When Pictures Speak

This picture represents everything I love about advertising.

Although it’s definitely not the most ingenious piece of art on the planet. Well, it’s a picture of a boardroom. Seen it. It depicts a logo. Seen it. It employs light-painting technique. Yawn.

So what’s so bloody great about this photograph?

Well, it’s a picture of our boardroom. And I have never quite seen it this way. This makes it very interesting to me. The picture depicts our logo. This is the brandmark of the agency I work for. This makes it extremely personal. Lastly, it has light-painting. Light-painting, people! Isn’t that the coolest thing ever? No matter how many times I see it, for an instant I feel like I’m 12 years old. How do they do that?

But often, the most remarkable thing about a photograph is the story behind it. This one stands out for its lack of drama. We had to upload some agency pictures on Flickr and I wanted our album to have a nice cover picture. Daniel Botezatu had shot a cool picture with light-graffiti and I asked him if he could light-paint the Y&R logo in our boardroom. He said he didn’t know if it was possible but he would try. The next morning it was in my email inbox.

That’s why I love working in advertising. We experiment. We fool around. We believe. We create. We apply ourselves even to seemingly unimportant tasks. This picture doesn’t exist because it had to. It exists because an art director wanted it to.

By the way, he told me how it was done. With a flashlight, a mobile phone and a blinking keyring.

Blinking brilliant.