Courtesy Bryan Rindfuss ‘Pawn Shop' is illustrative of the rich color Bryan Rindfuss believes only film can provide (top left). He stays away from digital.Rindfuss tied a designer silk Vera scarf around the neck of one of his family's goats for ‘Goat' (top right). ‘I love the whole theatrical aspect of fashion. It's more about creating something that's fun to look at,' he says. He used stuffed deer in a grocery for ‘Low Price' (bottom). Rindfuss attended college in New York but came back for inspiration.

NAME: Bryan Rindfuss, 34

MEDIUM: Photography

Bryan Rindfuss

BEST KNOWN FOR: High-concept fashion photography for newspapers and magazines such as Nylon, Harper's Bazaar and the London Independent. Rindfuss does his own location scouting and a lot of his own styling, coming up with innovative ways to showcase fashion. For a story in a French magazine about Vera scarves, Rindfuss tied the designer silk scarves around the necks of goats on his family's ranch in Bandera. For a profile of the French designer Pierrot, he stuck one of Pierrot's ski hats on a stuffed raccoon. “I love the whole theatrical aspect of fashion. It's more about creating something that's fun to look at,” Rindfuss said. Animals also figure prominently in his fine art photography, which focuses on “oddities and found objects.” That includes a broken disco ball on the ground, a stuffed deer and black buck heads that appear to be for sale in a grocery store and cats in different poses. He calls himself a preservationist: “One of the main objectives is I'm trying to capture stuff before it disappears,” he said. Maybe it's only fitting, then, that he eschews digital cameras for film cameras and prints the images himself in a darkroom. “I don't believe you can get the same color or richness from a digital camera as you can from film. For anything I care about, I shoot on film,” he said.

BACKGROUND: Rindfuss, a San Antonio native, graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and stayed in the city to work. He decided to return home because “a lot of things I'm really inspired by I couldn't find in New York,” he said. “You have to go to the ends of the earth to find something that's not recognizable (in New York). It's hard to find the landscape I'm looking for. I like a certain type of architecture from the '40-'70s.”

CHECK HIM OUT: “Photographs: 1997-2007” is on display at Blue Star Contemporary Art Center through Sept. 29 as part of FOTOSEPTIEMBRE. The exhibit includes an estimated 200-300 photographs, representing both his commercial and personal work, displayed like a collage. Another exhibit opens with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Sept. 26 the Semmes Library, 15060 Judson Road. It runs through Nov. 26.

Jessica Belasco | 210SA contributor