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Profile: Marcus Russell Price
You could say that photographer Marcus Russell Price has a hilarious gig. He photographs comedians. He has worked with Amy Schumer, Pete Davidson, Aziz Ansari, Hannibal Buress, and more, capturing their biggest moments and also small, unguarded ones.
NEW YORK - When Marcus Russell Price works a camera, there's usually laughter involved. Price is a photographer of comedians. And having worked with the likes of Amy Schumer, Pete Davidson, Aziz Ansari, and Hannibal Buress, he is quickly becoming one of the industry's most sought-after talents behind a lens.
"I travel with these comics, and I take a lot of pictures during the show like stage shots," Price said on a recent afternoon between headshot sessions in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "But the most interesting photos are the things that happen in between shows, like offstage, backstage, on the car, in the bus, on the plane."
Price recalled one of his favorite moments when he standing in the rear of the stage at Madison Square Garden and Amy Schumer got caught up in the gravity of the moment.
"Right before she went on stage, she looked at me and goes, 'I grew up here—it's amazing,'" Price said. "She got to perform in her home town in New York City at Madison Square Garden."
"I think she was just taken by the moment, and she turned around and looked right at my lens and I snapped that photo," he added.
He remembers touring in Mumbai, India, with Aziz Ansari.
"The times we weren't on stage, we were just mobbing through the streets of Mumbai, like eating food and taking pictures because he's a photographer as well," Price said. "And he's a darn good one."
And he has more than a few photos from his time spent chilling in Pete Davidson's Staten Island basement, and often Davidson is getting a new tattoo at the same time.
"He's friends with a couple of tattoo artists, so his friend Ryan came over and was tattooing him while we watched a movie, which is not uncommon for us to do," Price said. "He was getting a unicorn [that time]."
When FOX 5 NY caught up with Price, he was working on promo shots for The Daily Show's Ronny Chieng, who described why he enjoys working with Price.
"He's super easy to work with, he's super talented," Chieng said. "Everything he touches just turns to gold.
That was followed by a headshot session for Paul Virzi, who met price through their mutual friend, Pete Davidson.
"It was just one of those things where it was like, 'Oh yea, I like this guy, I trust this guy, he's friends with my friends' and that's how it worked out," Price said.
Virzi also spoke of the importance for a comedian to have good-quality headshots.
"You have to because the comedy clubs have it all over, all over their internet, all over their ads when you're performing there, social media has it," Virzi said.
Price's success is no joke. And in fact, he now sees it as a responsibility.
"You see all these legendary photos of people like Steve Martin and Richard Pryor and you think, 'Thank god someone was there to take that picture,'" Price said. "And in a lot of cases that person is now me, and that doesn't fall on me lightly."