“APPARATUS was born out of necessity,” the design studio’s artistic director, Gabriel Hendifar, remembers. Like many a connoisseur, Hendifar was disappointed by the home decor options on the market when he was shopping for his new Los Angeles apartment just over a decade ago. Unlike his frustrated peers, however, he took it upon himself to start a company that would rectify the problem.

Let’s strip all of those things away and focus on the people.

Gabriel Hendifar

APPARATUS came onto the scene in 2012 with a selection of tasteful and moody lighting—still the backbone of its offerings—before expanding into furniture and objects of a similar tenor. Most recently, the studio released an expanded modular line of its popular Cylinder lights. Instead of functioning as “the jewelry of the room,” as Hendifar characterizes his other statement pieces, the Cylinder serves to draw the eye to a desired focal point. In Hendifar’s home, the beacon is currently pointed on a few statues, but his focus frequently shifts.

The term ‘photography’ literally means ‘to draw with light.’ My craft, whether through photography or film, is to bend and capture light, weaving narratives in its glow. Without light, we are left unable to tell a visual tale; the eye—human or otherwise— would lose its purpose.

Matthew Placek

“I’ve always been a tinkerer,” he says casually of his foray into the world of home design. Instead of formal training, Hendifar’s preparation came from studying costume design at UCLA and working for womenswear designers like Raquel Allegra, as well as from being raised by a machinist and entrepreneur father. The question, he reasons, was always, “How do I turn this idea into a thing?”

The solution, as Hendifar sees it, is in the individuals you surround yourself with. As such, APPARATUS has enlisted a coterie of 19 frequent collaborators and friends of the studio over the years, many of whom appear in the company’s new Cylinder project. The sleek, talent-heavy shoot was a departure for the brand: “Rather than doing what we traditionally do, which is to lean into fantasy world-building … we said, ‘Let’s strip all of those things away and focus on the people,’” he explains.

The same set and cast, lit from above by a constellation of Cylinders, were shot to extraordinarily different effect by two photographers, Matthew Placek and Dina Litovsky—living proof of the power of perspective. Among the stars are Metropolitan Opera conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who uses APPARATUS to light his Steinway; model Debra Shaw, of whom Hendifar has been a lifelong fan; and cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond, who has performed at a number of the company’s events, as well as writer Camille Okhio, nightlife star Dianne Brill, and design dealers Joel and Bianca Chen.

Portraits start getting interesting when they ask more questions than they answer, when they hint at a story rather than reveal it.

Dina Litovsky

“My hope is that people see this [project] as a celebration of humanity and of vulnerability, particularly in a moment where it feels like the world at large is rolling in a direction that is terrifying,” says Hendifar. “The things I cling to are the community around me and a certain responsibility to be the custodian of beauty. I hope that, by connection, people see that as the goal of the studio. Ultimately, we make things that we hope people want to live with.”

I wanted to exploit the malleability of light here, pushing the aesthetic limits to create portraits that were beautiful as well as disorienting and strange. Light helped me to decontextualize the scene, displacing subjects from their physical environment while keeping some elements to ground the viewer. Light became a paintbrush for a colorful fever dream that I wanted these photos to be.

Dina Litovsky