When it comes to documenting person-on-the-street style, few do it better than Scott Schuman. He’s been publishing his photographs of singular looks on his blog, The Sartorialist, for the past five years. And this month the online collection jumps genres with the debut of The Sartorialist, a book (published by Penguin) of Schuman’s evocative photographs and musings on the characters he captures.
“In the book I had a chance to remix [the photos] and put... certain groups together, put certain juxtapositions together, put different kinds of people together,” he explains. “It was really fun to go in and lay it out in different ways.”
No stranger to fashion, the Indiana native worked in fashion sales and marketing before turning his attention to photography in 2001. His strategy? Approach shooting as a designer would troll the streets for inspiration. So he draws himself in via one thing—a shoe, a smartly draped scarf, a turned-up cuff, a mix of pattern, a posture, a bag—and works from there. Just don’t call the endeavor a trend report.
“I think it’s past fashion,” he says. “It’s really about people and how they express themselves and how people of all different ages and races and sizes can be shown in a stylistic way with the same level of integrity.”
The blog allows his posts to be discussed immediately among a loyal following, whether that discourse is about the appearance of a cigarette in a shot or the merits of flip-fl ops. It’s that instant conversation that Schuman loves— and that differentiates him from others doing similar work (such as Bill Cunningham of The New York Times, to whom Schuman pays tribute in his book). “To be able to capture what contemporary conversation was at that time, and to be able to look back a hundred years from now [and see it], I think will be really interesting,” he says.
Along with the blog, Schuman, who lives in Chelsea with his two children, writes a monthly style column for GQ, guest-blogs on Style.com and continues to do editorial photography. Time Style & Design placed him on “The Design 100” list in the blogwatch category in 2007 and he appeared in the 2008 fall-winter Gap ad campaign. Often traveling, he shoots in cities like Milan, Sydney and Paris, and while in New York tours the neighborhoods and boroughs for a few hours a day in search of people who simply catch his eye. “I’m not going to say I try to capture the essence of who they are; I just try and capture a pleasant moment,” he says. “That picture that I would want to look back at [as a] win-win—I like the outfi t and I like the photograph as a photograph.”
NEW YORK FAVORITES:
Team: New York Yankees
Tech Store: The Apple Store
Shopping: Barneys New York
Family Perk: The best playgrounds in the world
