They may not be household names, but anyone who has followed theater in the Northeast over the past three decades has probably seen their photos of current and classic shows on theater Web sites, and in magazines and newspapers (like page 19 of this one). Joan Marcus and Carol Rosegg are, without question, the leading theater photographers both on and off Broadway.
Sitting in a French pastry shop in Chelsea near their photography studio, Marcus and Rosegg lounged on a sofa, sipped coffee and reflected on their decades of shooting photos for some of the biggest plays and musicals — many directed by and starring a who’s who of Broadway and Hollywood. Marcus has captured the images of everyone from David Hyde Pierce, Frank Langella and Denzel Washington to Sally Field, Julia Roberts and Claire Danes. Rosegg has shot such Broadway legends as Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, and movie stars like Jennifer Garner and Kathleen Turner.
After speaking with these down-to-earth ladies for just five minutes, one immediately knows why they have become the grand dames of theatrical photography not just in New York but the entire country. Joan Marcus, clad all in black and sporting stylish designer glasses, is soft-spoken and extremely polite, while Carol Rosegg, the more extroverted of the two, is equally good-natured and quick-witted. Both have an urbane sense of humor about their years working in the theater, which, says Rosegg, has its own unique demands.
“An art photographer can spend an hour lighting something, but we’re not art photographers,” said Rosegg. “In theater photography, you’re not your own boss and you don’t always get to be where you want to be [from a shooting vantage point]. The costumes aren’t always ready, the lighting is never ready. You’re kind of at the bottom of the totem pole in the theatrical hierarchy. We come in during a dress rehearsal and catch what we can.”
It’s similar, says Marcus, to shooting sports. “You’re trying to interpret what’s on the stage in a way that will not be boring, which is hard sometimes because you’re limited so much,” she said. “You’re working with egos and you’re working with unions and contracts and agents and costume designers, all of whom want a certain amount of control over how they’re represented.” Oftentimes, for instance, a director or publicist doesn’t want the ending to be photographed, “even though some of the best pictures come out of a show’s finale. They don’t want people to see that.”
A non-theatrical photographer would be surprised, says Rosegg, at the kinds of limitations placed upon them. “If a director said, ‘You can only shoot from the side and you can only have five minutes’ [to any other] photographer, they would be like, ‘Are you kidding?’
The director may be upset about something, the costume designer doesn’t have all the shoes ready, so it’s like we’re creeping in. We’re already making noise, and some people don’t like the fact that there are clicks going on. We have to be as unobtrusive as possible.”
Besides shooting all the big shows and sharing a photo studio, both women possess the neutral, laid-back, diplomatic personalities necessary to work harmoniously with everyone involved in the American theater scene, from the actors to the technical crew.
“There might be an electrician who just learned the board yesterday,” Rosegg said. “So you’re at other people’s mercy, even in a set-up situation.” But because they manage to make everyone happy, they remain incredibly busy. Aside from the recent strike, during the fall and spring theater season the photographers sometimes shoot one to three shows a day.
Both women paid their proverbial dues before they began working on Broadway. After graduating from George Washington University, Marcus, originally from Pittsburgh, started out working for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. in 1976 as an assistant printing photos, but later became their main photographer. She left the Kennedy Center in 1979 but returned in the mid-1980s and also worked as a freelancer for various Washington-area theater companies. She got her big Broadway break in 1986 when she photographed the Zoe Caldwell vehicle “Lillian,” a one-woman show about the life of playwright Lillian Hellman, which premiered in Washington. “That was a door opener for me because after that, Caldwell and her husband [the late Broadway producer Robert Whitehead] would hire me to come do their stuff,” Marcus said.
She moved to New York in 1992, and now lives in Tribeca with her husband, Adrian Bryan-Brown, of New York’s most successful Broadway P.R. firms, Boneau Bryan-Brown. The Broadway press representative has been especially supportive of her work. “Theater allowed us in a way, in a weird business, to have a good relationship. I understood why he had to work every weekend, and he knew why I worked every night. It’s allowed me to do what I do.”
Marcus has taken photos for countless Broadway shows, including “The Phantom of the Opera,” “The Lion King,” “Mamma Mia,” “Jersey Boys, “Wicked,” “Spamalot,” “The Light in the Piazza,” and “Doubt.” Although there are too many shows to name — and different things she likes about each — she admitted that she loves shooting Disney musicals such as “The Little Mermaid,” which she recently shot in Denver during out-of-town previews before its New York opening next month, because she gets to do photo books for them. “Their books are beautiful,” Marcus said. “That is something you don’t get to do very often and [Disney] really allows me that opportunity.”
Like Marcus, Rosegg’s husband is also part of the theater community. She’s married to producer Arnold Engelman, one of the executive producers of comedian Margaret Cho’s recent hit, “The Sensuous Woman.” They live in the Village with their two daughters, the youngest of whom is also in show business. She recently appeared in the Off-Broadway show “Lysistrata’s Children” at Theater for the New City in the East Village.
Rosegg shot photos for the recent Broadway revival of “Cyrano De Bergerac,” with Kevin Kline and Jennifer Garner. Rosegg is especially proud of her photo work on Tony-winning hits like “Avenue Q,” but she also loves shooting for Off-Broadway companies such as the Irish Repertory Theater in Chelsea, the New Group, the Pan Asian, and many others. She took photos for recent shows such as the musical adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and the critically acclaimed “Die Mommie Die!,” with Charles Busch. “I hadn’t seen Busch in a long time and his stuff is great,” Rosegg said. “Getting to see him again was part of the thrill.”
Originally from the Kansas City suburb of Shawnee Mission, KS, Rosegg graduated from Tufts University, moved to New York in 1978 and started working in theater management for an Off-Broadway show. “I got a high-def camera and took photos for the show because there was no money, and the press agent I met through there told me that Martha Swope needed someone. She was the preeminent Broadway dance photographer and I had no idea who she was,” Rosegg recalled. “I had no idea theater and dance photography existed, but I was really unemployed and would have called anyone. A week later, she offered me a very low-paying, long-hour job, and it was the best thing that ever happened.”
Swope, who was shooting for New York City Ballet and was the American Ballet Theater’s photographer, was at the height of her career. “Broadway was phenomenal then, so I basically canceled my life and went out with her every night shooting shows,” Rosegg said. “I learned everything from her.”
Working for Swope also brought Rosegg to D.C. whenever the American Ballet was on tour. A New York publicist who felt the two photographers’ paths should cross put them in touch. The two hit it off, and though neither was ready to strike out on her own — Marcus was not even ready to leave D.C. — they decided that at some point, they would open a studio together in New York. They have now shared the same Chelsea studio for the past 13 years, but Marcus is quick to point out that they are not in business together. “We’re not partners; we’re friendly competitors,” she smiled.
Much has changed since their early days of shooting — particularly technology. Before digital photography, Marcus explained, their job was more time-consuming because so many things went to different people. Slides were always getting lost, but those days of traditional film negatives, developing and printing photos, are long gone. “It’s been a learning experience; we’ve been able to keep better control of images,” said Rosegg. “[Digital photography] copes better with strange lighting situations. It’s great because we’re making the deadlines [faster], but I think sometimes you have to step back and breathe. Now there’s not the ability to take that breath. Things have to be quicker. You have to keep up with the technology, which is changing at a very rapid rate.”
Marcus recalled when she was photographing shows back at the Kennedy Center and The New York Times would want to use her pictures. In the 1970s, before the era of overnight services like FedEx, the only option for getting photos somewhere quickly was a company called Next Bus Out. “We’d shoot the pictures, I’d process the film and print the pictures, and then I’d go to the bus station,” she said. “I would call the New York Times and say, ‘It’s on the 3:30 bus, it gets in at 9 tonight,’ and they would go pick up the pictures. Now it’s like we just go into e-mail and hit ‘send.’ ”
The Broadway and Off-Broadway stages have always been their primary domain, but both have had their share of shooting theater in unusual settings. Rosegg remembered a particularly odd outdoor photo shoot: “Once we went to a median on the highway — I forget the show — and there was a gun for set-ups, and the next thing I know the police had been called because everybody driving by had seen us,” Rosegg said, laughing. “So the police came by and they said, ‘Everybody, hands up!’ I mean, literally.” She urged the cops not to shoot. “We were like, ‘We’re theater people.’”
Most of their photo gigs, however, are not nearly that unorthodox. And both women are emphatic that while shooting theater may sound glamorous, it’s anything but.
“Everything is fun and everything is frustrating,” Rosegg said. “You can’t do what we do if you don’t really love it because it’s not a terrifically high-paying field. It’s very odd hours. You may have a birthday dinner planned and [find out] there’s a dress rehearsal, and you have to decide which is more important.”
Neither likes to show favoritism or bias about working on a particular play or musical or with a certain director or actor, although Rosegg admitted that “some of the worst shows have fabulous photos.”
Musicals are the easiest to shoot, Marcus said, because “they are staged to be colorful,” whereas capturing the staging of straight plays can be tricky.
“The hardest is one-person shows,” Rosegg said. “Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, it’s so easy, it’s just a one-person show,’ but in a one-person show it has to be perfect because that’s it. In a one-person show you can’t have a funny eye, a funny mouth.”
“You also want to try to tell the story of what it is,” Marcus added. “You look for lighting elements and gestures, but that’s really hard in a one-person show.”
Still, the women admit that although they never imagined they would be career theater photographers, they cannot see themselves doing anything else. “It’s great to work in an environment where you actually want to be there,” said Marcus. “A lot of people work in an office — and they want to do something else. Everybody who wants to be in theater wants to be there. They may get tired or jaded, but they’re there.”
“I pick up the newspaper and I get to see my name all the time,” Rosegg said. “To this day, [seeing my photos] in The New York Times, The Villager, in a magazine, in a CD — it’s fun. Even after all these years, you put your memory card in the computer and the photos come up. There’s still this thrill. Every picture is still, ‘Oh, I got that moment, I didn’t get that moment.’ I don’t think many people after doing this as long as we have still get that thrill.”
By Scott Harrah