DPA December Featured Classroom: Miami's Carousel Studios

Miami > Carousel Studios

CAROUSEL STUDIOS by Frank Lovece

Life is a carousel, my friends, so come to the Carousel … Studios, that is, where for 10 years, co-founders Tom Gonzalez and wife Mireille Chancy-Gonzalez have made their Miami venue a photographic sweet spot in the Big Orange.

The two had already been part of the Miami photo scene for 20 years, having founded the venerable WorldWide Foto, the city's photo-supply mecca. Carousel, located nearby, fills a 5,000-square-foot building in Miami's Design District. It's near Miami International Airport, scenic U.S. 1 and I-95 – and within walking distance of beautiful Magnolia Park and Biscayne Bay, if anybody in Miami walked.

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"He's got a really ideal location in the Design District and a nice facility," says Panasonic Digital Academy instructor Michael Thoennes, the renowned, Miami-based commercial photographer for such clients as American Express, DHL, Ford, Hewlett Packard, Molson Canadian Beer, Sprint and the U.S. Postal Service. "It's a comfortable place to be working," he says of Carousel, "with everything a student would need."

Gonzalez, he says, is something of a Miami photo godfather. "Tommy has been around forever," says Thoennes. "I've known him for years. He's the guy you go to in Miami when you need an odd photo gadget or stuff you just can't find anywhere else."

"We were here before the photographers started coming to Miami Beach, when the city was ready to bulldoze all the Art Deco hotels," Gonzalez remembers of that precarious early-'80s era. In fact, he gives photographers credit along with preservationists for saving South Beach. "Some photographers discovered the Art Deco hotels and started to photograph them, and with that came the models, and with the models came the big bucks chasing after them!" he says with a laugh. "And they all needed someplace to get together, so the restaurants and the clubs opened."

Gonzalez at the time had only his still-extant flagship store on the mainland. "Then we got calls from guys like Kodak and Fuji staying, 'You've got to have to get a retail place on the beach!'" He took their advice and was successful. Soon his busy company outgrew its rental department. And eventually, "I just said to my wife, 'Let's open up a studio that has equipment rental, too.'"

The couple found a building that had been home to a company called Carousel Fabrics, and Gonzalez became enchanted with the main entrance's big glass doors decorated with ornate, sandblasted carousel horses. "They were beautiful doors – and expensive doors!" Gonzalez chuckles. "I said, 'We're gonna keep the doors,' and that's how we got our name."

The space has two studios, one of them 1,800 square feet, the other 1,300 square feet – with the former offering what Carousel claims is "Miami's only full, all-corners, floor-to-ceiling cyclorama." That means a seamless backdrop that when used with special lighting can help create the illusion of sky, open space or a far, sweeping distance. And along with from the usual dressing rooms, lounge, kitchenette and other typical amenities of high-end studios, Carousel also rents every kind of photographic gear you can name and even does on-site flash repair.

Not surprisingly, all that plus a pair of on-staff photo experts have attracted a host of world-class photographers in addition to Thoennes. "There's Tim Geaney, who shoots a lot for the big fashion catalogs," Gonzales says. "Sid Hoeltzell, another local guy," who's won ten Addy Awards and an International Silver Clio for his liquor advertisements and other photos. "And Joyce Tennyson, who makes these books with portraits of men and women over 60 [Wise Women, 2002; Amazing Men, 2004]." As well, he says, "We have had so many celebrities: Gloria Estefan. Jeff Gordon from NASCAR. Jason Taylor from the Miami Dolphins. The rapper Lil' Wayne."

And what with being in the Design District, Gonzales takes a day each year during the internationally famous Art Basel Miami show, "and I don't rent the studios out to photographers, but make them available as an art gallery."

Ultimately, Tommy G. has made Carousel a place both fancy and fun. "I keep it low-key, I don't over-advertise, I don't overdo it. When you get too big you start losing the personal touch," he says. "I don't want that. There are some studios much bigger than me, but there everybody's just a number, from the employees to the clients. I'd say the majority of our clients have become friends of ours." And that, so to speak, is by design.

Carousel Studios
(305) 576-3686
atmfoto@carouselstudios.com

3700 NE First Court

Miami, FL 33137

http://www.carouselstudios.com/