Nucleus Imaging 36 E. 30th St. New York, NY 10016 Phone: (212) 213-4455 Fax: (212) 213-4556 www.nucleusimaging.com	HOURLY RATES: Most priced by job; otherwise, price is$300/hr. PRIMARY EQUIPMENT: Mac-based G4s, dual processors and beyond; Hell 3900 drum scanner; Photoshop 7.0; for output, three-color prints on Fujix, four-color match prints, digital files direct to publications.	SPEED OF TURNAROUND: Depends on client needs—from a day to a week CONTACT FOR RETOUCHING SERVICES: George Dash, partner and operations manager OTHER PRINCIPALS: John Rosen, president/partner, John Grasso, production manager

NUCLEUS IMAGING

Nucleus Imaging’s New York office staffs five full-time retouchers, plus retains a couple freelancers for busy streaks and operates in double shifts. Known for its fashion and beauty work for advertising and editorial, Nucleus Imaging’s major clients include Estée Lauder, David Yurman jewelry, Lipman ad agency, Condé Nast and a number of publicists. Partner George Dash says the studio has also branched out recently into product retouching and now specializes in manipulating prototype product shots to make the product look like it’s off the shelf.

One of the studio’s highest-profile projects of late was the Phantom Towers, a.k.a. Tribute in Light, created as the cover image for The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, September 23, 2001. The image features twin towers of light beaming up from the Manhattan skyline where the World Trade Center used to stand, and ended up being a model for the actual art installation that marked the tragedy’s six-month anniversary.

The image was conceived by Manhattan-based artists Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, who were displaced by the terrorist attacks from the artist residency program of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, based in World Trade Center Tower One. The New York Times Magazine invited the artists to create a cover image, and they joined with Times photographer Fred Conrad, who provided the source photograph of the downtown Manhattan skyline at night.

LaVerdiere and Myoda then sat down with Nucleus retoucher Sharon Mathis, and together they digitally dodged and burned the photo to create the image. Dash said to position the twin lights correctly, they used an old image of the twin towers from roughly the same angle. Mathis also illustrated the reflection of the lights in the New York Harbor in the foreground.

The image took a full day’s work to create. “There was a lot of finessing; a lot of care was taken to make it look like they wanted it to,” Dash said.

Over subsequent months, LaVerdiere and Myoda worked with their partners at Creative Time, the New York-based nonprofit that funds and plans public art projects, to lobby for an actual memorial of light at the World Trade Center site. They succeeded: the art project was installed and unveiled on March 11, 2002, to mark the six-month anniversary of the tragedy; it remained through April 13, and received a lot of press.

Dash said the feedback has been all positive: “Usually, we’re making dresses fit tighter on skinny models. It’s not a regular occurrence to work on a project with socially redeeming value.”


Image created for the cover of The New York Times Magazine and shot by Fred Conrad.