Aces in Their Places
Jesús Baez does not take pictures. He engineers them. Fifteen years in, the creative director shot five editorial stories in one day, and one of them is this one.
Jesús Baez will tell you, without any drama about it, that a cover is not a lucky frame. “I believe covers are engineered,” he says. “Sometimes you get lucky, but before that luck happens, you’ve spent weeks planning looks, poses, hair, makeup, lighting. By the time you’re on set, everything is prepared so a magical moment can happen.” He has a name for what happens next. Preparation meeting luck.
That is the whole philosophy, and it explains how a self-taught kid who used to plan a painting before he touched the canvas grew into the photographer behind DialUp, the Galore story you are looking at. It also explains the more absurd fact underneath this feature: Baez shot five full editorial stories in a single day, three locations, one crew moving from morning to night, and DialUp was one of them.
The Card Table
He runs a set like a card table. “My philosophy is aces in their places,” he says. “If you’ve played poker, you know how to use your aces strategically to win the hand. I apply that to my craft. I look for experts in their field. I’m not just bringing in someone who can perform their craft, I’m looking for key players who contribute to the execution through their expertise.” For DialUp the aces were Dorian Jihad on styling and Ricardo Delgado on beauty, the same core team that has become a Baez signature, with Venecia Reyes on hair. He calls the result one word: synergy.
You can see the hand in the clothes. Dorian keeps DialUp almost severe for the season: a black leather corset cinched over a plain cotton tee, a skinny black tie strung with oversized crystals where a necklace should be, crinkled nylon cargo pants slung low, wire coil cuffs wound up one arm. Ricardo bleached the brows down to nothing and held the lip to a single matte stroke, which turns the face into a blank screen for Baez’s light. Venecia crimped the hair into a blond storm big enough to read as motion even in a still.
Strategic Visuals
What separates Baez from the guy with a nice camera is that he does not think he is holding a camera at all. “I say strategic visuals because I’m not a photographer who pulls out a camera and snaps a photo. I’m a creative director. I dissect the frame, the lighting, the story, and I build from there.” He carries a mental archive he estimates at over a thousand images, and pulls exactly one. “I only use the one I need to convey the story.” Even on the day, he is already thinking past it. “I’m asking where this will live. Book pages, social media, a website. They all have different aspect ratios. So everything is thought out before the day. Poses, angles, all of it.”
It reads like a producer’s brain, but the origin is an artist’s. “It’s my own version of painting,” he says. “Even as a kid, painting, I’d plan the image before I touched the canvas. I’d sketch ideas, then marry the one I felt most drawn to.” That is the tell. Baez is not documenting a shoot. He is composing one.
DialUp is where that composing gets loud. Half the story is shot in hard black and white, Shia Coyne kneeling and crawling across a bare studio floor, every crease of leather and nylon rendered in silver. The other half looks like the signal dropped out: the color slides into acid green and burnt orange, a pink-outlined cutout of Shia floats upside down in the corner of the frame like a pop-up window, and in the last color shot she is dancing so hard the camera can only catch her as a smear.
“I heard the shutter, I saw the moment land, and I knew I had it.”
The Face
Casting, for Baez, is a story decision. For DialUp he put Shia Coyne in front of the lens, and she plays the concept with her whole body: coiled and watchful in the black-and-white frames, all limbs and hair in the color ones, the shield sunglasses turning her into something closer to a transmission than a portrait.
Next Look
Ask him about the frame that turns a shoot, the one where you know you have it, and he does not reach for theory. He hears it. “I heard the shutter, I saw the moment land, and I knew I had it.” Then, always, the same two words to the room. “Next look.”
Here is the part that makes this more than a shoot recap. Baez is fifteen years into this, and for most of those years he was waiting for someone to tell him he was allowed. “Fifteen years standing up at once,” is how he describes the day he went through the files and the imposter syndrome was simply gone. “I spent most of those years looking for validation I could have given myself all along.” That is the tension under all the strategy. A man who can engineer a magical moment on demand for everyone else, learning to hand himself the same thing.
Which is what his studio is now, in his telling. “Somebody walks in unsure and walks out holding proof of what they already were,” he says. “I know exactly what that’s worth. I went fifteen years without it.”
Bleached brows and crimped volume. Beauty by Ricardo Delgado, hair by Venecia Reyes.
The last frame of DialUp drains the color out entirely. Shia, bare-browed and still, looks straight down the lens. The static is gone. The call went through.
Credits
Photographer and Creative Director: Jesús Baez, @baez_photo
Model: Shia Coyne, @shiacoyne, P5 MGMT, @P5MGMT
Styling: Dorian Jihad, @dorianjihad
Beauty: Ricardo Delgado, @touchthisskin
Hair: Venecia Reyes, @vee_didit
Styling Assistant: Hyden Echelon, @hayden_echelon
Assistant: Nova Reyes, @glamedupby.nova
Portrait of Jesús Baez: Self-portrait
Fashion: Dorian Jihad Archive
Story: “DialUp” for Galore
Produced by: Noah Love & Associates, @noahloveassoc
