Featured Project · Financial Services

TIAA / Nuveen

Who
TIAA and Nuveen, two of the most established names in global financial services, with executives and employees across a large national footprint.
Goal
My goal was to create consistent, high quality imagery while helping individuals at every level of an enormous organization feel recognized as individuals, beyond simply being documented.
Outcome
Over a thirteen year relationship, I have created thousands of employee headshots and executive portraits, covered major conferences and national events, and built a visual record of two institutions becoming one.

Since 2012 | Financial Services | Events, Executive Branding, Group Portraits, Headshots

Some relationships reveal themselves slowly. For me, this one began with something as ordinary as employee headshots at Nuveen's Chicago headquarters: a simple assignment, modestly lit, quietly executed. Without quite realizing it yet, I was laying the foundation for thirteen years of trust with two of the most storied names in financial services.

(www.BenRosePhotography.com)
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As Nuveen’s needs grew, so did the scope of my work. I photographed precious artifacts from the corporate archive for an annual report. Following TIAA’s acquisition of Nuveen in 2014, a much larger question emerged and became increasingly important: how could I help tens of thousands of people across a merged global institution feel recognized, not just documented?

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(www.BenRosePhotography.com)
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That question has shaped my work ever since. I have created executive portraits of CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett across all five Executive Operating Council meetings, a portrait of CEO Bill Huffman commissioned for Nikkei Magazine, and thousands of individual headshots for staff across Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Charlotte. With each portrait, I work to make a single person feel seen inside an organization of enormous scale. The event work has given me a level of access I deeply value. I have photographed all three of Nuveen's marquee nPowered conferences in New York, with rooms that included George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, David Rubenstein, Karl Rove, and David Axelrod; national and global sales meetings; CEO events in New York, Atlanta, Boston, and Washington, D.C.; and Nuveen's Leaders in Lifetime Income series held across the country.

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What started as headshots became something closer to a visual memory of two institutions becoming one, told one recognizable person at a time.

(www.BenRosePhotography.com)
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All work