STYLE is about personality,You can't help but be stylish. Joe Boggess, stylist

The Fashion Connection
While they share a background in the fashion industry, (the names Valentino and Ungaro slip easily off Joe's tongue) he met Rick Guidotti right as Rick was transitioning over to photographing the genetics community . Joe still very much inhabits the fashion world, speaking over the phone fresh from another photo shoot where he had to exercise his artistry within the constraints of a designer's vision. "I take the clothes chosen by a designer and make the models look like they belong in them," he explains. While Joe may not be center stage, his makeup is, appearing in international ad campaigns and in his own makeup campaigns designed for a Korean cosmetics line.

A Stylist's Perspective Joe looks at a person's face shape and considers how he can use hair, makeup and color to help define it, but he also displays an uncanny ability to grasp someone's personality after a few moments of talking to them. Whether he's designing makeup for a Broadway performer or a model, Joe says the person sitting in his chair comes away satisfied because they feel he sees "not just the look but their own individual beauty."

Christine, PE's first model

Valerie, from the People's Genome Exhibit

This individual approach to discovering beauty made Joe a perfect stylist for Positive Exposure. "I immediately grasped the aesthetic that Rick was going for," he remembers. He also vividly recalls the skin of Christine, that first model 11 years ago.   Joe is a man that knows skin: he can immediately discern between a film and a digital camera print by the way it renders the human surface.  "I still remember seeing her face for the first time," he said. "Her skin was gorgeous."

Learning from Positive Exposure Joe styled several more Positive Exposure photo shoots but considers one to a be a turning point for himself and for the organization. "Valerie epitomizes Positive Exposure. Here was a girl who had had so many surgeries at age 8 that she had a road map of scars limiting her facial expressions. But she had this miraculous ability to still be a child. She was very much in the moment, wanting the shoot to be about who she was.

"That day I saw Rick creating a certain level of joy that turns on who the person is, and what they have to give.  Because people always have joy to offer. I learned the notion of what beauty was through that little girl and that photo shoot. Rick had just figured out a way to make that beauty accessible."

M: Singer and PE supporter

M: Creating a Stage Persona Positive Exposure also introduced him to M, the phenomenal singer and creator of the contemporary opera, "Madwoman."  He was so captivated by her unique presence that Joe has become M's personal stylist for her performances. "You can't miss M's beauty," he said. "She is absolutely stunning, physically, but she also has an energy that makes her radiant. I know her face so well, but still every time I see her walking down the street, wearing her signature sunglasses or wrapped in a pale chiffon dress, I go, 'Wow!'"

It's Joe's job to make sure that the "Wow!" from the woman and her music is transmitted by her onstage look to the audience. "She has many moods," he says of the versatile singer whose six-octave range lends itself as easily to blues as it does to soul. "I've dressed her for jazz which was just a gown, earrings and flower in her hair. For Madwoman I'm making her up to be a mythical character that was driven mad by her questions about life and love. She answers these questions through her music, but I have to create a mystical persona."

How he does this seems to involve a little mysticism on his part.  "It's all about how I connect the dots. If dots were the constellations or the curve of her cheekbones or the arch of her brow, within that I create my own shapes using a line or a shadow."  Whether he gives her Greta Garbo eyes for a show or creates a look reminiscent of a samurai, Joe says, "I'm not styling according to her albinism, I'm styling according to her music."

The Gentle Side of Fashion Meeting Joe is to experience the fashion industry without the "industry"; his talent is to discover the personality that is already there in a person, strengths all of us possess. "You can't keep me away from beauty," he says. "I do what I do because once the person sitting there, it becomes about my vision and the beauty I see." Somehow it's nice to know that there are people like Joe out there, lending their style insight to the photographs that eventually arrive to us as fashion gospel. It's a task that's just as glamorous as it sounds, Joe admits. "It's a fantastic job, by the way."