Gone are the days of clocking into the Time magazine mailroom and steadily working your way up the corporate ladder, the days of a job in mass media being sustainable at one institution. Nowadays, thanks to the digital uprooting and resodding of every profession everywhere, enterprising communicators are expected to wear quite a few hats. A local photographer, but also videographer, production company owner, studio technician, graphic designer, and chamber of commerce board member, Zach Minskoff has enough to make a milliner’s eyes pop.
Born in Guatemala and raised in East Hampton by his adoptive parents, his first camera-related project was one familiar to many born after the turn of the millennium: “I did stop-motion animation,” Mr. Minskoff said the other day. “Mostly Legos, and mostly ‘Star Wars.’ But I got my first DSLR [camera] for my bar mitzvah.”
Chronologically speaking, Mr. Minskoff was one of the first of an age when professional-grade tools and the skills necessary to operate them had been rapidly decentralized and made available at little to no cost. It’s no surprise that he developed a facility for graphic design in his early high school years, his first gig being the design of a website for a local real estate company.
What started off as a way to take landscape photos on family vacations quickly became a hobby and then some. “Coming into high school, I was crazy shy. I had friends, and we’d play Minecraft or Call of Duty or whatever, and I did sports, but I would just never talk. But people saw me with my camera, and would ask me to shoot the soccer team or a club or something.”
In the ninth grade, pitching for the East Hampton High baseball team and a burgeoning photography career were his social inroads. He made the jump from high school community photographer-on-demand to professional in a gig for the Timberland boot company. He also started his own clothing line, called East End Clothing Co., while in high school. “That was insane. I’d been doing graphic design for a while, since I was 13 or 14, just making websites and stuff like that,” he recalled. “And me and my friends were doodling around, and we found a distributor here, and another press there, and then boom. We had sold out.” Not bad for a couple of 16-year-olds.
A leap forward in time to today reveals a creative approach that hasn’t changed a whole lot since then — Mr. Minskoff’s enthusiasm seems to rub off on everything he does. Looking through his website will give you an idea of his back catalog’s bright, hyperkinetic nature, whether it’s a promo for Nick and Toni’s or a still from a high school trip to Japan.
Growing into his personal style happened at Ithaca College under the tutelage of a professor. “His name was Michael Lewis. He was fresh off of Rolling Stone, where he had shot Eminem, and Michael Keaton, and a billion other big names. He could be really harsh, but he was the person who showed me how to take photos that were really mine.”
Now his career has taken off, and no one can deny that his work is very much his own. It’s difficult to put a precise label on what exactly it is that he does, though, because there’s so much to choose from. He also mentioned his role as the head technician for LTV’s Studio 1 — “Yeah, that’s my side thing.”
His chamber of commerce work entails a lot of administration. For those not conversant in the particulars of what they do, such chambers exist to advance the interests of local businesses and interact with the government. “From Wainscott to Montauk, we do our best to make sure businesses are supporting the community we live in. That’s kind of vague, but we do fund-raisers for local charities, we do a lot of mixers where people can come and talk, stuff like that.”
Similarly, Mr. Minskoff’s production company, Minskoff Studios, has a strict East End focus. And, as in every other facet of his career, he makes sure to keep busy. This summer, projects have involved Rowdy Hall, Gosman’s Dock, the Lululemon Summer Club, Alice + Olivia, the Red Horse Market, Grindstone Donuts, and many, many others.
The idea came about when Mr. Minskoff and some contemporaries from LTV noticed an interesting labor gap. “We saw there was something we could fill,” he explained. “Short form is huge now. Everything is short form, especially advertising. But for production stuff out here, people were hiring from the city. We figured we could keep the money out here and hire locally.”
Now, Minskoff Studios is about to celebrate its one-year anniversary, and business is indeed booming. “It’s summer, and I’m just knocking out one project after another. Summer’s really busy out here, as you know. But what’s interesting is that the work doesn’t slow down that much in the winter,” he said. He finds that his work with the chamber of commerce accelerates during the off-season.
And when he isn’t on the clock? Mr. Minskoff likes to D.J. Who knows where he finds the time?
