Henning Vorstad.
The brief.
Type Quarterly needed a cover portrait of type designer Henning Vorstad — a man famous for letterforms and allergic to being photographed. The magazine gave us forty minutes in his studio, between press checks, with one instruction from the editor: make him look like someone who draws letters for a living, not someone who minds being looked at.
The approach.
We brought one light and a grey backdrop and spent the first twenty minutes not shooting — drinking coffee, talking about ink traps, letting the camera sit visibly idle. Vorstad relaxes around process, so we gave him one: we photographed his hands first, then his desk, then finally him, by which point the lens was furniture.
The cover frame is number 214 of 310. It is the third frame of its sequence — the one where he stopped performing patience and actually ran out of it, which reads on his face as exactly the dry authority the story needed.
- Client
- Type Quarterly, Berlin
- Service
- Editorial · cover story
- Shoot
- 40 minutes · subject's studio
- Kit
- PhaseOne XF · 80mm · one strobe
- Frames
- 310 shot · 9 delivered · 1 cover
- Delivery
- Cover, opener, 7 inside frames
The cover sold out the issue's first print run.
Type Quarterly's best-performing cover that year, and the start of an ongoing relationship — we have shot four of their cover stories since. Vorstad, reportedly, keeps the print in his studio. Framed, even.
