People
Asher Lara Would Rather You See the Stumble
The creator sits very still for his portraits. His work prizes everything a portrait leaves out.
In one portrait published this year, Asher Lara sits on a carved green velvet settee between two vintage studio lamps. Black jacket, white T-shirt, black trousers. Hands folded between his knees. He looks straight into the lens and doesn't smile.
In another he leans back on a ribbed black leather sofa against heavy gray curtains. One arm runs along the cushion. His legs are crossed, and a white sneaker sole catches the light. He looks off to the side, as if someone just called his name.
Every surface in these pictures was chosen. That's a little funny, because the 8.5 million people who subscribe to his YouTube channel did not show up for careful.
Lara is 21 and lives in Beverly Hills. He runs an agency called Iconify Media, and the idea he sells there is the opposite of what the portraits show. A contributor profile on Paste's site put it plainly. Authenticity outperforms perfection. Speed matters more than overproduction.
On screen, that means small things. A profile on Nylon's site called them human tells. A stumble left in. A laugh nobody planned. A story so specific it would sound strange coming from anyone else. The machinery is there too, the hooks and posting schedules, but it stays out of frame.
He got here slowly. At 16 he posted every day for a year, and almost nobody watched.
"I just kept posting, praying it would work, and trusting that something would eventually click even when it felt like I was talking to nobody," he has said.
That year doesn't appear anywhere in the portraits.
Lara keeps two versions of himself on purpose. On Coffeez, a business podcast hosted by mortgage executive Joseph Shalaby, he said his personal accounts should stay about him and his lifestyle, because that is what keeps the brand deals coming. Iconify, he said, should be a thing by itself.
So there is the creator, whose own feed earns through brand deals and works as portfolio, lookbook and résumé at once. And there is the founder, who sells a method to other people. His first client was Shalaby, a mortgage broker. Lara says he grew his most recent client's YouTube channel from 20,000 to 100,000 subscribers in two months. If his plans hold, cafés and restaurants come next, places where the person behind the espresso machine is usually the whole brand.
It's hard to say which Lara is sitting on the green settee. Maybe both.
In the Paste photograph, he stands behind the settee instead of sitting on it. Its carved back fills the bottom of the frame like a headboard. He rests his folded hands on top and waits for the shutter.