Print Pays Off: Ian Curcio’s Life-Size Cutouts for Lenovo
While photography portfolios and promotional materials have all gone digital to meet the growing demand for easily accessible content, there’s nothing quite like seeing images come to life in print. This is especially accurate when referring to a life-size printout of a person standing right next to you in the flesh. Greenville, South Carolina-based portrait photographer Ian Curcio’s images for tech company Lenovo showcase typecast models that were meant to represent millennial buyer personas.
These images were then printed, cut out, and placed on a conference floor where executives could walk around and see Lenovo’s computers, as well as the renditions of potential buyers in a “real-life” environment.
Ian sends out a direct mail campaign with printed promotional cards once a year to potential clients. His dedication to print paid off when he received an email from The Cargo Agency about working on this campaign for Lenovo.
I send out printed cards once a year, and they’re on my list. I finally got the “Your card came across my desk, and I think your photography style would be perfect for a shoot that we have coming up” email that I always hope for when marketing to potential clients.
Ian received a brief and creative direction from the agency, and they worked together to photograph the campaign for the client. The creative direction was to create cardboard cutouts that pictured millennial buyers as members of the new workforce. Each model represented a specific persona and had its own corresponding phrase meant to encapsulate their ethos and personality. The choices in casting and the styling of the models would each fit each one of the personas the client developed.
The portraits were captured in studio on a white seamless backdrop, and once Ian had the lighting right, everything moved along quickly. The simple backdrop made it easy for the client to do minimal retouching and prepare the photos for large format printing.
The models were great at taking direction and gave us a variety of poses. This project was more about tackling the technical challenges, so once we had the lighting dialed in, it was ‘step and repeat’ for the next few hours.
Credits:
Agency: The Cargo Agency
Producer: David Estrada
Photo Assistant: Matthew Franklin Carter
See more of Ian’s work at iancurcio.com.
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