Joe Infurchia at the piano, black and white
Case Study · Branding Session

He didn’t ask for headshots. He asked for album cover art.

Joe Infurchia teaches piano across Connecticut. What he needed was not a portrait of a teacher. It was a picture of a musician.

Client
Joe Infurchia, pianist and teacher
Service
Branding session
Location
Fairfield County, Connecticut
Delivered
Album art, press, teaching pages, social
Who he is

A working musician who also teaches.

Joe brings piano lessons to his students, in homes across Connecticut and online, mostly through Fairfield County. That is the business. But it is not the whole picture, and the photographs he had showed only the teaching half.

He studied with Seymour Bernstein, the pianist at the centre of Ethan Hawke’s documentary Seymour: An Introduction. More than ninety lessons. His own Debussy recording has passed three thousand streams on Spotify.

None of that was visible in a headshot.

Joe Infurchia standing at his grand piano
The brief

A standard session would have handed him a clean, smiling headshot, and he would have used it once, on a directory page. He asked for album cover art instead. That single word, album, changed what the session had to be. An album cover is not a picture of a person. It is a picture of a sound.

The approach

So I shot the session like a record.

Not a set of options to choose from. A sequence, with an order and a shape: an opening side in black and white, colour arriving partway through, and a closing track built to travel. The running order was set before the first frame.

Side A

Black and white. The playing, not the player.
1At the keys, in profileAvailable light, long lens, no eye contact
2Hands in motionShutter dragged so the hands blur and the keys stay

Side B

Colour arrives. The room, the score, the man.
3The instrument and the roomSage walls, brass curtains, open lid
4Seymour’s BIRDSThe score in his hands, the story beat
5Closing trackThe portrait he can use anywhere
Side A

It opens in black and white.

Joe Infurchia playing, profile, black and white
Track 1. Nothing in the frame but the player and the keys.
Joe Infurchia's hands moving across the keys, black and white
Track 2. The hands move, the instrument holds still.
Side B

Then colour arrives.

The room does the work here. Sage walls, brass curtains, the open lid and the wood. It was his own space, so the colour is his, not a backdrop I brought with me.

Joe Infurchia standing beside his grand piano in his studio
Track 3. The instrument and the room, full width.
Joe Infurchia seated at the piano, smiling
Track 4
The worn score in his hands is Seymour’s BIRDS.

This is the frame that stopped being a portrait and started being a document. The book is not set dressing. It is the music Joe learned from the man who wrote it, and it looks it.

A photograph earns its keep when it carries something a caption would otherwise have to explain. This one does.

Joe Infurchia holding Seymour Bernstein's BIRDS score
Track 4. The score is his own copy, not a prop from the shelf.
Track 5

The closing track.

Every record ends with the song that gets played on its own. This is that frame, the one that leaves the sequence and goes wherever a photo is asked for.

Joe Infurchia, close portrait at the piano
Track 5. Built to leave the record and go to work.
What he walked away with

One session, three different jobs.

Each frame was made for the job it now holds. Nothing had to be re-shot to fit a format it was never composed for.

Album art

The black and white side, composed with space for type and built to survive a square crop.

Teaching and press

The colour portraits, warm and direct, for his teaching pages, directories and any writer who asks for a photo.

Social and web

A full width frame of the room, plus verticals that hold up cropped to a phone.

Branding sessions

If you make something for a living, your photos should say so.

Sessions for musicians and makers across Connecticut. If your work has moved on and your pictures have not, I would like to hear about it.

Tell me what you make