Ithaca College

Clay Enos, a 1991 Park School graduate recently cited for his photography work on the new Warner Brothers movie Watchmen, will speak to students at Ithaca College on Friday, March 27, at 4:00 p.m. in the Park Auditorium.

According to his publicity file, Enos refuses to be pigeonholed into any one category of photography. "From a portrait session with Sting, to a print campaign for Coca-Cola, to glue-sniffing children on the streets of Cambodia, Enos consistently captures moments that feel both real and transcendent. Always spontaneous and edgy, Enos' unique style shines through his commercial, editorial, and fine-art photographs."

Enos was invited to campus by Janice Levy, one of his former professors. Levy said, "Clay has an interactive style and, rather than snapping shots from the sidelines, he fully engages his subjects. He will speak in Ron Jude's Photography Workshop course at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, March 27. He also spoke to students in Levy's Advertising and Illustration course on Thursday, March 26.

In addition, Enos is expected to appear on the WICB radio program, Countdown to the Weekend, on Friday afternoon.

Enos, who earned a BFA in film, photography, and visual arts, proved his eye for portraits in his first large-scale photography project, Streetstudio. Launched in 2000, Streetstudio involves shooting portraits of random passersby on the streets of New York City. By bringing his studio to the street, Enos gains access to the most remarkable faces in the city. This access, combined with his sheer enthusiasm and friendly rapport, allows Enos to create quiet poignant portraits of everyday people that reflect the myriad beauty and electric spirit of New York City.

The project has expanded to include London, Paris, Amsterdam, Black Rock City, Bangkok, and Berlin. To date, the Streetstudio collection contains more than 20,000 portraits and the project is still going strong.

Director Zack Snyder hired Enos to document his film adaptation of Watchmen. That effort resulted in three coffee-table books, one of which is dedicated exclusively to 220 on-set Streetstudio-style portraits made during the film's production. Recent covers of Entertainment Weekly and Empire magazine have featured that work, and one of his set photos appears in the March 16 edition of Time.

Enos describes himself as a typical New Yorker who doesn't own a car. When not riding his bicycle on the streets of Manhattan, he roams the globe discovering memorable photographs in far away places (48 countries so far). Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers and the Lemelson Foundation have tapped him to document their innovative development projects around the world.

Clay Enos' most recent foundation work found him traveling around East Africa (Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and Kenya) to document the development work of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Lemelson Foundation in developing sustainable water and forest projects with coffee farmers. The work itself involved documenting coffee farming practices, co-op meetings, and portraits of farmers and their families, as well as key players in the development projects. The images ranged from chimpanzees in their preserves to big industrial coffee plants in Kenya.