Jim and Lisa Fiscus - photography

Back in 1995, Jim Fiscus and Lisa Fiscus were unaware that their experimentation with the nascent art of photography combined with digital imaging would result in producing award-winning advertisements. Read more...

Jim Fiscus’ photographs are truly an adventure, from start to finish. The Dallas-born photographer dreams up symbolism-filled scenarios, and to make them come to life, he directs his subjects in ways that even his clients find amusing. 
A shoot he did in London for billboards promoting the hit British TV show Shameless involved an actress playing a highly excitable pregnant woman who loves her martinis (did we mention the show is a dark comedy?). The mild-mannered Fiscus had to direct the actress to have a freak-out of sorts, and the best way to do it was to pretend to be a pregnant woman himself. There he was, in his cowboy boots and jeans, rubbing his belly and rolling his eyes in an exaggerated—and, to the casual observer, quite amusing—fashion. 
“Oh my God, this is certainly not a normal photo shoot,” commented the client’s art director, who would surely have been shocked—and thrilled—if he’d been at the OutKast shoot Fiscus did for HBO. The Grammy-winning hip-hop duo had been filming a movie for 43 days straight when Fiscus arrived to photograph them. Fiscus knew the singers were fatigued, so he did his best to make the shoot fun. And fun it was. “It was a party,” he recalls. “The makeup artists were breakdancing. The client from HBO came up and said, ‘This isn’t a photo shoot—this is a cultural phenomenon.’” 
Actually, what’s phenomenal is the amount of planning Fiscus does for each project. The finished product—the densely layered, almost allegorical images he makes for commercial clients like Adidas and GE and magazines like ESPN—is made up of a series photos that he methodically maps out on a storyboard before each shoot. Later, he composes the multiple images in post-production work that he oversees with a team of digital artists who have been with him for years. (Loyalty is as important to Fiscus as perfection.) 
Why is his process so involved? Because Fiscus is drawn to the conceptual, the symbolic, the hidden story—things that are inherently complicated but truly rewarding, both for the photographer and the viewer (and, of course, the client). When Fiscus makes a photograph, he’s not just documenting what his subjects look like but what they represent. He displays their inner life—and in doing so, he creates photographs that have an inner life themselves.