We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Christopher Creese. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Christopher below.

Alright, Christopher thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

I was in college for video game art and design, and as part of our graduation assignment, we were asked to figure out a name that we could use to promote ourselves and our work. I initially came up with the idea of being like a factory – something that produces something – and that led me to the suffix -works. Since I was doing 3D design, I wanted a name that reflected that but also wasn’t limiting to what I could do. Eventually I added my name to -works, becoming CreeseWorks. It worked on multiple levels; Creese Works, as in I’m a solution to a creative problem; as in I work hard and as in I create quality work.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a first generation Vincentian-American Photographer & Filmmaker, born and raised in Hyattsville, MD, in the DC suburbs. When I was under 5, my mom’s coworker at the time got me a toy camera that used real film for my birthday and it set off my love of photography. That love of visual creativity and storytelling spread to other avenues in my life – books, comics, video games. After college, I was trying to figure out my path and through a chance event, and great support from my late father, got a professional camera and started to network with people in the DC Metro Area.

I started with still work for non-profits, local businesses and portraiture and slowly got asked more and more to do videography. Now, I do commercial photography for corporate clients, photojournalism for news outlets including The New York Times and NBC News, and documentary style film work on multiple projects. My work helps clients connect emotionally to others by capturing those subtle nuanced moments that help tell their stories.

When it comes to accomplishments there are several that stick out to me! On the short list, getting to capture the cast of the show Superior Donuts back in the summer of 2016 which included Katey Sagal and Judd Hirsch, photographing the concert of one of my favorite musical artists, getting asked by National Geographic and The New York Times to capture work for them, and documenting the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

When people see me and my brand, I want people to understand how much I care about the work that I do, that I’m willing to think outside the box using my influences to bring something new to the table, that I’m open to traveling for work and that community is important to me.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I think that NFTs, or non-fungible tokens for those who don’t know, can be very useful if we can divorce the idea that a NFT is a profile picture of an ape, or that the tech is just a get rich quick scheme. The blockchain technology that powers NFTs can be applied for so many use cases.

One example that I’ve heard is medical records – having all your medical information in a NFT that can be shared between doctors without having to start over from scratch every time you have to meet a new doctor. Sharing car titles and other important documents that hold value with people as we buy and sell things on the blockchain means that since the network is decentralized, if one point were to fail, there are thousands of other encrypted points that can verify that a transaction did happen.

The other big example I’ve witnessed firsthand is seeing traditional artists – photographers, painters, illustrators – create work that couldn’t be made otherwise. This allows them the ability to create work that both makes them happy as well as their audiences, and reward those audiences with access to exclusive perks, like early access to new releases, or access to private communities.

NFTs can be incredibly useful but there are some hurdles that we’ll have to get past first.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Like many businesses, the Covid-19 Pandemic in 2020 completely caused the world to shut down. I had been booked to cover performances at SXSW that year and had a whole spring of client work that just evaporated instantly. During that time that we were still figuring out how the virus spread, no one was hiring for assignments. I found myself signing up for the organization Diversify Photo and in the summer, started to do photojournalism assignments, which meant learning a new way of post-processing my work, both for speed and captioning. It lead to more and more work and it’s allowed me to grow more about how I compose my work and making use of available space.

Contact Info:

• Website: creeseworks.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/creeseworks
• Facebook: facebook.com/creeseworks
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophercreese/
• Twitter: twitter.com/creeseworks
• Youtube: youtube.com/creeseworks