O’Neill shoots his way to top
( Vogue, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, GQ) and commercial clients (Gillette, Olay, L’Oreal).
Stepping foot on Planet Kardashian, though, was by far the biggest break of his career. By photographing Kim, O’Neill’s work was put before her 102 million Instagram followers. He’s encouraged by what the commission represents.
‘‘She can choose whoever she wants in the world, and she chose me. That’s what I take most from the shoot – she has a lot of power, through social media, and it was a demonstration of her power. She actually chose me.’’
For the KKWBeauty shoot, O’Neill stuck to the aesthetic style he prefers, capturing her skin’s natural texture and pores, while keeping retouching and airbrushing to a minimum.
‘‘She has a very tough audience and if the pictures are too retouched she gets torn to pieces, so she was very adamant the skin and makeup had to be represented properly,’’ he says. ‘‘I wanted to bring out her natural beauty. I just want everything to look real, but elevated in some way.’’
The final shots were those O’Neill felt best combined lighting, shape, and crop.
O’Neill grew up in Nelson, and had never studied photography when he decided to pursue it. He began shooting modelling portfolios in Christchurch and Auckland, then images for men’s magazines such as FHMand Maxim.
‘‘That’s in the past,’’ he says. ‘‘It was a way of funding my mission: to do this top-end stuff, shooting supermodels and beauty campaigns. Without the portfolio, you can’t get those jobs.’’
Some of his work features nudity, and O’Neill approaches those shoots cautious of what could appear gratuitous or explicit. ‘‘It has to be beautiful, original, tasteful, and it has to not show genitals.’’ The results, he says, ‘‘might be sexy, but they’re not sexual’’.
‘‘With the nudes I try to remove the sex completely. I make it about the form, the shade, the light – appreciation of the body. I don’t want to push the models to be sexy, I don’t want to transform them into some crazy thing.’’ He adds: ‘‘If I can’t show mymumI don’t shoot it.’’
O’Neill sees the KKWBeauty job not as some freak outlier, but part of an incline he has been slowly working towards. ‘‘I feel like I’m knocking on the door of where I want to be now more than ever before,’’ says O’Neill. ‘‘I’m living the New York artist life I always wanted to live.’’