NEAL SLAVIN A Profile by Judith Kalina Excerpted from an article in Photo District News Neal Slavin is a photographer, director, writer, producer, filmmaker and teacher, part philosopher and part sociologist, equally at home in the commercial world as well as in the world of the arts. Talking to him is like riding a fast moving escalator. There is so much to see that you have barely enough time to digest one thing before he shows you something else. The man is a perfectionist, a human dynamo, who is so totally immersed in all that he does that you wonder if he ever sleeps. Before you inquire, he will tell you he works seven days a week from early morning to late at night.. But however you picture his work, Slavin's name is most synonymous with group portraits. He says it started in 1972, when a photograph of a friend's scout troop triggered a curiosity about the way time passes. Though people changed, their visual relationship to each other as a group, with its uniforms, flags and trophies, remained the same. Believing that no contemporary photographer seriously worked with groups, Slavin decided to explore the theme. His first group portrait was of a volunteer ambulance corps. Says Slavin, "Once I did that picture I realized I had stepped into something really fascinating. It was sociologically oriented, it had all kinds of psychological things going on, it had memory, and it was fun. It was very alive and yet it was something that could be there forever because you are actually immortalizing people who have come together to symbolize and pinpoint themselves at a certain time in their lives and consequently in history.” And with this first group portrait Slavin found a major component of his life's work. By 1976, with the publication of "When Two or More are Gathered Together', Slavin's identity as the photographer synonymous with the group portrait became fixed. But this being a man who never sleeps, Slavin’s interests and assignments brought him broader attention from photographing the Clintons at Christmas to photographing the annual report of The New York Stock Exchange to producing and directing the feature film Focus. Now in 2010 he continues to create projects commuting from his studio in NY to his home in California generating ideas and philosophy as he flies.
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