The Selby: a website that chronicles unconventional portraits, originally started when the young photographer Todd Selby became frustrated with taking the traditional portraiture of prominent figures while on a project for various print magazines. Ergo came the birth of TheSelby.com. The curious yet dissatisfied photographer, decided to create his forum to display his idea of what a more inclusive and revealing depiction of interesting people might be. He took inspiration from architecture type editorials, and delved in even deeper to look inside one's personal environment--hoping to reveal more about this person than your typical pose on camera shot. With The Selby, the idea is to get a very intimate point of view by seeing photos of someone's things, what their sense of style is, and how they organize their collected items within the confines of their own homes, and ultimately updating them on his website, on his own terms.
The site has been a great success so far. The intricate home profiler initially startedcovering just a bunch of his "artsy downtown friends and friends of friends," which today has expanded to names like Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Louboutin. It also didn't hurt that the young creative was featured at Collette, the high end fashion store in the heart of bourgeois Paris early in the game, as well as having a lush network in the fashion and art industry.
Image by Todd Selby
This later gave Selby even bigger opportunities--finally being hired by a publication like French Vogue to do his more free but artistic style vignettes. (See Helena Christensen featured in her West Village home in New York from French Vogue). These days however, Todd Selby is launching his new releases of short films, his latest being: Mitch Alfus, Leather King. Alfus is a large provider of fine leather to major fashion lines. The mini-documentary starts in the biker's home with his small daughter waking up, which reveals the gentler side of this man, who later goes into his office to show his more calculated business side, down to his sexist tendencies. Although it is clear that this type of venture of moving into films (shown below) is still perhaps in its amateurish phase, given the rapid growing popularity of the TheSelby website, the young creative entrepreneur might well be on his way into the next stage of his career.
