Husband-and-wife photographers team up to find success.

Whether they’re shooting a world-famous rock star or the girl next door, Jeremy and Claire Weiss have a few simple rules: Make sure that the subject is comfortable and that the mood is low-key and fun. Then, work on composition, using light and shadows to create a sense of drama and story.

The results, both simple and stylish, are images that have a carefree informality and hipster vibe, while also being beautifully framed. It’s a combination that has catapulted this young Los Angeles husband-and-wife team to great success in the last year, with assignments that included a major advertising campaign for Nokia, road trips to document MySpace.com’s Secret Shows (where music stars like Ice Cube perform on short notice at small venues) and shoots for magazines ranging from Nylon to Elle.

Calling 2006 “amazing,” Jeremy admits that it was the first year that the couple turned a profit and managed to pay off some debt. “Since March, we’ve been shooting every week,” he says. “It’s weird—we’ve had to turn down jobs, or try to figure out whether we can do three shoots in one day.”

Not bad, considering that Claire was recently waiting tables at the Hard Rock Café and Jeremy was moonlighting as a movie extra. Though their current success might seem fast-won, it’s actually the result of years of working hard and paying their dues: shooting endless portraits of friends, working for small publications like the punk magazine Anti-Matter and getting experience and exposure while trying to break into bigger markets.

“It takes a while to get noticed,” Claire says. “You can send promo cards out, and you might not hear back for years. Then suddenly you’ll get a call.” That’s what happened to the pair last year, when they were contacted out of the blue by the art director for the Nokia campaign. “We asked her how she knew about us,” Jeremy says. “She said, ‘Oh, I’ve been looking at your Web site for four years. I love it.’”

Undoubtedly, a large part of Jeremy and Claire’s success is due to the fact that they work really well together. They met in New Jersey, when Claire had just graduated high school and Jeremy, who’d dropped out of college, was working at a local skateboard shop and photographing skateboarders in his free time. “A lot of my guy friends skateboarded, and we met through them,” Claire says. “I thought he was cute.”

Soon, both of them started taking photography classes at the County College of Morris in Randolph, New Jersey, which shared teachers with the School for Visual Arts and Parsons The New School for Design in New York. They later moved together to Boston and attended the New England School of Photography, where Claire concentrated on art photography and Jeremy began to cut his teeth in editorial magazine work.
“I knew what I wanted to do,” he says. “I’d be shooting bands who were friends, or friends of friends, and I’d send the images to magazines.”

Looking back on those early days, Claire and Jeremy laugh at how naïve they were. Not knowing that art directors wanted to see a formal portfolio, Jeremy would show up at magazine offices with a simple, bound sketchbook in which he had taped 500 rough prints. “I think it caught them off guard,” he says. “They were used to seeing so many books. Mine was so different, and people were really into it.”

As well as shopping the sketchbook around, Jeremy and Claire would make “’zines” by color-copying their images on 8.5 x 11-inch paper, then folding and binding them into little books. They’d sell some of these through their Web site and send others to photo editors they wanted to work for. “Hopefully most of them got saved and not tossed in the trash,” Claire says.

Their persistent self-promotion paid off. Eventually, the breaks started coming for Jeremy: a five-month run of assignments for XLR8R magazine, and jobs shooting bands for record labels Arista and Virgin. To get images that looked distinct and edgy, Jeremy took risks—like bringing a vial of fake blood to one XLR8R shoot and convincing DJ Chris Jackson, the founder of Resource Records, to simulate a bloody nose. “The editor looked at me as though I was insane when I handed it in,” he says. “But they ended up changing the layout so that they could run it as a full-page image.”

Surprisingly, it took a while before the two started working together. “Jeremy would shoot, and I’d be helping out,” Claire remembers. Two and a half years ago, their rep, Jennifer Jenkins, suggested that they work together. They teamed up under the banner of Day 19 Photography, named for Jeremy’s childhood fascination with the number 19. “[Working together] was such an obvious thing, but we hadn’t seen it,” Jeremy says. Claire adds, “It’s funny that it took so long.”

Kidding aside, it’s clear that the duo bring out the best in each other. And 2007 promises to be another great year, with upcoming assignments for DIRECTV and the publication of their first book, which has the tentative title Day 19: The First 10 Years. “I feel very lucky that we get to do what we love, and that we love each other’s company so much,” Claire says. “I never get nervous before a shoot. I always think, ‘Well, if I can’t figure it out, Jeremy will.’”

© 2007 All photos copyright Jeremy and Claire Weiss, All rights reserved.