Meeno Peluce
GROWN UP WORLD. Child star turned photographer MEENO PELUCE, travels the world, taking photos of celebrities and working on advertising campaigns while also documenting the lives of his wife and daughters.
"I adhere to this law, The two most important things you set on your camera: where you stand and when you push the button."
Editor: What is your background? How did you become interested in photography?
Meeno: First, I grew up on the road. It planted the seeds of the world wonder and jammed them through with wanderlust. Those were the very early years. Then we were back in LA, and I got a job at the factory; by the age of 7, I’d become a successful childhood actor in the heyday of 70s TV lore. Then, I gave it all up to study literature. If you combine those elements: adventure addiction, bright eyes for new places, the belief that a day of make-believe is an honest day’s work, and a yen for storytelling, well, you may find yourself walking around the globe trying to make poems with light.
Your photos were taken in several different cities. Do you like to travel? Do you feel that you have exhausted your inspiration in one place?
The Road always spools out in front of you. It offers new faces and places and always the exotic thrill of the mundane seen differently. (Also, instead of having a memory, which I’m primarily bereft of, I stalk things with a camera and trophy them with pictures.) My great success is that I married a boon travel companion. She sees well into the future, plans, and schemes and does most of the leg work, keeping our yearly calendar filled with continental crossings. So we go, and each one’s a rejuvenating adventure.
We drag our daughters with us everywhere, and we hold it a point of pride that while we’re never able to blow their minds, we are secretly triumphant in raising the bar regularly for them.
What cameras/lenses do you like to use?
I love my 50-megapixel Canon 5DsR; it makes such lovely big RAW images. And I have lots of good glass for it. My little Fuji X100T, my like-a-Leica, goes everywhere with me. And I just got the new Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro 4.6K movie camera, which is a total mind-blower. I’m a massive fan of digital shooting because a RAW image is essentially the latent image inside your camera. It’s the precursor to the holy grail of the celluloid negative because, like silver halides waiting quietly in the dark, it hasn’t been developed yet. I also have a Mamiya 6 that I’ve traveled with for years. It often causes me to make perfectly magical big square pictures. But the film is a different endeavor once you’ve embraced a digital pipeline. I walked back into a darkroom recently, though, and boy, did it give me some ideas.
What are the qualities of a great photo? Can a great photo be taken on an iPhone?
Daily, I take great pictures on my iPhone. Like different sexual positions, different cameras bring you in novel ways to the same good place. It’s all about image-making and moment-snatching. I adhere to this law, “The two most important things you set on your camera are where you stand and when you push the button.”
Left to right: Tyson Ritter for LEE Jeans. Will.i.am, Meeno’s younger sister, Soleil Moon Frye, Jack Black, Lady Gaga, Perry, and Etty Farrell for their disco album.
Is much of your work staged or shot on impulse?
I always bring the honesty and spontaneity of my street photography to my professional work. And I walk around every day hypothetically steeped in the casual cock-security of my pro-work. Again, the world is a marvelous place, and my job as a photographer is to make constant proof that I see it that way.
Are there any themes to your work? What is a typical MEENO photo? People-heroism. I dig the human spirit. I like it when it’s encouraged, and I try to tell that story repeatedly.
Which photographers do you admire? My wife is one of my favorites. She’s got a great eye and a vicious wit, and I’m intimately familiar with her subject matter: our life. I’ve always loved Cartier-Bresson’s notion of walking around the world seeking decisive moments, which is why I also dig the guy at 9-eyes.com, who pours through Google Street View to find arcane and often startling shots from all over the globe. A soul didn’t take those pictures; a nine-eyed, all-seeing, always-watching-from-the-curb machine did, but it takes a brave soul to parse those moments and pronounce them art.
I’m super impressed with all the top-notch life observers I’m finding these days on Instagram. I dig curating my feed. We’re back in an era, like the 30s and 60s, when malfeasant tyrants are aching to preen for the camera. The Post-Camelot Crazies, as well as the Tom Joads of our politics and kleptocracy, need telling. Our sexuality and security, our privacy and conformity, we ordered and infinitely disarrayed compassions and fashions and hungrily rationed odd passions like all cancer and self-styled, stem-celled healing of a world sagging under its weight that won’t wait, all of Kurtz’s’ Horror plumbed deep, all of Didion’s Slouching stood straight, all of that muck, murk, and diamond glory must be seen and seen well. I like that to be the job of the camera. I like that there are so many cameras out there doing good work.
What are you currently working on? My life story is about my wife and my children and our urban homestead in LA, which we call Skyfarm, with all its gardens and animals and the new@skyfarmyurt we built to be our AirBnB. And, of course, our relatively constant and wide-ranging travels. Everything else gets planted in the fertile soil of those basics. I’ve taught myself cinematography in the past few years, and that’s a big new magic. Most of my jobs are both stills and motion now. In the past year, there’s been Gaga prepping for the Super Bowl, John Chiang running for Governor of CA, a new ad campaign for a luxury brand called CCCXXXIII, and another for a new healthy vegan candy bar called TruWomen, several small documentaries and films and music videos, a piece for Fender with one of my favorite new singers, Børns, a terrific campaign of salt-of-the-earth union folks up in Washington State, the Yucatan for Spring Break, Saint Louise for the Total Eclipse, Vietnam for Xmas, and next month in Cuba. It goes on like that. That’s the way we like it. And it sure makes for good pictures. www.meenophoto.com
