photo: Tracy Kumono
Photographer: Jennifer Polixenni Brankin
Specialty: Editorial Photography
Favorite Subject: Fashion
Jennifer Polixenni Brankin knew early on that she didn’t want to be a starving artist.
Before she had even entered college, she was traveling the world, photographing billboards and collecting a hefty file of images ripped from magazines.
“I thought I should know something about how people communicate,” she said in explanation.
But it goes beyond that. Brankin was focused on a prize. She wanted to create, she wanted to travel and she wanted a bit of glitz.
“I had dreamed of going to New York Fashion Week,” she said over the phone from Chicago O’Hare Airport as she waited for her flight to New York for this year’s Fashion Week.
Brankin now has several fashion weeks in her portfolio. The 29-year-old Aussie has photographed models strutting down the catwalk in both New York and Sydney. Her work has been distributed by Getty Images and published in the New York Post and Scottsdale Lifestyle Magazine.
The process that over 10 years brought Brankin to living her dream was deliberate. The logic, as she lays it out, seems inexorable. She honed her skills with an eye toward practicality. First, she set herself a foundation.
“I went (to Europe for a year) and photographed billboards,” she said. “I tore images out of magazine. I immersed myself in art and architecture.”
In college, Brankin studied not theater or music – her earlier interests – but visual communication. She focused on photography and interior design, and straight out of school snagged a job photographing interiors for a Fortune 500 company, MDC Holdings.
From there, she took a job at Tucson Newspapers, in the process adopting Tucson, and the area just west of downtown, as her home. Toward the end of her three and a half years at Tucson Newspapers, Brankin was managing the photography department for two lifestyle magazines and a Sunday newspaper insert, and creating videos for a website.
The closure of the Tucson Citizen newspaper was a turning point.
“I felt like I was on the Titanic – I knew how the story ended,” she said. “I realized that if I had invested what I had in the company into my own business, I would be very successful.”
And so she bailed and launched a freelance operation in the middle of this Great Recession. In pure driven fashion, Brankin set out, using each step to leverage the next. She submitted her portfolio to critique after critique. She learned the unwritten rules – models must have both feet on the ground in catwalk photos, for example. She transformed each assignment into a bigger one.
Brankin, who is also president of Tucson Chapter of American Society of Media Photographers, specializes in editorial photography, especially images of food and fashion.
“I’m not just an artist,” she said. “I’m someone who’s creating a reality, whether it’s real or not, that will sell a product.”
Even so, she thinks that part of her advantage is her early immersion in art history. “I definitely felt that my art history gave my work a richness to it,” she said. “I understood how the work worked in context.”
Polixenni Photography won a Gold and Bronze ADDYTM award in February from the American Advertising Federation Tucson. View her online portfolio at Polixenni.com.
