Ashley Judd – June 9 2010 (Upscale embedded with SynthID)

The Gear

Lens: Nikon 85mm f/1.4 (estimated)

Camera: Nikon D3S

Settings: 1/125, f/2.8, ISO 800 (estimated)

Lighting: Nikon SB-800 Speedlight, bare, positioned behind stage

Editing: Alien Skin Exposure with Ilford HP5 Plus 4×5 film frame

The Goal

Capture a quick portrait of a humanitarian and actress backstage at the Chairman’s Session before the main event started.

The Vision

This portrait was made in the wings of the stage at the Women Deliver 2010 conference, right before the Chairman’s Session on “Women and Power” began. A bare SB-800 positioned behind the stage gave me just enough light to work with in the darkness backstage.

Being a black and white image, the Ilford HP5 Plus 4×5 film frame from Alien Skin Exposure made sense. There’s something about that textural border… the rough edges, the film rebate markings… that adds weight and presence to a portrait. Even if you don’t know what Ilford HP5 is, that kind of frame still signals something. It says: this is intentional, this is considered, this is film-era craft applied to digital capture.

I don’t use these film frames as often anymore. When you actually shoot film regularly, borrowing the aesthetic makes sense. But these days my work is almost entirely digital, and referencing a format I’m not actively using started to feel less authentic. A product of its time that I’m keeping as-is.

The Story

Ashley Judd was already well into her transition from Hollywood actress to global humanitarian by the time I photographed her in June 2010. She had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, addressed the UN General Assembly on modern slavery, and was weeks away from completing her Master’s in Public Administration at Harvard Kennedy School… where her thesis focused on gender-based violence. She wasn’t at Women Deliver to be a celebrity. She was there as a student of the issues being discussed.

The Chairman’s Session on “Women and Power” featured a remarkable panel. You can see in these photos that Arianna Huffington was seated alongside her… the same Arianna Huffington I would photograph a year later at a National Press Club luncheon discussing the AOL acquisition of The Huffington Post. This conference was a year before that deal, when The Huffington Post was still independently reshaping how news traveled online.

What strikes me looking back at these images is how many of the people in this room would become even more central to public discourse in the years that followed. Ashley Judd would go on to become a UNFPA Goodwill Ambassador, visiting refugee camps and conflict zones across 22 countries. She would be named TIME’s Person of the Year in 2017 as one of the Silence Breakers… the first person to go on the record about Harvey Weinstein. The work she was doing at this conference… the research, the advocacy, the quiet expertise she was developing… was the foundation for everything that came after.

The Lesson

Textural borders and film emulations can add real presence to an image, but only borrow from formats you’ve actively used or genuinely understand. The Ilford HP5 frame works here because I was shooting it on film at the time and aiming to edit all my black and whites to match. These days I wouldn’t reach for it… not because it doesn’t look good, but because it wouldn’t feel honest.