See the Unseen with Studio Pi

An interview with Darren Sital-Singh

We spoke with Darren Sital-Singh of Studio Pi to understand how they differ from other agencies and the importance of their mission.

SEE THE UNSEEN. We are the award-winning artist management and production agency that promotes equality and celebrates diversity.

Q1: Can you tell us a little bit about Studio Pi?

Studio Pi is an artist management agency and a production agency as of this year.

Founded in 2020 by Sachini Imbuldeniya as a response to a government survey which had identified four groups in particular that were severely underrepresented across the creative industry. Those groups were: women, people of colour, those living with a disability and those from a working class background.

At the time Sachini actually fell into all four of those categories, so it clearly resonated with her and she decided that she wanted to do something about it. Having been a commissioner for many years, she had seen the same faces repeatedly put forward by agents or existing members of the team and felt there wasn’t any really a cycle of ‘newness’ for un-championed talent.

That was the premise of the agency. We launched in a pandemic so the first year has been tough. Essentially borne out of the idea that there needs to be more support for those who aren’t naturally privileged to become photographers and illustrators. Successful, commercially successful artists.

Almost anyone can pick up a phone and become a ‘photographer’ but to be a successful commercial photographer – there’s a huge, huge leap from that.

Sachini’s founding ideals are at the heart of Studio Pi -“…it’s the mission that keeps all of us here“. It’s a rare thing but as we grow a fledgling agency you “feel it in your heart, this is the right thing to be doing. The mission, the beliefs and values speak to me as an identity and as a person.

Q2: What are the main challenges in championing the underrepresented?

It’s twofold. Finding new talent – and that in itself is a challenge because while the mission is baked into the agency, from me in terms of how it speaks to me as an individual, as an ethnically diverse person, a person of colour – it’s still quite a challenge to find good talent because ultimately it has to be the right talent. There’s no point just having diverse talent if it’s not very good – then the reputation of the agency will die. So then you start to realise that there’s a genuine dearh of upcoming talent because of all the societal issues that they face in trying to become a professional photographer.

Even before that, if you’re from West African or Southeast Asian culture it’s very much focused on the sciences, on building definitive and demonstrative financial security. Whereas the arts in particular have always sort of been viewed with a certain level of suspicion. So it’s it is a challenge in terms of finding good talent with which to fill the roster and to build the agency’s reputation with.

Secondly is the challenge of finding them commissions.

Within industry – captains of industry, they do see there is an opportunity to change organisation and show ways in which it can benefit financially, but across a sector it’s quite difficult to unite, say 40 ad agencies into an agreement that more should be done.

Individually within their own organisations, yes, they will recognise the need to recruit more diverse talent, more women and actually we need to embrace the older generation because they are more experienced employees. They’ve learned so much, but where is that feeding back into the talent hunt? So there’s all those sorts of issues, but none of them really come together. And that’s why it’s interesting talking the AOP more to see how we might be able to try and unify that. When I’ve spoken to [agencies] in private for feedback, they’ve said, the reason why is because they’re all competitors and there isn’t anything that really unifies them in actually wanting to come together.

Because if you’ve got a more diverse workforce than say another big name agency, then you would perceived to be better at winning clients and retaining clients. So there’s that, competition element, it’s it doesn’t really seem to bring everybody together like there does maybe in in other industries .

So a big challenge is trying to communicate the need and I suppose the end product benefit to why you should have more diverse teams behind the camera, the artists, the production crew.

Again, when you talk about B to C there are lots of examples of where the black pound or the black audience has impact. Take Black Panther, for example, and the box office takings – there’s always a monetary value. At the end of that it goes, oh, that was a good decision in retrospect because it made this amount of money, but it’s very difficult.

Black Panther was a movement, because there hadn’t been anything like that before. There was full Hollywood scale commitment to it under a franchise that had already garnered a lot of momentum and interest. So it took on the challenge of speaking to an audience authentically, and that audience said, Yep, we’re going to pay our money and we’re going to watch that. Now you’ve got sequels, you’ve got spinoffs, you got Daniel Kaluuya, you’ve got Top Boy. There’s various other initiatives that are coming through. There’s a new film out called Woman King, which wouldn’t have been made 6-7 years ago. That’s an all female black cast with a couple of men thrown in for some, you know historical accuracy. But when they’re done authentically, they speak to an audience and that can output money.

When you’re talking to a creative, to a producer about why having a black photographer – if they’re shooting black talent is relevant, there’s nothing tangible at the end of it that really can demonstrably say why it is better. You’d almost need the talent and the photographer to come together in a sort of post event case study to say – I felt so much more myself or I felt like they understood me.

You get that with beauty. You can see what Rihanna has done with Fenty beauty. Even within the sale of tights and the understanding of how people of colour feel. Anything that’s around skin colour, there’s always a monetary output. That’s one thing I sort of struggle at the moment with – being able to communicate a real sort of non-negotiable power punch reason, because it doesn’t equate to money.

I think that’s where photography or any sort of visual art is sort of caught in between the business decisions. You need an audience over here that’s been decided then this is the strategy we’re going to take and this is where we put the media because it’s then going to generate X amount of consumers. But in here [ points to the middle] it’s all subjective.

I think that’s just one of our biggest challenges, because you can’t really can’t overcome subjective opinion because of the very nature of it. You can’t always get to the creatives who are making those decisions to have a conversation about why they see that, or to be able to offer some different perspective because the process is behind closed doors – and in fairness, if they invited every agent or every photographer to come join the conversation, but they wouldn’t get any work done.

But as we’ve been talking about the biggest challenges for Studio Pi, I’d say being able to have that conversation with as many people as possible without making people feel like they’ve done anything wrong. Bringing them on this journey so that they can understand that more can be done and should be done, and that they are in positions of power to actually affect this. And then therefore if you’re in a position of power, ask – what are you doing in your sphere of influence to make a difference?

And that becomes a really, really sensitive conversation to be had. So suddenly the pitch of the agency is at times uncomfortably aligned with society questions and you have to really judge when is the right time to have that discussion. So there have been certain individuals who have come running towards us saying ‘This is amazing. I think what you’re doing this great. Come on in, come in,’ and there are others where we are like, ‘can we come in and see you, can we come in?’ and just don’t know whether they’re ready to have that conversation or if they even want to hear that conversation.

Finding the right language and approach – that’s reflected in our sort of daily conversations about how across a platform, across a medium, as toneless as e-mail, we find the right way to encourage people to meet with us and start talking.

Encouraging those conversations, saying we can do this. This isn’t us accusing you or pointing a finger and saying you’re not doing enough. This is saying, listen – we recognised this, It was an actual government report. [Admittedly] government reports aren’t necessarily greeted that warmly, but this is something that’s indicative. You’ll see it in your own agency at the senior level, so let’s all work together. We’ve created this agency to make it easier for you to make some of these decisions, we just need more of those conversations.

Q3: So how do you find your talent? What are your methods?

At the start, it was an open call out, so Sachini just ran it across all of her channels and asked people to share it. She had been in the industry I think 14 years and so had a big network of people and contacts, lots of people who are willing to help her just by sharing this out. It was an open call out for a new agency that was going to be taking on artists from these four categories. I think she had something like 120-140 submissions that were then whittled down with her own creative eye and then through a blind judging process, so removing all recognition of names so to to eliminate as much bias as possible and then sent a reduced list to a number of her key contacts and influential commissioners toblind judge them and then rank them. Then she went and had I think near enough 100% success rate in hiring 10 photographers and illustrators.

So since then it’s evolved. We’ve chosen to probably move towards having a more commercial roster than originally, because that’s what we felt is the is the financial opportunity for growth for this business.

We currently have 14 illustrators, 15 styles, and 7 photographers. I’m sad to say that, we had a few that left us, I think launching in a pandemic probably didn’t necessarily set expectations straight from the very start. As an artist, you come on, you get represented, you’re like great, this can be amazing but that perhaps set against the very real challenges of trying to get commissions in a pandemic proved difficult. And not only that, it’s a brand new agency. So where’s the trust? You need to develop that and we are and are signing new artists very soon.

Now, such is the profile of the agency I probably now get five to six submissions a week. They’re not all relevant for our categories and they are not all of the calibre or experience that we would like and they’re not all offering something different. So, we’re probably rejecting a lot more than we are accepting, but that’s because we’re at the point now where we want to make sure that each of the artists is offering something slightly different, rather than say having 10 black and white portraiture artists, and then just hoping they fit. The aim isn’t necessarily to be a directory of talent. We wanted to be able to ensure that for these particular types of artists who are already finding it challenging, that they have support rather than just being part of something where it feels rather faceless and we might catch up with them infrequently.

The idea is that we’re there to try and support them. It places a lot more burden on the agents and myself to be there for them in the coaching and the management and the communication of it. It’s much more emotional. When they don’t win commissions, you feel a bit sick yourself, and when you do win, you feel like you’re on top of the world.

But our aim is to is to be a small agency so that we can actually start from a management perspective, to genuinely affect change.

Right now, yes, photographers come to us. But it’s awesome because we’re a small team, so when we get into a nice rhythm, I do expect the team to be, looking to Instagram, listening out to channels, attending things where we might be able to spot new talent because that that emphasis ultimately has to be on us. We can’t just expect people to come to us, because if you haven’t heard of us you wouldn’t come to us.

Q4: what does success look like to studio Pi?

Sachini and I in the long evenings after a few gin and tonics agreed that the idea of success was that ultimately there wouldn’t have to be an agency that has the mission that we have.

We called it utopia and ran an exhibition called Utopian that was centred on the idea that an agency like Studio Pi shouldn’t have to exist in a utopian world because everything is done on merit, it’s just a pure meritocracy. Wer’e so far from that, despite all the issues that are going on, Black History Month, levelling up, whatever initiative that you see – there are still huge amounts of imbalance with respect to privilege and opportunity. So I think a more realistic and sort of short term success is that we build a roster of working artists.

It’s the thing that keeps me awake at night around have we got enough and how they’re doing enough and are they busy enough? And obviously, if you’re an artist of worth, the answer probably never a yes. There are always more jobs that could that they could be doing, but at the moment I don’t think the roster is working as well as it could, given how talented we believe they are and the feedback that we get from people having seen their work.

So there’s this real sort of disconnect that becomes very, very frustrating. That leaves me puzzling from a business perspective. What is that missing link then?

If you take people in and you take them through the books and they go, ‘this is great work I love it, I love this, I love this.’ Then why isn’t that necessarily translating into real world opportunities for commissions? And we’re not talking £100,000 commissions or shooting the next Bond trailer.

We’re talking about £30 to 50k projects where they can really start to demonstrate what they’re capable of doing. We’ve had that for Madeline. We’ve had that for Ming Tang Evans. But yes, I think success is that we’ve got a commercially successful working roster. They’re working on interesting, exciting projects that maybe 20% of them go on to become almost recognisable names within the commercial industry that are being moved between ad agency to ad agency.

And then I guess the final point is that we’re also growing talent. We’ve been able to maybe work with the SCA or Brixton Finishing School, Central St. Martins, UCL or maybe Studio Pi has its own scholarship or apprenticeship and we’re able to bring talent through. Or working with AOP about how we do that. That that feels like almost a stage two, where we’ve got our business running, we’re pairing really nicely. Where we’re being considered in the same breath as the CLM ,that would be nice, as 40 year old businesses, bastions of US photography, but really are we making any change in terms of how easy it is to come into this industry and establish a career in it. I think that feels equally weighted, yet far more daunting, if that makes sense.

Q5: We have touched on it but what changes would you like to see in the industry and you have kind of touched on those.

As touched on in an earlier conversation, I’d like to see some genuine mandates to do something differently. I feel very fortunate to meet with clients, say, rather than ad agencies or editorial publishing teams, I get to meet with clients, with brands. And it’s a different type of conversation. It’s probably less admiration for the work that they’re seeing because they’re not experts being the CMO’s or the COOs.

But when you talk about the mission and they start to think about their own business and how that might link into their own marketing and comms, you see their mind whirring. You see how they’re going to do it and you can almost see them get stuck in terms of, I know we need to do this, but I can’t see how to it – until the term mandate comes out or quotas come out and then you see their eyes light up. ‘Yes, we should speak to our agency about how we should mandate something. We should put quotas in!’

Then we speak to the ad agency and they roll their eyes because they say ‘We’ve been putting in diverse talent for however many years. We do triple bids. At least one of them is going to come from this background, or that background etc. And the client always chooses this’ – and that’s where you end up getting this disconnect between what the client says they’re going to do and what the ad agency says they’re putting in front of the client, towards artist management saying, well, this is what I’m telling you that we see.

While I’ve never really been a fan of quotas, certainly not within business, because it would always make me feel uncertain and doubt my talents and my experience if I got hired because I knew that organisation had a quota. At the same time maybe I would be more senior than I currently am if there had been quotas in the organisations that I previously worked for.

So I think in the short term, they’re probably a necessary evil for want of a better frame, and it would help more talent get more opportunities, more quickly. But after that, you’d almost want them to disappear or dissipate, as it was about that talent coming through and that natural pipeline flowing, flowing effectively.

Now we come to the that word – risk. That’s the biggest thing we’re talking about. It feels at times a very risk averse set of decisions that are being made, in the process which is I suppose, if it was something we read in black and white, it wouldn’t feel very fair because there are creative concepts that are challenging the norm. There are people who are getting opportunities, but it’s not really led to a cascade of other opportunities that have come through.

The same with Black Panther. It’s not like there were a whole host of others films suddenly coming through. It still feels like a handful in four maybe even five years. It’s slow going, and so you get some trail blazers, but it isn’t blazing the trail for many others.

So I think, I think it is about risk and risk mitigation. I’d love to be able to speak in front of Adland and challenge them to identify, a threshold of risk in which they could take more, they could be more brave. There are clearly more projects or clients or budgets where more risk could be taken in the commissioning of new talent. And that’s massive for that talent to then be able to prove with a case study, that they did it, they excelled, they delivered and could then be commissioned and work again.

It feels like in the 10 months that I’ve been running Studio Pi that ‘snowball’ has been the word that’s been moved around so many times. As in, ‘It’s just a snowball effect. You just need one and then one leads to another’ and you’re like, OK, great, how do I get that one?

Challenging the industry does sound a bit hard and perhaps slightly antagonistic or aggressive, but working with them to identify where there could be more risk taken – and while risk can imply failure it’s also about reward and success, so if we viewed it with a half glass full perspective, where could we be?

Or change the word – from risk to chance – find a better word to make it more exciting, naturally exude more confidence and success than risk.

Taking a little extra risk is something that a lot more agencies could do but there is even more. I mentioned when we talked previously that when we talk about crews there’s lots of in front of camera diversity, to the point where obviously you’ve got many sort of forums on Facebook no doubt moaning about, same sex couples, mixed race families, etc. (to the point where sometimes I joke with my wife that I wonder when I’m going to see a white family on telly). It’s gotten to a point where it doesn’t feel natural. It feels very forced, deliberate and box ticking, but that’s an opportunity and we were seeing that development. But behind the camera I don’t think we’re seeing that. It still feels predominantly white crews. It’s probably still feels predominantly male crews. The Double The Line Pledge started in the US and is an initiative where on all production crews, they add another line so that so someone from an underprivileged or underrepresented background can have live experience of a shoot at minimal costs. It’s a one day shoot, a two day shoot, so you’re only talking about £6-700. It’s nothing in the grand scheme of when I’m sat there talking to a major brand – that’s absolutely nothing to them. As long as they knew that they are associated with something that is trying to find different ways to bring talent through. If we can find a way to raise awareness of this type of initiative here that would be great.

We talk about having a mission for the agency, but it doesn’t really mean anything until there is something tangible that comes from it, and we’ve been searching and searching about what’s the best way to do it achieve that. And I think ever since I met the US photographer who told me about pledge, albeit predominantly within production across theatre, TV and film and the mixing of units there – I think that’s easily feasible over here.

Q6: what three things would you recommend Commissioners / industry do to address this imbalance?

I think take more risks or however you want to phrase it, be braver, yeah, be braver with the commissioning of new talent.

I’d say be bolder in pushing for quotas from under-represented talent, so there are forced opportunities for them to experience live jobs and prove that they’re capable of doing it.

Lastly, if we’re talking about how this cascades into the iceberg that everybody sees in terms of representation in front of the camera, the adverts, praise for Sainsburys or Tesco campaigns etc and while we’re starting to think about behind the camera a lot more – these initiatives need to filter down to the rest of crew as well.