Julia Haltigan

When New York songstress Julia Haltigan approached me about taking a pinhole portrait of her for the cover of her new EP, Hot Tears, I jumped at the chance. She’s an enormously talented singer, songwriter, and performer who has built a strong following for her evocative mix of country, rock, and punk. Check out this recording of her fantastic song Goodbye Cowboys and Rocketmen!

Julia grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and wanted the portrait to have a distinctively New York look, so I took the photos in her old haunts near the corner of Ludlow and Rivington. We split the shoot into two sessions — one to cast a wide net and review the results, another to zero in on the best results and improve upon them. Pinhole photography is a crapshoot process, with little way of knowing exactly what you’re getting until the film is processed, so having two sessions gave us a chance to zero in on what we wanted. In all I took 120 portraits of Julia, from which she selected one taken in the stairwell of her childhood apartment building.

I ended up also designing the cover for Hot Tears, working closely with Julia and her photographer boyfriend Marc McAndrews as we explored fonts, colors, and compositions. The result is a simple and classic design that references the covers of many great New York albums from the 1970s.