Nicholas Duers is a commercial still-life photographer based in New York City, where he has run his own studio since 2007. His work has been commissioned by Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren, Harry Winston, David Yurman, Netflix, Adidas/Y3, Roberto Coin, Oscar Heyman, and V Magazine, among others. He holds a degree in Advertising Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. His interest in photography began from a fine art perspective. Studying at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, he was profoundly influenced by masters of abstraction like Minor White and Aaron Siskind, and by the way their work could take an object seen a hundred times and show it to you in a way that made you look again, and linger. Seeing that work led him first toward architecture, drawn to buildings as a subject in their own right. It was only later that he recognized what the abstractionists had actually solved: how to make a viewer stop, look again, and consider something they'd otherwise pass by. He began to see that same problem at the center of advertising, a photograph's job there is also to make someone pause and look twice. That recognition is what moved him into studio photography and commercial work, a practical way to keep working on the same problem while building a career. Twenty years on, still-life work for commercial clients has become his primary discipline, but the underlying interest hasn't changed. He continues to work from that same approach, tempered now by two decades in the studio: that a photograph's job is to make a viewer pause. In recent years that approach has pulled him back toward architecture, and outward into the Arctic landscape, balancing the controlled environment of the studio with the open, variable conditions of the field. He sees it as a way to keep developing and growing, working under conditions that shift and resist repetition, while still aiming for the same aesthetic and impact that defines his studio work. He lives and works in New York City.