The Watchmen photographer (Class of '91) at Park!

Clay Enos, a 1991 Park School graduate recently cited for his photography work on the new Warner Brothers movie Watchmen, was in the Park School today and wil be speaking to students in Ron Jude's Photography Workshop course at 1:00 p.m. Friday, and will be interviewed on WICB's Countdown to the Weekend.

According to his publicity file, Enos refuses to be pigeonholed into any one category of photography. "From a portrait session with Sting, to a print campaign for Coca-Cola, to glue-sniffing children on the streets of Cambodia, Enos consistently captures moments that feel both real and transcendent. Always spontaneous and edgy, Enos' unique style shines through his commercial, editorial, and fine-art photographs."

Enos, who earned a BFA in film, photography, and visual arts, proved his eye for portraits in his first large-scale photography project, Streetstudio. Launched in 2000, Streetstudio involves shooting portraits of random passersby on the streets of New York City. By bringing his studio to the street, Enos gains access to the most remarkable faces in the city. This access, combined with his sheer enthusiasm and friendly rapport, allows Enos to create quiet poignant portraits of everyday people that reflect the myriad beauty and electric spirit of New York City.

The project has expanded to include London, Paris, Amsterdam, Black Rock City, Bangkok, and Berlin. To date, the Streetstudio collection contains more than 20,000 portraits and the project is still going strong.

Director Zack Snyder hired Enos to document his film adaptation of Watchmen. That effort resulted in three coffee-table books, one of which is dedicated exclusively to 220 on-set Streetstudio-style portraits made during the film's production. Recent covers of Entertainment Weekly and Empire magazine have featured that work, and one of his set photos appears in the March 16 edition of Time.

Enos describes himself as a typical New Yorker who doesn't own a car. When not riding his bicycle on the streets of Manhattan, he roams the globe discovering memorable photographs in far away places (48 countries so far). Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers and the Lemelson Foundation have tapped him to document their innovative development projects around the world.

Clay Enos' most recent foundation work found him traveling around East Africa (Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and Kenya) to document the development work of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Lemelson Foundation in developing sustainable water and forest projects with coffee farmers. The work itself involved documenting coffee farming practices, co-op meetings, and portraits of farmers and their families, as well as key players in the development projects. The images ranged from chimpanzees in their preserves to big industrial coffee plants in Kenya.