Known for her bold use of color, Frances’ still photography creates a visual representation of the mood and kinetic energy of the music that inspires her. In her motion work, Frances creates music videos in collaboration with various musicians, including Ratbag, THEIA, and The Beths. Frances sat down with Format to talk about the role color and synesthesia play in her work, transitioning to become a full-time photographer, and being intentional with her photography niches.
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Watch part of our conversation here:
Please introduce yourself and your work.
My name is Frances Carter. I’m a photographer based in Tāmaki Makaurau, also known as Auckland, New Zealand. I specialize in portraiture, often featuring musicians and artists. I do a bit of commercial work as well, and occasionally some video directing.
I picked up photography as a hobby when I was about 14 years old. There were photography classes at my high school but I wasn’t in them. When I realized that I really enjoyed it as a hobby, I went to the photography teacher and I showed her some of the work and asked, “Can you let me into the class?” And she actually said no. I did a visual art degree in university, so in that sense there was a little bit of formal training but it was around concepts rather than technical stuff.
My technical education came after I finished studying, when I began to work in equipment rental houses. My job there was to know every light stand, every piece of grip, every modifier, just everything– to know what equipment is called, how it works, and to be able to explain that to people. I think that part of my training has given me the best technical base. I also spent quite a few years working as a photographic assistant, and that was a great way to learn about different approaches to lighting, camera work, and managing a shoot.
There wasn’t really a point where I decided that photography was going to be my career. It was what I did and continued to be what I did. And here I am 12 plus years later still doing it–it wasn’t intentional to make it my job, but I’m glad that it’s turned out this way.
What was the transition like for you, from assisting other photographers to becoming a full time photographer?
Even when I was working in equipment rentals or as a photographic assistant, I was always doing my own work on the side. Naturally over time that increased until it was a 50-50 split of working for other people and doing my own shoots. The push that took me to full-time photographic work was the pandemic. I experienced quite a bit of instability with work around that time because we had several lockdowns here where I wasn’t able to work–the longest was about three months. That gave me a really clean break from assisting. At that time I had a conversation with Emily Moon, who is now my agent. She was ready to sign someone new and we already knew each other from my work as an assistant so everything aligned.
That was the push I needed, her saying, “Let me take you on.” I knew if I had a few commercial jobs coming through the agency side, I’d be able to balance that with my music photography and make full time happen. Here we are about three years later and it’s working.
I found the experience I gained from assisting really invaluable. Assisting can teach you a lot, not only about how other photographers do their work on set in terms of lighting and camera, but things that are less obvious; What is every crew member’s role and who do you talk to if you have an issue on set? In both commercial work and my work with musicians, it’s good to know that kind of stuff and learn how to handle yourself on a bigger set.
How did you get started photographing musicians?
I started photographing musicians in high school. I was friends with a lot of musicians and I was one of the few people in my friend group who couldn’t play an instrument. My contribution to the scene was to photograph people. We had quite a thriving all ages scene going on in Auckland. I used to go to every gig that I could and I’d take photos.
It was a little bit documentary, a little bit live music. That naturally turned into more staged press photography as the musicians that I was working with became more and more successful. Local music outlets, blogs, and magazines started to ask me to go to shows and shoot for them.
At the time I thought I was getting a great deal–a free ticket to a show and you just have to work for a couple of hours. Looking back, maybe it wasn’t such a great deal, especially when the tickets were 20 bucks–but I got to see some of my favorite bands when I was a broke student. It was awesome getting to be up in the front capturing really momentous occasions, historical stuff–it was really fulfilling. I think music photography is one of the types of photography that can gain importance over time.
The picture might be great when you take it, then 30 years down the line, people look back on the career of that artist and an image that you captured is THE definitive image. I always hope I can get those shots of people.
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When I started out, it was back in the era of Facebook albums, so people would expect 200 photos the next day after a gig. That was a great way to let people know that I was a photographer. Everyone just knew because they’d be tagged in a photo at one point or another. So in our small community, I got associated with photography in quite a strong way and that’s remained helpful a decade plus down the line–people know that I’m the one that takes the music photos.
Commercial clients will often use my music work as an example of what they’d like for their brand photography. They really enjoy the cultural relevance of it–that’s what everybody wants for commercial work. They want it to feel non-commercial. I really love it when people come to me with an idea and I get to act as a technical producer and figure out how to bring their idea to life, both with musicians and commercial clients. It’s important that I shoot a lot of work that isn’t advertising and that helps me get advertising work.
You mentioned you also create music videos–tell us more about how you got started with video.
The video part of my work came about when I was working in equipment rentals. I worked in a studio that had quite a lot of video gear, so it was part of my job to become familiar with that equipment. I’m someone who learns by doing, so I just picked it up and started making videos. Quite experimental stuff, just with friends–a lot of it was DIY music videos and that was my way to figure out the camera menus, what a codec is, frame rate–stuff that was completely unfamiliar to me as a still photographer.
I basically learned through doing and I’m still going–I think there is always more to learn. It’s really helpful as a photographer to also have a little bit of experience with video. People often want both still and video on a job and it’s nice to be able to offer both.
Music videos come about in different ways. Sometimes I’ll do a really in-depth treatment for a video which involves conceiving an idea, finding references, describing each aspect of the video and so on. In other instances, someone might reach out with an idea they want to make, and it’s my job to flesh that out and bring it to life. I always need to consider what’s going to be achievable within the budget. I have to be thinking as a director and a producer at the same time–the first time doing this was a challenge for me, but it’s something I’m more comfortable with now.
In your work, there’s a really bold sense of color and dramatic lighting. How did you arrive at this style?
I really love working with colored lights. I think that developed out of my teenage love of Photoshop and color grading–color grading was one of the things that got me really hooked on photography. It’s not just the taking of the photo, but what you can do with it afterwards. And as my skills have progressed, I’ve tried to pull back a bit on the post-production and do a lot of that rich color in camera.
The change in lighting equipment that’s been happening over the past 10 years has influenced my work as well, like the adoption of full spectrum LEDs. They just make it so easy to play with color and also to do it single-handedly. If you’re using strobes and you need to gel all the strobes, it really, really helps to have an extra pair of hands to help you test all that lighting and set it up. Whereas if you’re using full spectrum LEDs, they’re just on constantly. You can see what you’re doing more easily, and it becomes an option to work alone and to experiment alone with color.
I have noticed a lot of musicians talk about synesthesia in their work and how they feel their music has a color. Although I’m coming from the visual side rather than the auditory side, I have the same feelings, especially when I’m working with musicians. There’s a mood to what they’re producing and it’s my job to interpret that in a visual sense, which is quite difficult because obviously there are different mediums, but I think color plays a big role in trying to represent sound. That’s definitely a part of where that comes from in my work.
How does it feel to see your work in publications like Rolling Stone?
We have such amazing musicians here, some of whom are inevitably going to be profiled by the big music publications because they’re really good. I don’t really market myself at all–we’ve got a small enough community that word of mouth does all the work, and I photograph a lot of the musicians here in Auckland. Sometimes I feel I’m riding on the coattails of these great musicians–I took the photos, and it’s not as glamorous as it sounds. But don’t get me wrong–I’m going to take that accomplishment and say, “I’ve been published in Rolling Stone.”
What advice would you give to emerging photographers?
My advice to photographers who want to do music photography is to specialize–find your thing and do that thing. I spread myself across quite a few different genres when I was starting out and I reached a point where people were referring to me as a fashion photographer. Although I did enjoy shooting fashion, I thought, “hmm, I don’t think that’s me. I want to be known as the music photographer.” I intentionally pulled back on my fashion work and I told people, “I do music. This is what I do.” It took about four or five years until people’s perception of my work changed, and now that’s what I am known for.
Now that I have found that niche, I feel more able to explore other things, but I think it’s better to stick with one thing than to spread yourself across landscape, product, portrait, weddings–don’t do everything. There’s enough of us. We don’t alle need to do it all.
I think there’s also something to be said for not going all in too soon, because I had my side work. Whether that’s in equipment rentals or photo assisting or other things I did, it was many years until I was relying solely on photography for an income. Having that side income gave me the flexibility to turn down jobs that I didn’t feel were right for the type of photographer I wanted to be known as.
What role does your portfolio website play in your career and workflow?
I love going and looking at my own website. I don’t know if that’s weird to say, but I’m in the millennial generation and I’ve been working with mostly digital mediums. I do shoot film occasionally, but I’m mostly a digital photographer and we almost never see anything physically. I don’t usually print my work, or get to look at my archive in an overarching way. My website is currently the best place to go to see the years of work that I’ve put into this career. Yeah, it highlights my best stuff.
Instagram is good as well for just putting out what you’re doing at the moment, but in terms of showing where your focus is and what themes might run through your work, I love how I can curate my website to show that.
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I’ve been using client galleries a lot recently, that was a new addition to my workflow. And I really liked being able to send people to my website to look at the long list of the shots that they were going to make selects from. I also like putting my favorite image from the shoot as the title page image. So when people go to look at their photos from the shoot, they’re not going to a Dropbox folder or something that doesn’t look nice. There’s a bit of style to it. And I can start with a really good image right on the homepage to show, “don’t worry, we got the shot.” And then they go in and see everything else.
Client galleries have been a game changer. Compared to various methods I was using before, the Client gallery is classy–it’s the full service.
I find having a good-looking website that I have to do absolutely nothing to on the back end is amazing. It’s a level of professionalism that is really easy to achieve.
What’s on the horizon for you? Do you have any upcoming projects that you can share with us?
I just enjoyed a break, a holiday. When the end of the year comes up, I really look forward to just switching off and maybe not putting the camera down, but switching to a very different, smaller camera–I have a little film camera that fits in my bag. Taking photos for fun rather than for work.
I’ve also been working on a series of portrait shoots with my friend Léon Bristow, who is creating an online directory representing talent in Aotearoa’s POC, rainbow, and disabled communities. Everyone is a lot more aware that they need to have diversity represented in their images these days, but sometimes they still struggle with doing it. The talent being cast might look like they could be from a certain demographic, but often they aren’t, and are lacking the lived experience.
I’m really loving creating the portraits of the talent for this directory–it is called “Beings.” There’s no product to sell, there’s no agenda–the brief is just to celebrate this person that’s in front of the lens. It’s nice to photograph people just because they are them. I think that’s what drew me to stay with music photography over fashion photography–it’s really focused on the person that you’re photographing. Fashion photography is so beautiful and really fun, but it’s often about turning a model into somebody else. I much prefer trying to bring out the essence of the person that I’m photographing.
The directory project will launch in early 2025, and there will be a small exhibition of that work in February at Studio One Toi Tū. BEINGS: Tātou Tātou will be open February 19-28, 2025.
