LARA CALLAHAN

Makes you look hot

By COURTNEY COX

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"I'm gonna be sexy tonight," announces one party-person, primping for his turn in front of Lara Callahan's ring-shaped flashbulb.

It's So Dope's second night at dbar, and resident photographer Callahan is definitely the main draw. Popping out from behind the lens to straighten a collar or tease a cowlick, Callahan's transformed her corner of the bar into the party's photobooth with little more than a gold paisley backdrop and her Canon 5D, 24 and 105 lenses.

"It's hard sometimes," says the 19-year-old Wrentham, Mass., native, of what she calls the most challenging part of her job—soliciting subjects. "Sometimes you have to be sassy to them, and sometimes you have to be super nice. If you take the picture without them knowing, they get pissed. Then when you show them the picture, they start laughing."

With only a few months of practice, Callahan can charm the inner camera whore out of the most flash-phobic wallflower. She started out at Paper, shooting the party for a class project when she was a student at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. The Paper crew asked her back as resident photog, then she bounced to another club night, Compound, where party sponsor Red Bull snatched her up.

"I guess I've always had a niche for shooting people," Callahan says. "You put me in front a landscape, and I'm pretty bad at shooting that. But I can capture the emotion."

From a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, R.I., to parties like Duplex, FTW and Dancing on the Charles, her subjects range from Derby-celebrating socialites to "people with holes in the crotch of their pants." The Derby pics? Not on MySpace—but pictures like one of a "girl screaming, and you can see the string of spit from her mouth" are suspended in the "party pic" webscape—delighting (or haunting) clubbers for months to come.

"At the end of the party, the only thing left is photos and what happened that night, and a lot of people don't remember the night. You need the photos to be like, 'Oh my god, did I look good that night or did I look ridiculous?'"

Verdict according to one Callahan fanboy: "She can make me look like a supermodel."