The Rolling Stone cover. Credit: Aaron Kotowski Behind the scenes of the Rolling Stones shoot. Adam Fahlund Photo Credit: Aaron Kotowski I’m a visual vampire. Or so I learned from New Haven photographer Aaron Kotowski as he adjusted the settings on my camera so I could take a nice picture o f him for this article. If you shoot in sRGB, he said, you are “committing your subject to mediocrity.” Oops. At least I shoot in raw. “Everyone wants to be photographed a certain way,” he said. That’s the challenge. It’s one I’m familiar with as a reporter. I want to capture what I find fascinating about people. Often, these are not things they emphasize or even like about themselves (but I do). I was interviewing Kotowski at Arwa coffee shop after learning that he had taken the photo of bachata stars Romeo Santos and Prince Royce for Rolling Stone En Español’s cover, published Feb. 15. I wanted to know more about who he was and how he approaches his craft. When Santos and Royce came to Kotowski’s shoot, they were clear pros. Santos was “very sweet, very nice, very pleasant to be around,” Kotowski said. “His deal is, ‘I’m gonna give you all I got, but you gotta do your job.'” Santos, who stands 6’1″, peered over Kotowski’s shoulder—”I’m a short king,” the photographer said—to share excitement and quick decisions. “Oh, that’s dope,” Santos would say. Or, “Five-star that one,” referring to a scoring system to choose final photos. It was Kotowski’s second assignment for Santos. The first is a top secret project, coming out soon. “It’s the most accessible art form,” Kotowski said of his medium of choice, at least in this digital age. He was trained on film. I did a double-take upon hearing that—how old is he? Almost 50, it turns out. “I dye my beard,” he said, crediting Eli Campos of Campos Hair. Back in the day, if time and money allowed, photographers would pause the shoot and send a roll of film off to a lab via courier. Kotowski told me this was called a “clip test.” At the lab, technicians would develop a section of the film in order to create a “recipe” for how to process it. “It’s straight alchemy,” he said. But “I’ll never go back to film,” Kotowski added. “I’ve done my time. My fingers used to smell like D76.” That’s a developer used in film processing. Now, Kotowski often photographs CEOs of large companies. He angles his lens from below to make them seem heroic. Like every good rule, this one has exceptions. He scrolled through past photoshoots on his computer, and one image caught my eye. Two men stood in the middle of a huge field. The fuzziness of the vegetation got me. And how much of it there was. Kotowski had told his subjects that, for the grandeur of the final image, he needed them to be small. Kotowski himself seemed to be well-aware of the shadow he’d like to cast. “Normally, you’d be talking to me in jail for killing these photoshoots,” he said. He talked big, then reflected in moments of striking self-awareness. He mentioned a few times that he cares more about the craft of photography than the art; he knows the assignment and executes it perfectly. Hearing himself, he paused and said, “Then again, that might come from insecurity.” If you have a bad photoshoot, he said, “That’s a wrap. For that client, at least.” It’s a tough field, and you have to treat every shoot seriously no matter what you’re being paid. “There’s not a lot of redemption in the job.” Kotowski told me about growing up in East Haddam in a poor family. It was a time of a lot of insecurity. That’s why, he said, “I want everything to be really good. If I fail, there is no Plan B. There is no contingency plan.” After we chatted for a while, I asked Kotowski if he wanted to help me take a picture of him. I offered him my camera to fiddle with. It was a gamble as to whether he’d be into it. Little did I know just how into it he’d be. For over half an hour, he was in the zone, communicating with my camera in a way I never had. He updated settings I didn’t even know were there. Before, he had been a fountain of stories. Now, straight silence. I let him cook. He asked if my firmware needed to be updated. “I can update that?” I asked. “Yeah, girl!” he said. He added my name and the year to the metadata of my photos. It’s something he told me I should be doing every Dec. 31st. (I’ve done it literally never.) At the same time, he said, “We’re all losing our creative rights. It’s all going down with this administration.” When I noted that photography seems to be the perfect job for Kotowski because of its discrete moments of total control, he said, “So much of life is out of control.” His journey into photography was, as he put it, “an accident.” He went to school for electrical engineering, got kicked out, then went back to school at a community college. There, he made Dean’s List and took a photography class. He lived in a van at one point. Lest you start imagining the adventure of van life, he added, “It wasn’t cool. I felt like a loser.” In the early 2000s, Kotowski took time off from school at RIT and worked as a photo assistant. When he returned to classes in 2003, “all the darkrooms were gone. It was all digital labs.” He graduated in 2005, waiting for the job offers to start rolling in before realizing, as he put it, “Motherfucker, you’re an independent business owner!” He had to learn about taxes, clients, and running an operation. His advice about school? “For people that come from my low-caste system, do not do photo school. If you have a trust fund, do all the schooling you can.” After tuning up my camera, Kotowski pointed it toward me to test. I remembered a “look of defiance” he had appreciated in a different photoshoot he showed me, and felt free to be myself. I stared at the camera, serious, a bit tired, pen ink smudged on my hand. I loved the photo. Now it was my turn. I pressed the shutter, willing myself not to look down at the photos until I’d fired a few off. I wanted to look cool, like I knew what I was doing. Then I reviewed what I’d captured; the focus had been off the whole time. “That’s the price of being cool,” Kotowski said. By the end of our meeting, I got the shot. I followed Kotowski’s advice: low f-stop, lit from the right (because the eye travels to the light, and in our culture we read left to right), avoiding specular highlights in the background. Five stars, at least to the standards of a reformed visual vampire. Rolling Stone photoshoot credits:Photography: Aaron KotowskiExecutive Production: Alejandro OrtizStylists: Norma Castro, Kate ForkinGlam: Michelle Nicole, Realiz AlcaideBarber: Paul Hernandez Images for new Album, Better Late Than Never Credit: Aaron Kotowski The real me? Photo by Aaron Kotowski, using my worse-for-wear camera. 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