Earlier this year I interviewed Rogers Park resident Chad Leverenz on WCPT-AM about the school photography business. Here is an edited and expanded version of that interview:

Eric Zorn: Chad Leverenz is an independent photographer. He shoots events and family portraits, working in the studio and on site. The aspect of his work that particularly intrigues me, though, is that he does school pictures, those annual images — usually taken in the gym or the auditorium — that parents can buy. You know, 8X10, 5X7, wallet size.

I’m intrigued by this because school portraits seem like the kind of thing that technology would have eclipsed. After all, last November, the Pew Research Center reported that 97% of adults in the age bracket where you find most parents — 30 to 49 —- own smartphones, meaning that they’re carrying high quality cameras with them nearly all the time. And wallet size? Who carries photos in their wallet anymore? You just pass your phone around if you want to show pictures of your family.

But there remains something enduring about the tradition of school photos; of these images of children captured exactly one year apart, year after year, in roughly the same pose. My kids are grown. We have literally thousands of photos of them. But we bought and kept and still cherish these yearly school photos showing them emerging steadily from the cocoon of youth.

So what’s that business like in 2025? How do you get hired? How do you compete against big photo? What’s a day in the life of a school portrait photographer like?

Here with at least some of the answers is Chad Levernez of Chad Leverenz photography in Chicago. Let me start this conversation by noting that the Guardian took an online poll a while back and, out of about 400 respondents, 69% said they always buy school pictures, and 26% said sometimes. So, Chad, is that similar to what you find in your work?

Chad Leverenz : Increasingly, yes. That percentage has been growing over the years, and I get a great response, although your intro has me worried about my entire business model.

EZ: I can imagine. When I was in school in the ‘60s and ‘70s, very few parents had decent cameras and those who did have decent cameras didn’t take many pictures because printing was costly and usually resulted in a raft of mediocre snapshots along with one or two keepers. Think of all the pictures you’ve deleted quickly on your phone because someone’s eyes were closed or they were making a weird face. School pictures were the only ones where the kids were well lit, had their eyes open and were perhaps even smiling. There were necessary keepsakes. But now things are different.

CL: Yes, Because of the ubiquity of these little supercomputers in our pockets, most people now have zillions of photos of their kids. And the school-picture space has been almost completely taken over by huge companies that provide what are usually charmingly awful portraits. Where I’ve found an opening is in creating rapport with the students and documenting the process of getting to a smile — most of the time, not always. But always trying for a beautiful studio quality picture that isn’t too staged and doesn’t feel phony. Then I’m able to deliver lots of options to parents — like, up to eight pictures to choose from. Authentically imperfect and well-lit portraits of the actual child parents know and love – sell.

There can be tension between the desire of school administrators for speed, reliability, access to all of the photos, and the ability of their photographer to work with yearbook companies and the parents, who just want beautiful pictures of their kids. The large companies do an excellent job courting administrators. Now I don’t mean to imply that efficiency and effective bureaucracy aren’t important. They most certainly are. But over time I’ve learned to balance efficiency and the need to foster a free wheeling and fun environment for the students. I lead with a human face and edit like a machine.

EZ: What does a day look like when you’re going to a school? What do you bring with you? How many assistants do you have?

CL: The biggest school I now do pictures for is Peirce Elementary in Andersonville with an enrollment of nearly 1,100 students. I started working for them in 2023. Up until then, I was doing mostly smaller preschools. And I love taking pictures of little, little kids, but Peirce is pre-K through 8th grade. I go in insanely early to set up, and I work with one other photographer, who happens to be related to me, just a coincidence. She just happens to be my 23-year-old daughter. And she’s fantastic with the students. 

EZ: What were the odds?

CL: I know, it’s weird. But, she was the best person for the job. In my family. But that’s how it happened. We’re a two-person show, not counting the parents who help us out and the teachers whose entire days are thrown into chaos to help make this happen. First, I get all my bases covered technically with the lighting, then we’re free to work with the kids, trying to build rapport of some sort with each of them. 

Each set has a backdrop, three strobe lights, a reflector. We use full-frame mirrorless Nikons and 85mm lenses. The fixed focal length lenses help maintain the correct framing. We don’t use tripods. We’re both on rolling stools because we need to be able to move — we don’t want the student to fit themselves to the environment any more than is necessary. The environment — all of the artifice, everything, ought to serve the portrait, the child. So, we wheel ourselves in. We say hello. We comfort and kid.

None of this begins to address the actual logistical nightmare of making certain we know who we’re taking a picture of. Who they are. Who their teacher is. How we will get the right photos to the right families. We use an extremely clever bit of hardware/software to sort most of this right when the photo is taken. We have all of the necessary data in a spreadsheet. My computer tells my camera how to tag each photo via bluetooth. So, when the photo is taken, my camera knows who that child is. Sort of.

EZ: How much time do you spend with an individual child?

CL: One or two minutes. I don’t pose them. I don’t ask them to smile, because no one smiles naturally when you ask them to smile. Instead they perform an approximation of a smile that nobody really wants to see. Parents want to see a genuine smile. Or they want to see a picture of their child doing that thing that usually only they get to see in the privacy of their home; that weird, idiosyncratic expression that their particular child has.  It requires a lot of   improv on my part to get that to happen.

EZ: So all this in the familiar context of a backdrop, lights, a stool and line of kids waiting?

CL: Yes. My lighting setup is pretty elaborate so that my photos stand out in terms of quality, Because, as you pointed out, most people already have hundreds or thousands of pictures of their kids. And it’s not just the lighting that has to be special — I also want them to stand out in intangible ways because of how I’ve connected with the kids.

EZ: Do you have conversations with each child? Do you talk to them? Do they talk to you? What do you say to make it work? 

CL:  So one of the things that’s always fascinated me in photography — and probably why I gravitated towards taking pictures of children — is that most people are uncomfortable in front of a camera. It’s a very phony situation,full of artifice. So photographers will say “Just smile … no, no, do your real smile, not that smile, your natural smile.” But that’s not how people work. For people to feel comfortable and really show their true faces, they have to feel free to hide a little bit. They have to feel safe. And so what I like to do — and this works for almost every age group — is to draw attention to the awkwardness of the situation by having little things that I say over and over again, just to break the ice, like, “OK, look at me and say, ‘Oh my God, I’m so uncomfortable.’” Because most people in that situation are uncomfortable , and I know they’re uncomfortable. And when I have them say it, it sort of breaks down the awkwardness and I’ll get a real smile right then.

And of course it doesn’t always go well. Last year I photographed a 7th grader who was super annoyed with my entire process. I was working with his classmate, and he was behind me saying, “Oh my God. Just take the picture. Come on.” There was mild cursing involved. Him, not me. He wanted me to work really fast, the way the big companies do. So when it was his turn I said something like, “I truly do understand how annoying I am. Give me the smile you want me to have or not have. I won’t torture you with my business model.” And, this kid…he gave me a big fake smile, right? That’s fine. But, I took a chance and said, “You have a beautiful fake smile.” The kid laughed.He asked me not to use the photos with a real smile. I may or may not have respected his wish. I can’t remember.

EZ How many shots do you fire off during this process when you’re waiting for that perfect moment? 

CL: Maybe up to 15 images. I don’t want to miss anything.

EZ: Wow. Just doing the math here, that’s more than 15,000 images at just that one school; 15,000 photos to go through to figure out which ones you want to show to parents.How do you go through that many pictures of that many kids without going nuts? What are you looking for?

CL: Well I’ve not yet pulled the trigger on letting AI go through my pictures and deciding which are good. I don’t doubt that AI could help me in the process of figuring out which pictures are best in focus and which pictures are the kids actually looking at the camera, stuff like that. But there’s occasionally a photo that no algorithm would catch that is special. It’s not maybe technically a good picture, or something that a parent would even know to ask for or want, but when they see it they’re like, “Oh, that’s something special.” And so I literally go through every photo, every single photo, one by one, and I try to narrow it down to five pictures to let the parents choose from. So this is the other thing that I do that larger companies don’t do, is I like to give parents a lot to choose from. I stress in my marketing materials that I’m documenting this process of getting to a smile, if we get to a smile at all. So, it’s not that hard to do, because where AI really does help with programs like Photoshop and Lightroom, as every photographer working now knows, is that it can do blanket edits really quickly — even very specific blanket edits like lightly changing the background in every photo, or adjusting the exposure of only the subject in the photo. Stuff like that.

Going through thousands of images is a massive job. It requires a zen-like, nearly unconscious flow. I can’t deeply scrutinize every image. I have to just listen to my gut. “Yes, yes, no, no, yes, no …” The only question is, do I like the picture? And I can’t question the choice my fingers make. My fingers decide the fate of the photo.I occupy my conscious mind by listening to lifetime movies and podcasts and such. Once I have three to five images of each student, I use AI to crop the images based on the location of their eyes. I use AI to add a light radial gradient to the background without changing the look of the subject. I apply broad stroke edits to the balance of color, light, and shadow to make the photos feel as if they all exist in the same world. Which, of course, they do. 

Once the photos are edited, I upload them to the site I use for hosting and commerce. The site is able to read the tagged student information on each photo and connect those photos to parents and families who might be interested in buying the pictures.

EZ: Big companies that have moved into the space like Shutterfly, which bought out LifeTouch. You say they take one or two pictures and, and that’s about it.

CL: That’s what you get. Yeah.

Eric Zorn: So when you’re hired by a school, do they simply provide the space and the contact information for parents, or is it a revenue sharing situation so the school makes a little money by charging you for access to that market?

CL: For some companies there’s a revenue sharing arrangement, but I haven’t done that. What the school gets when it works with me is beautiful pictures, happy parents, a smooth process and copies of all the photos — teachers, staff and so on — that they can use for their purposes, such as yearbooks.

EZ: How did you get into this in the first place? Did you study photography in school? Were you trained as a photographer? 

CL: I studied philosophy in college, so naturally at some point I became desperate to make money, as philosophizing wasn’t really paying the bills. So I when my daughter Scout was born — the daughter who now works for me — I started taking pictures of her, like a good dad. And I found that it transported me, and it helped me. Having a camera between me and the world made me look at the world like a new person like I hadn’t seen it before. Maybe more like my child was seeing it.

EZ: Let’s go back a little further. Where are you from? What did your folks do?

CL: I grew up in Hamlin, New York. It’s a little farming community on Lake Ontario outside of Rochester. My family was very religious. I tried to be. I’m the oldest of 6. I tried very hard to believe what was required and to be a good big brother. I entered a pre-seminary program at Concordia, New York, a small Lutheran college in Bronxville, NY. I was very quickly seduced into a love affair with art, poetry, music and New York City itself. It was actually a really difficult period for me. I wanted to embrace the mystery of the world, not study metaphysical certainties.

I transferred to SUNY Geneseo and studied philosophy. After Heidegger’s “Being and Time” broke me  —  which is my face saving way of saying I didn’t graduate — I worked as a musician and performer. I moved a lot. I traveled a lot. I played guitar, wrote music for myself and others, and sang on street corners and in bars and cafes – – in New York City, Boston, Tucson, Philadelphia. I slept outdoors a lot. This is what I was doing when I met my first wife. We met at a Pizzeria Uno in Greensboro, North Carolina. I was performing and she was doing honest work there. 

Up until this point I have sort of let you assume that Scout is my first child. The beautiful and painful truth is that we welcomed Emma into the world well before Scout arrived. Emma had Down Syndrome — this was a shock, but not tragic. Sadly, Emma also had a defect in her lungs, making the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide impossible. She lived for two weeks. We had to let her go. This changed my emotional landscape.

We moved to Philadelphia for a fresh start. But music became impossible for me. It was too close, emotionally.. There was just nowhere to hide when I was singing. I had always actually loved that about performing. But, I couldn’t do that anymore. Not then. So I started working at a Starbucks, mostly for the health insurance. And that’s what I was doing when Scout was born. 

EZ: So you decided to become a photographer based on the experience of taking pictures of Scout?

CL: Yes. She was learning how to walk, and we would go out and walk around the art museum area in Philadelphia, where I lived at the time. And I realized that I was so absorbed in my new passion that I had to actually tether her to me physically. I had to tie her to my belt so she wouldn’t wander away, because I would lose myself in this process. When I was looking through the camera lens I felt invisible, weightless, as though I was wearing a mask that relieved me of being myself and allowed me to move in and out of society as I saw fit. I was excited and possessed by this new way of experiencing the world. 

I bought a computer for the first time, and I got a digital camera and started taking pictures for charity events at Starbucks, then I started taking pictures of people and of pets and, weirdly, grasses.  My first serious foray into being a professional photographer was taking pictures of children and their beloved objects, their blankies and snuggleables and their stuffed animals and whatnot. This project really resonated with people and with me. It was, for me, really focused on the masks that we wear. The mask we wear that, paradoxically, free us to reveal ourselves. This is what children do with their beloved objects. This is what I was doing with my camera.

EZ: Was this a service that you advertised? Did you do it just for friends? How did that hobby become a job?

CL: It just kind of snowballed. I started doing it in earnest after our second daughter, LIly, was born and we moved to Chicago, my then-wife’s hometown. She pursued teaching. I was home with Scout and Lily, still taking photos, but not professionally. Then about 15 years ago I went on social media to say “I will come to your house and set up a little studio, and I’ll take pictures of your child for free. Then if you like the photos, you can buy them.” 

 I continue to use that model for family portraits. I do lots of free family portrait sessions on weekends throughout the year. The idea is, if you have little children, you know that on any given day there is no guarantee that your child is going to be willing to wear pants or clean their face or even leave the house. And if you have paid up front for a photo session, iit might be a disaster — a big waste of money. So I like this model of the shoot itself being free, in part because it puts the onus on me to do a great job and create pictures that they can’t stand to not buy.

EZ: I’ve seen some of those at your website and they are not your standard Christmas card photos of families. They are beautiful and clever pictures in which the families look relaxed and happy. 

CL: It works tremendously well. And we have so many beautiful public places in Chicago where I can do this. The families show up. They’re not stressed because they haven’t spent money on the session in advance And I like to think of it as an opportunity  for  an experiment in family portraiture. They can do whatever they want. They can have fun because they’re relaxed, and I honestly can’t think of a time when it didn’t go pretty darn well. I can’t believe how often people just buy all the photos.

EZ: It sounds to me like success for a photographer doing the kind of work you do is as much about personality as it is about technical expertise. I mean, there’s certainly, obviously a lot of technical aspects to it, but the real skill of a good photographer is to relax subjects, to connect with them and catch them as who they really are. So we have just a moment or two left here. But I understand that you actually met your second wife through school portrait photography. Can you tell that story?

CL: Yes. It had become clear that my then-partner and I wanted different things and we split up, but we remained friends. In fact, when she remarried I took photos at the ceremony. Anyway, after the divorce I’d gotten a job with a photo studio that did school pictures. I was assisting another photographer at Families Together Cooperative Nursery School on the North Side and one of the teachers, Mary, was bringing the kids in to have them photographed. Usually a parent would do that, but the stars and fates aligned and Mary had to do it. We started talking, and I started asking her questions about the building, being a teacher, her favorite synoptic gospel – – she wasn’t religious. She was my dream person. After the shoot, at the end of the day, she offered to help me pack up my car. One of us did some serious flirting. Now we have two kids together! Gus and Ida.

EZ: Great story and a nice little benefit, a perk of being a school photographer. What’s coming up for you in terms of school photography? Is it mostly a fall thing? 

CL: Mostly, but not entirely. Yeah, the fall is crazy. And then there are always graduation photos coming up in February.  Also, some schools do portraits in the spring too. So there’s always stuff going on with schools. I’ll have family portraits coming up in the spring, and before then, I’m setting up a headshot session, like studio portraits, just for headshot purposes, like for LinkedIn and whatnot.

EZ: Cool. And people who want to know more and see your work should go to chadleverenz.com or check out your TikTok page which features amusing videos