me for photos to accompany an article I had written. Keany works largely in fashion photography, using her Nikon D700, beautiful light and natural moments to create dreamy scenes and euphoric moments with her images. “Fashion,” she says, “is a sense of confidence and fantasy---we can be whoever we want with fashion, and we can change it from day to day.” She works in full-frame digital, but has on occasion used 35mm color or black and white film, as well as dabbled with 120 film for personal projects. Her journey into photography began long before she ever touched a camera. She had always been fascinated by art and interested in creating, but she only took up photography when in high school, a friend introduced her to Photoshop. Similarly, she was introduced to fashion through cosmetology. Her grand-
mother worked as a cosmetologist, and she learned how to style hair and apply makeup through spending time in the salon of her “nonny.” She would later follow her grandmothers’ career path, and received her license in cosmetology.Yet, while she has the skill and eye to act as her own stylist for shoots, I noticed even when I first met Keany, that she works in a collaboratively, reaching out to other hair-stylists, makeup artists, and wardrobe stylists, thereby allowing her to concentrate fully on the photography. With fashion photography, Keany captures a sense of realism through natural and ambient lighting. At heart, she styles her shoots with high fashion and avant-garde flavor, playing around with new trends and textures. However, she prefers to give her stylist room to develop a theme or a concept based on a single piece, idea or mood. “Sometimes things go into totally different directions than what we started brainstorming with,” Keany admits, “but that’s the whole process. One idea leads to another…I’m not intentionally trying to create a new aesthetic per say; I just do what I love and if something new comes out of it, that is amazing.” With her subjects, Keany is hands off, and I remember sometimes asking her through the lens if I was doing all right. She gives her subjects free rein to “just twirl around or dance and those in-between moments come so naturally…my favorite shots have those real raw moments and emotion.” Occasionally she will direct a model, and especially if the model is new, she will do the pose herself. But like that winter in January nearly three years