Category: Photographers

via, twitter.com/Cicerophoto

Frank Ockenfels is the kind of photographer who does everything well. From his black and white to his color; from passport photos to 4 x 5; photographing men and photographing women; it’s all equally good. He’s also the kind of guy you throw a really difficult assignment to because with all the different films and formats he’s bound to get something great.

I had the opportunity to talk with Frank because he’s got a show opening tomorrow at the Clark Oshin Gallery at the Icon (November 21, 2009 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m).

Rob: I want to go all the way back to the beginning. We don’t have to spend a lot of time there, but we have to go to the very beginning where it all started. Where did you grow up?

Frank: I grew up in Lockport, New York, which was a suburb of Niagara Falls. I had a bunch of friends who had darkrooms behind their refrigerators.

Rob: Behind their refrigerators?

Frank: Yeah, we all had these little corners down in the basements of all our houses in Lockport, and we’d go out and take pictures and whatever. Because we weren’t the popular kids, we’d photograph the cheerleaders, photograph the jocks, and do portraits and that kind of stuff. This is in junior high school but then high school too.

Rob: All right now we’re getting somewhere, I’ve not interviewed someone who started as the school photographer.

Frank: I wasn’t.

Rob: What?

Frank: I totally didn’t show my pictures to anybody. I was just trying to get the cheerleader into my friend’s rec room to try and take pictures of her in a bikini or something like that. Lasciviousness in every action and my friends were worse than I.

Rob: So, you guys were all friends, you all took pictures, you all had darkrooms, and you did it to get girls.

Frank: I loved taking pictures. I took whatever money I had, and built a darkroom in the basement. I would shoot girls, you weren’t cool, but at least you could talk to them. Then there was this photo contest at the end of my junior year in high school, before we hit senior year, and I submitted some work, and I won almost every prize. All of a sudden the guy who ran the yearbook said, “Who are you?”

Rob: [laughs] Good God! Who’s this kid?

Frank: “We haven’t used you? All this time you’ve been here in this school?” I’m like, “What do you want from me? Who are you people?”

I was a science major, failing out of high school pretty badly, not doing well and trying to not go to classes. So he turned to me and said, “If you’re the school photographer, A: We should make you an art major, and B: I can get you passes, and you can go wander the hallways all the time.” [laughs]

Rob: You’re like, “Whoa. Wait a minute.”

Frank: Where have you been all my life? So, Jack DiMaggio, who was my high school art teacher and ran the yearbook made a deal with me. If I shot for the yearbook, then he would help me get into college for photography, which was completely abstract to me. I was like, “What do you mean go to college for photography? What are you talking about?”

Rob: So you ended up being the yearbook photographer.

Frank: I was. My last year in High School, I was the yearbook photographer. He then got me a list of colleges, and I went around. Then I started asking my dad, who was in advertising in New York City…

Rob: Your dad was in advertising?

Frank: He worked for DuPont Textiles promoting Lycra/Spandex. He would hiring advertising agencies and that kind of stuff. I went to my dad, and said, “I want to do this.” He said, “I have friends in advertising. You should talk to them.” So, on my summer vacations, I went to see them for a week.

Rob: This is in New York City.

Frank: Yes, in New York I met a bunch of people, and they all said the same thing to me. They said, “Well, you’re looking at Cleveland School of Art, and PCA, and Eastman.” I didn’t have the grades to go to RIT. They said, “Have you thought about New York City at all, because, in all honesty, you should go to school in New York City. A: It’s where 90% of the industry is done,” over 20 years ago, “and B: The people you’re going to school with will be people you work with later on in life.”

So, I applied to the School of Visual Arts. That was in 1978.

Rob: So, you went to college there. How was it?

Frank: SVA was OK. I was working with professionals and it gave me an idea what was going on in the photo industry. We were living in New York City just living and breathing what’s happening in the city and the energy. There’s no campus. Campus at the School of Visual Arts is the streets.

Rob: It gave you a good reason to hang out in the city, which was probably very beneficial.

Frank: One of my fellow classmates in first and second year of college was Jodi Peckman. Jodi and I were photo students together. So my father’s whole thing of, “These are the people you’re going to be working for” came true. I remember this one night Jodi called and she goes, “I’ve got to do this favor for a friend, can you help me?” Andy Summers took all these pictures when he was on tour with The Police and he wants to make a bunch of prints, and I don’t know how to do that. Can you help me?” And she goes, “Andy’s going to call you.” And all of the sudden Andy calls me in my Hoboken apartment.

Rob: That’s funny.

Frank: He said, “Hey, I’ve got these negative and Jodi said you could help me out.” So I printed a bunch of pictures, just like really quick pictures. And I get this box of negatives and it’s naked pictures of Sting running down a hallway, which would never happen nowadays.

Cut to Jodi getting the job at “Rolling Stone” as the assistant to Laurie Kratochvil and Jim Franco. Then she hired me for my first real job, Buster Poindexter at the Beacon Theater on New Year’s Eve.

Rob: Did you get your first job right after you graduated then?

Frank: No. I came out of college and worked for a guy named Joshua Greene who was Milton Greene’s son. Milton was the main Marilyn Monroe photographer. Josh was completely nuts. Like insane. Wonderfully insane, and gave me all the reasons to be a photographer in life. I randomly worked for some other people, and I abstractedly came to Jeff Dunas, founder of the Palm Springs photo festival. He and Josh were my influences. They were the ones that made me want to be a photographer.

Rob: They mentored you.

Frank: Yeah, totally. My complete irreverence that anything can be done and there are no rules comes from Josh Greene. The passion of being a photographer came from Jeff and Josh.

They were both amazing characters to come across in my life, because they believed in photography and what it can do. They were both tremendous photographers and passionate. Beyond passionate. When they would take a great picture, they would jump up and down and scream.

Rob: That’s awesome.

Frank: Which was amazing. To be around someone like that as a kid just makes you want to do more.

Rob: The passion rubbed off, then.

Frank: Yes, because I was around enough of the other ones too that just were bitter.

Rob: [laughs] Back then? There were bitter photographers back then?

Frank: Yeah, lots of bitter ones.

Rob: So, you got your first job from Jodi.

Frank: I did a picture in Rolling Stone of Buster Poindexter, so she and Jim Franco hired me to shoot Tracy Chapman when her first album came out. Her album hit, so it went from a quarter page to a full page feature in Rolling Stone. All of a sudden, luckily, my phone started ringing. “Who the hell are you? How can you have a full page in Rolling Stone and no one knows who you are?” That’s where it started, and Sigma called.

Rob: So, the other magazines saw it. The other photo editors saw it.

Frank: Yeah, because Rolling Stone had that thing, back in the day. If you did a cover for Rolling Stone it was your license to kill at that point.

Frank: SO, I did the picture for Rolling Stone of Tracy Chapman and it was a full page. Daniel Roebuck called me from Onyx and asked me if I had representation. Then two other companies, I forgot, at the time, who they were, but Daniel’s name I knew the best.

I called Jodi up and said, “Who are these people?” She said, “They’re somebody you should talk to and the other one you should talk to is Jim Roehrig over at Outline.” I sent my book over to Carol LeFlufy who had just come to work there to start a representational division and run the NY office. She loved my work and had to convince Jim to take me on.

Rob: What did your book look like?

Frank: It was nothing. Little square black and white pictures. There were a few celebrities in it. Not much.

Rob: What were you shooting? What was your camera?

Frank: A friend of mine Jenni Rose had a model agency called Ice. It was an alternative modeling agency. They were trying to break the rules of what a model was supposed to look like. They didn’t want their promo cards to be done in a way that was like models. I met them one night when I was hanging out in a bar, and they said, “Shoot our models like you’re shooting people in rock and roll.” That kind of thing.

So, I would do these pictures, and put them in my book, and since no one knew who they were, I would say, “They’re musicians and actors and models.”

People would be like, “Wow, that’s really cool.” They’d seen their faces, but couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. I wasn’t shooting them in fashion clothing. I basically would hook up with the model and go wander around the streets and take pictures. I would randomly go to walk up to actors, if I could, or musicians, and say, “I would like to photograph you and could I do that?” And I got a pretty good response. So I was able to photograph quite a few people.

Rob: And the camera setup?

Frank: All these black and white square pictures were shot with a Hasselblad. Maybe one light. The whole first five years in my career was wandering around on my bike with a Norman 200b and a Hasselblad. I would just show up to photo shoots and go, “Here I am. I’m taking your picture now.” So it was kind of a funny thing.

Around that time also, I had in the past worked for Edie Baskin. She was the initial photo show photographer for Saturday Night Live and I assisted her off and on. And she came to me because she didn’t want to be the show photographer for Saturday Night Live, and she offered me the job to shoot the bumpers.

Rob: What are the bumpers?

Frank: When you go in and out of commercial there’s a photograph, that’s the bumper. They shoot those every single week. When I started they decided they wanted one to go out in the streets and get reality, which was kind of a disaster.

I started crawling out on the rooftops like the garden in the old NBC building, the gardens weren’t fixed up back then. They were over grown and desolate. So we would crawl out of the emergency window and up on this waist-level grass, on top of a building.

I’d take Keith Richards out on an old walkway in the upper building and try to shoot him outside. So they felt like they weren’t inside of a building. And it just got to a certain point where no matter how hard I worked at it, no one seemed to appreciate it. You were literally the most insignificant thing that happened every single week.

Rob: They were like, “Ah, great, that will work.”

Frank: Yeah, great. Why is there only one? [laughs] That kind of thing. I only lasted nine shows and quit at Christmas. I was the only photographer that ever quit the job, actually. But I hated it.

The only good thing was the two tickets I was given to the rehearsal for the show, because I handed them out to photo editors. That was actually a great thing. I would say, “Hey, do you want to come to Saturday Night live? I’m shooting for the show.”

Rob: I want to get at how you arrived at the collage style of photography and the journals?

Frank: I was always a big fan of Francis Bacon’s paintings, and much more of Robert Frank’s later work, his collage and how he’d do things with Polaroids. And I was really frustrated at the time that everything was the same.

I was in Lens and Repro one day. And I was kind of bitching and moaning to Jeff Kay the owner. He said, “Do you really want to try something different?” I’m like, “Yeah.” So, he said, “Well, you’ll either get this or you won’t get this. If you don’t understand it, then I don’t want to hear about it. You bought a camera, end of story.” And he handed me a Super D Graflex and said, “Go shoot with this.”

It sat on shelf for about three months before I picked it up. And I fully understood there was this thing about it. There was awareness to it. So, I started keeping notes on these pictures. And the notes turned into journals.

Around then I had a really bad breakup and spent a month making charcoal drawings out of anger. My apartment floor was covered in charcoal and my hands were always black. I kind of just kept on going with like, “What’s the next thing, because I’m bored.” You know what I mean. I love photography, and I love where it takes you, but there’s got to be something else here.

So, I started researching and looking around. I started going out and seeing more of painting exhibitions, because I felt photography was just becoming a little bit stale and no one knew where to go.

When I went to a painting exhibition of the old artists and you saw how they looked at light, I wanted that light more than I wanted the light of somebody else who was a photographer because I understood it more. That painter spent hours making that one little piece of light. Just that subtle gradation of light bringing you right to what he wants you to look at in the picture and then you look back into the shadows. I saw that more in paintings than I did in photography. And since I couldn’t really do that, I started doing more journals and keeping journals.

It was more writing at the beginning. And then I would start using more scattered ink pens and gluing things into the book. And, all of a sudden, I went through this whole thing where they were very, very overly done and now I’m back to the point where they’ve became much more simplified. Like these two elements is all I need to do to say what I need to say.

With the Polaroids, I started collaging the Polaroid together from the different Polaroid cameras I had. Every time I wanted to find something else, Jeff would find me another camera. He’d say to me, “Would you want to try this?” Or I’d go in and I’d see something on a shelf like there was this cast iron Passport Camera. So I bought that for, I don’t know, a hundred bucks. Every night I would going out and shoot with it. And just started shooting endless Polaroids.

Wheh I came back it was not what I wanted, so I started cutting them up. And I liked how the tape and the ink went against them. And I like that I can make them bigger or smaller or I can kind of recreate the energy of what just happened to pictures if someone didn’t give me enough. Actually, I found people do more, because they didn’t take it so seriously.

Rob: Because you’re shooting with a Passport camera?

Frank: Yeah. They’re like “What’s this?” and “What else you got?” And I go, “I have this plastic camera.” And they’d joke about it, “Can’t you afford a new camera?” And I was like, “No”. But the quality, people got that about it.

I think I was shooting Bon Jovi once, and I pulled the four by five out and I went to shoot with it and I was standing there and he goes, “Is this the camera you’re going to shoot us with?” And I’m like, “Yeah, why?” “I’m just going to shoot a couple pictures of you.” He’s said, “This is way too slow. I need to hear the wind of the motor. I need to hear it going. I need to get off on that.” I’m like, “OK.” So I put the camera down, picked up the one with the motor drive and go, “Are you ready to go? Here we go.”

Rob: You reached this point where you had this eclectic style of so many different formats. And then the journals and using tape and ink and all this kind of stuff.

Frank: And I wasn’t really presenting it to people to use. It was kind of one of those things that I was just shooting. Actually, I was directing a lot of the time too, when this all really kind of came to fruition, where it really started to happen more and more.

I kept minimal journals. I’ve done all the collages and painting and that kind of thing. But I hadn’t really taken that big leap of keeping big journals. I really got the rhythm of my journals when I started directing. Actually my very first director’s reel, was basically a barrage of imagery, using my journals.

At the time, M.T.V. was exploding and every company wanted to hire a photographer who knew the rock n’ roll world to use as a director.

Rob: So you start directing?

Frank: Yeah, I was out in Los Angeles for a job, and Carol setup a lunch with Stavros Merjos at HSI and he was flipping through my journal and he was like, “Dude you can totally do this, this is editing, this is putting things together, this is story telling.” He goes, “Take whatever money you need. If you need an editor a DP, video, you need film, you want sound tapes, I will pay for that. I will pay for you to go shoot something.” And so he did. He paid me to go make the initial piece that I had.

Rob: For your reel?

Frank: Yeah, something to show people that I can direct. Because at the time, when photographers wanted to become directors, what they would have to do is take your work, and you would do almost a Ken Burns kind of scene across your images. You would be playing and the camera would slowly pull across kind of like “Wheeeee.” And it wasn’t my thing. I hated it.

And so I went out and at the time my assistant in Los Angeles was a guy named Mark Schumacher. And he owned a movie camera and he wanted to be a DP. And so we went down to his loft got his camera and shot my journal. We just used the natural light coming in through the window in his loft. Then we ran around and shot some more pieces, so we would have some sort of storyline that would go with it, so it wouldn’t be just pages turning.

He said, “My friend Doug can cut it for us” a guy name Doug Walker. So we took it to him and Doug was nuts. He was one of the first editors to be irreverent in cutting things really fast in the early days.

Rob: The MTV cuts right?

Frank: Yeah, I fell headfirst into a bunch of great people and they made this piece that blew everybody’s mind. I would sit there with these people in the music industry that were working at labels and such, or for advertising. And they would look at the piece, and they’d go, “This is amazing, where did you get the photography from?” And I said it’s mine. And they go, “What do you mean it’s yours, do you own it?” And I go no, they are my pictures. “Oh you are a photographer, like a working photographer?” And I go yeah. And they go, “When was the last time you shot?”

Rob: Hilarious. How many music videos and how many commercials did you shoot?

Frank: I don’t know. I think I did 20-odd music videos and about 40 or 50 commercials.

Rob: Why and when did you move to California?

Frank: Let’s go backwards a bit because you were talking about how I started this whole thing. In the beginning when I was doing all the photography, I was just doing anything possible. I was shooting every – here you want a William Coupon? You want an Annie Leibovitz? You want a Deborah Feingold?

You just shoot things, because people ask you to shoot things, right? But every time I did a picture for them, what they were asking, I would make a conscious point of making an image that was 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

Rob: For you or for your journal?

Frank: For me. So it would be complete. So I started building these images up and people starting asking, as I carried this journal around, like “Hey, did you see Frank’s journal?” and go look through the journal. And people would sit and go through my journal. It was completely done with that whole irreverence, in the sense, I don’t care if you like my collage work or not. I don’t do it for you, I do it for myself.

Rob: But it ended up being part of your signature.

Frank: It happened when I suddenly realized I wasn’t happy in the direction I was going in. And I think it’s a struggle with every photographer, Rob, and when I’m teaching I come across it a lot, you have to find your voice. And I would say a lot of photographers, even famous photographers that are working non-stop now, don’t have a voice of their own. That was my struggle. It was the era where everyone had octabanks, and everyone was trying to be Annie. And everyone was shooting outside, trying to balance the light. And I’m going, do they really need one more?

It suddenly hit me that I didn’t want to be that photographer. I was young and arrogant enough, I guess, and stupid, so I started backpedaling and Carol was supportive. She said, “If you don’t want to do it, don’t” Don’t put things in your book that you don’t want to shoot. So we started shifting.

There was a couple of years where it was questionable if I was going to survive because I wasn’t just doing things to get by. I was saying, “No, I really don’t want to do that. And this is the pictures I want to take now, and this is where I want to go.” But Carol was always very supportive in that conversation.

So, that pivotal point is when a lot of things happened, and then from there, I learned that I didn’t need to be like everybody else. That I could easily choose to shake it all off and go, “OK, so I don’t work every day.” And I don’t. I work a couple times a month, and there are some months I work more, and there are some months I don’t work. But through other things, I’ve been hired because now I get to creatively come in and consult, or someone will say, “Can you design this? Or can you do this?” which is fun.

Rob: Does that happen a lot?

Frank: Yeah, it happens more than it used to. I’ve been paid to sit in a room and just have a conversation.

Rob: Well, from my perspective, I used to hire you because you have this tremendous range, incredible range. Nobody has that kind of range.

Frank: But some people don’t because you have to trust the photographer you hired. And I think that people think my stuff is too weird. They can’t look between the lines and see that there’s still the beautiful portraiture or there’s a beautiful moment or there’s this or that in the middle of it.

Rob: Right. So, have you shot yourself in the foot by having this tremendous range and not just focusing?

Frank: Yeah, but I’m fine being the one-legged man. I don’t give a shit.

Rob: [laughs] Good answer.

Frank: I’m happy. I’ll shoot the other foot if I have to. I’m much happier. I’m much happier in doing what I do. It’s a little more frustrating, but I do things that I’m proud of. I’m lucky enough to say that most stuff I shoot is my personal work. It took me a long time to get here. It took me over 20 years to get to the point where someone would look at me and say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be interesting to do a show?”

Rob: Right, you have a show coming up at the Clark Oshin Gallery at The Icon.

Frank: Yeah, Kathleen Clark used to be photo editor at “Los Angeles Magazine” and Nan Oshin was at the LA Times and I used to work for them. And then Icon, I worked with Icon for years, and they didn’t know what to do with their front space, so they turned it into this little art gallery space.

They’ve had several shows there already. I am not the first one they’re doing. But they’ve been very traditional shows where it’s big prints, maybe 20 or 30 of them, right? So, I said, “Well, if you want me to do this, I really don’t want to do, here’s a bunch of celebrity pictures.

“But,” I said, “over on this wall, I want to draw a massive face screaming at about 47 scans of my journal.” I had been doing this thing where I’d been scanning my journals, and they’ve been making 16×20 prints, and they’re beautiful. A friend of mine looked at them and said it looked like that I’d torn the pages out of my journal.

Rob: Wow. That’s awesome.

Frank: They’re perfect, I worked closely with Bonny in the fine art printing department at The Icon to find a great paper and it happened to be made by Canon so Bonny approached them to see if they’d sponsor the show and they have. The paper looks like watercolor or charcoal paper. So, it’s really beautiful.

So, there’s one wall that’s going to have that, and on another wall, the opposing wall, is going be about 72 pictures, and they’re all from 5×7 to, I think, 36×24, something like that. And they’re all jammed together. It’s like a massive collage of these little black frames, large and small black frames, all pushed together. There’s no space between them.

And it goes up the wall, under the wall – there’s a little lip that comes out – and then it spreads. And it hits the corner, and then it starts coming back down the wall toward the rest of the show.

Rob: So the gallery just turned into a big journal?

Frank: Yeah. That’s kind of my approach. So this wall is basically all just images that are of my kids or like an abstract thing I like, whatever. There’s a couple of celebrity pictures thrown in there, there’s a lot of nudes that I’ve done that I like that are distorted.

And then over the counter of the whole thing and above the wall that runs over the counter is going to be all Bowie because they wanted Bowie.

Rob: The show sounds fantastic. That just sounds amazing.

Frank: Absolutely. Everyone’s reaction about the show is either, “It’s going to be amazing” or “It’s going to be crickets.” [laughs]

Rob: It sounds like it has a lot of energy and I just think plain old prints on a wall appeals to a certain group but this will appeals to people who can get into that energy.

Rob: So when you do jobs, you have basically all your cameras and films.

Frank: Everything, it depends on the job. If I’m shooting albums covers, everything goes. I have boxes, plastic cameras to whatever…

Rob: Your assistants must be really smart. [laughs]

Frank: You know it’s funny, it’s hard to get new ones, I’m telling you.

Rob: [laughs] How the hell does this thing work?

Frank: Oh yeah. I’ve got a couple guys that are amazing photographers, God knows why they haven’t gone out and done it yet. But, they’re still around and I can fall back on them. They know a lot of things.

It’s funny because I have my two youngest guys right now, one guy came from Art Center. I taught for a semester at Art Center, which was actually quite difficult.

Rob: Why was it difficult?

Frank: I think the structure up there is all over the place. The kids didn’t get it. They don’t understand the industry. I’m used to teaching workshops and seminars where I deal with people who can come to me for a week and for 12 hours over seven days I can push at them and actually see them move. Where there you meet them for three hours once a week. And you’re getting in the middle of all the rest of their shit.

Rob: And you don’t see any progress. What was your class?

Frank: It was a lighting class and I basically tried to make them understand, which is how I teach most of my classes, that you’d better understand why you’re lighting something. If you’re saying, “I’m going to light this person.” Well how are you lighting it? What do you want to them to look like? Is it a woman, is it a man? Do you want it to be harsh, do you want it to soft? Is it supposed to be gritty? Is it supposed to be this? Is it supposed to have…?

So after, I gave them this assignment where I said, “Every day take a picture of a piece of light and put it into a day book.” I say this is just like a snapshot.

Rob: Take a picture of a piece of light?

Frank: And write down how that light is created. Because if you’re standing there, you’re in the middle of New York City, and the light comes bouncing off of a sky scraper, and it comes back down and kind of hits the person in the middle of that darkness. Know what that does. What’s it bouncing off of? Is it bouncing off a piece of white? Is it bouncing off of a mirrored window? Is it bouncing off a piece of steel?

And then if you said to yourself, “I want to recreate that light” you’d know that if you took a hard light and hit a piece of mirror and it came back down the mirror, that’s what it would look like. If it came off of a big white wall, it would be soft and kind of subtle.

Rob: So, why didn’t they get that?

Frank: I don’t know. They kind of felt it was more a pain in the ass.

Rob: They just want to know how to light like Seliger, was that the attitude?

Frank: I had quite a few guys that were really, really good and excelled completely and really got the point of it. I had a couple look at me and say, “If you’d only let me go in post, I could fix it.” And I would say to them, “That’s another class. This is not that class.” If you can’t light something in the first place, you shouldn’t be taking pictures. The whole point of photography is to find the light. To understand the light. You need to basically take that light and make it work for you, that the light is bringing you to what you want them to see. And that whole premise is gone.

I carry a Polaroid book around sometimes and I’ll say to a client, “Do you want this light. Would you rather have this? Do you want to have it slanted so if you want the light to come from the right you want a bit of edge from the side? Do you want a bright edge? Do you want a subtle edge coming through? And do you want that black edge that comes down the side of the face?”

Rob: Do you have a book full of Polaroids with the different lighting?

Frank: Yeah. We were shooting last week on a movie poster, and it was they wanted everything to be very much like comic books. So we had a black silhouette with a slash of light as a highlight. It’s very much kind of graphic. They wanted a whole series of everything coming out of a black background.

But, of course, nowadays you can’t really shoot like an edge light in the black and then it’s just this edge light and that’s all you have. You have to under fill the whole thing, so there’s just a subtle under-fill but you still get the idea of where you’re going with it. So they can choose how much they want to go out. How black they want it to go.

Rob: You do a lot of posters don’t you?

Frank: I get hired to do a lot of the odd ones, which is kind of great.

Rob: This one is going to be really hard, let’s call Frank.

Frank: Totally. I get Hellboy II and we spend five days in an old limestone refinery. Then there was Eragon which  was all shot in a tent that was nine feet wide by 18 feet long in the middle of a field in Budapest, while it was raining outside. The packs are all blowing up. Because we got there and, of course, it was one of those things where they wanted to shoot on set and it was supposed to rain a couple days, and the only answer was to do this.

I mean it’s adapt and figure out. The Coraline stuff was hysterical. I mean that was a great one because Coraline is an animated feature. And everyone was: “What do you mean, you shot the poster?” I go “Yep.” I went up there and we had set up a photo studio as if I was shooting Dakota Fanning, who’s the voice of Coraline.

I set her up and they bring the animators in it, and I said we want her looking like this. Then we took this little one cane, this little stick, and I had mirrors on them. And I had little pieces of white and I would fill them back in like I was lighting on them. And we were shooting them on medium format digital. I was able to change the layout in a couple different ways while we did it.

Rob: Wow!

Rob: I was just going through your journal on the site.

Frank: They’re not exactly the Disney Channel.

Rob: The journal that’s up here right now, how long has that been up? Has that always been here? There’s a lot of nudes, there’s some…

Frank: A lot of weird drawings.

Rob: Guys with penises drawn on. So, I guess Disney Channel is not going to call you up and say, “Hey, let’s have Frank do that poster, go check out his portfolio. Oh my God…”

Frank: I’ve actually had some people say, “Can you send us an ftp of your portfolio because we can’t have the client go to the website and see everything.”

Years ago, I did  a cover for Esquire of Robert De Niro and it was so abstractly they called for me to go do it. And I was kind of laughing, going like, “What, you want me to shoot him, really?” I’m like OK, sure I’ll go.

And then after the shoot Robert Priest looked at me and he goes, “Well we knew it wasn’t going to be good but we figured if anyone was going to fail you’d be the best at it.” He said, “We figured you weren’t going to be so structured that you would get something. We knew you’d get something.”

Rob: Right. If think back to that Red Bull book I hired you for. I called you because the project was absurdly difficult?

Frank: That’s my job. And it goes to the bottom line of what this is. If you are a photographer, it’s not about you. Your job is to solve the problem at hand. Now it’s your choice how you want to solve it.

Rob: I don’t know. Not a lot of people would look at it that way. I can tell you if I sent that job to a lot of different people, they would probably say, “It can’t be done.” They would say, “We need more days to do all those pictures.”

Frank: But, that’s just our job. Our job is to solve the problem. There’s always a solution to the problem. I love  thinking that way because, then you’re given these things in the moment you’re standing with a person. And they’re that moment. That’s your moment. You can’t create that.

Ten minutes from now this picture will no longer exist. This moment won’t happen. It just happened the two of you stood there while this piece of light fell through a room, and you were standing there and you took the picture. And if you were to basically plan that moment, you couldn’t have.

Rob: So the economy is in the shitter and I keep hearing from people about editorial completely drying up?

Frank: I think photography in general is at a sad state and it’s poignant that the last true portrait photographer dies. Irving Penn would spend six, seven hours with someone taking their portrait.

Rob: And that’s not going to happen anymore.

Frank: It hasn’t happened in years. When was the last time someone said to me, “You have all day to take a great portrait.” It’s more like, “You have 15 minutes to do this great portrait,” but if the person’s not connecting with you then there’s nothing there.

Rob: So, what do we do? Just say, “Screw it, we don’t need it?”

Frank: Everyone’s allowed themselves to be overtaken by the process, the imagery, the overdone insanity of making everyone happy and forgetting that there’s a subject.

Rob: Well, my theory is that photography follows the way of the American psyche and the bubble has burst, so I’m with you. I feel like it should end.

Frank: We’ve run out of good ideas. Look, they’re redoing movies. And if you look at the state of magazines, it’s no wonder. If magazines were still shot beautifully and designed beautifully, people wouldn’t abandon them. When you used to go buy a “Vogue” or a “Vanity Fair” or a “Rolling Stone”, you went for the imagery and the design. You kept that magazine forever.

Rob: Well, it turned into a numbers game. Just like everything. Just like the housing market.

Frank: We’re all doing jobs for a lot less money than we used to, or just having to work with budgets that we’re being handed. It’s what it is.

Rob: How have you adapted to digital?

There’s a reason certain photographers have lasted this long. When they went from shooting glass-plate negatives, to shooting roll film to shooting roll film to shooting kodachrome to shooting kodachrome slide to shooting negative to shooting digital. I mean, we all bitched at every step of the way, and then we all found our legs in the middle of what we were handed.

I have to say, I’m excited now to shoot digital because I can move quicker. I can change. I mean, I do lighting set-ups where I’ll have three key lights sitting there next to me. I’ll roll them in and roll them out.” Where in the old days you couldn’t do that because everything was so locked down. I changed. When I’m shooting movie posters nowadays, everything is on wheels. We constantly redistribute the light.

Rob: Really? Lights on wheels?

Frank: Lights on wheels. You want more key, you want more fill, you want more this, you want more that.

Rob: Wow!

Frank: I complained about digital for about two years, and I suddenly shut up and said: “Look at yourself in the mirror you moron. They’ve handed you the best tools in the world. You’re able to do whatever you want now.”

Rob: In my conversations with photographers of your generation, it’s sort of been like, this is the reality, let’s just adapt.

Rob: Your sons are 8 1/2 and 10 so what happens when they want to become photographers? When they graduate from high school and they say, “Look, I’m going to go to New York and I’m going to become a professional photographer” what’s your advice?

Frank: “You want to be photographer. Great, then let’s take pictures on film and I want you to process a roll of film. And I want you to basically print a picture. And I want you to understand.” Because, I think the light coming through a negative even makes you understand light.

Imagine being a 49 year old photographer with a 10 year old son and he see negatives hanging on these racks and says, “What’s this?” I go, “It’s a negative.” They go, “Oh” And they go “What’s it used for?” I say, “Well it’s a picture.” You hold that. Well how do you get a picture from that?” “Well, you go in a darkroom.” “What’s a darkroom?” “Well a darkroom has like chemicals and everything in it. And there’s like this projector and you project the image down.” “What do you mean? Does it move?” I mean, “How big can you make it?” “You can make it any size you want. It depends on the size paper. You put it into this developer and you move it around. The picture starts coming up through the paper.” “Well then what happens, why does it do that?”

Now they just come to me with their digital camera and they go, “Can we put these in the computer?” “Can I print this out immediately?” “Can I see that?”

Rob: Well you could also teach them how to shoot glass plates. I don’t see the point really?

Frank: I am.

Rob: Oh, you’re one of those dads. [laughs]

Frank: I bought them an eight by ten glass plate negative…

Rob: Oh, no! [laughs]

Frank: And I took a glass-plate class two summers ago out on Long Island. Hopefully by the time that they’re old enough and they’re interested that I’ll have that all set up, and I’ll know exactly how to put everything together for them. And it will be great.

Rob: So why is all this important to their understanding of photography?

Frank: Granted, they can digitally print out a million images nowadays, but there’s something about getting your hands dirty that is lacking in photography. Do you know what I mean? We no longer have the smell of the chemistry. We no longer have our fingers having the goo of the Polaroid. That was our one connection where you felt like you actually were creating something.

With my sons when I talk to them about becoming photographers, I’d try to say, “Don’t be everyone else. Don’t follow the herd.” Do you know what I mean? You have to find your own vision, your own thing, everything about it, and that’s what you need to do.

Rob: Right. Can you imagine, though, them with all the new tools? With the cameras that shoot video and the computers? What kind of eclectic photographers will they become based on your DNA?

Frank: Will they really truly get it? That’s the sense of any parent looking at their child. Do you really understand what I do? My wife would argue the point that I’ve probably spent way too much time in my office or in front of a worktable making collages of my sons who are out in the yard playing ball.

Rob: Right. So who knows? That’s the thing. Who knows where they’ll end up because life is so different now?

Frank: That’s what it is. Maybe that’s my subliminal point of how I named the show Without Filter because I think there’s just way too many focuses now. Everything is a knee-jerk reaction to not giving an experience of anything because you’re terrified of the outcome.

Now I could put all these pictures on the wall, and you’re going to have people look at me and go, “Did you see those pictures? Why in the hell do you think those are good? Those are disgusting. Why would you think that’s interesting?” And that’s the point.

I love that that would be more of the conversation than everyone walking and going, “Oh, isn’t that amazing?” Do you know what I mean? I’d rather have the argument of someone saying to me, “Why do you think this…

Rob: What the hell is this? [laughs]

Frank: Richard Serra had a classic line. He said, “Art is purposely useless.” And it is. If you do it for any reason but that it is some kind of gut reaction to something, and you draw, paint, collage, or photograph something and it means something to you, fuck everybody else. Right? Do you know what I mean?

But then I’m a commercial photographer. That’s who I am. Granted I’ve been lucky enough to have been able to do a lot of things that maybe aren’t as commercial as most, but still that’s my job.

Rob: That’s a pretty thin line I think you’ve walked for a long time.

Frank: I have to respect that the client had to go through a lot of shit before they’ve gotten to me.

I did the same thing when I directed. I used to always say, “You’ve been through this a lot more than I have. So I need to make sure that I’m covering everything you need so when you go back and I’m on an airplane flying back to wherever that you have everything you need.

That’s the most important thing. That’s truly the art form of what this is. The art form of being a commercial photographer is basically solving the problem creatively, putting your stamp on it somehow that people do know it’s you, and then having the client be happy at the end of day. That’s the art form. People forget that; that it’s an art form to actually be able to do this.

One of my favorite photographers:

“There’s no such thing as luck, you create your own.”

thx, Andrew

I discovered a great new blog written by Cheryl Jacobs Nicolai via The Online Photographer that you may want to follow called PhotoDino. Not just because she’s an excellent photographer but because she has excellent advice for everyone. These are real gems:

I get asked all the time, during workshops, in e-mails, in private messages, what words of wisdom I would give to a new and aspiring photographer. Here’s my answer.

– Style is a voice, not a prop or an action. If you can buy it, borrow it, download it, or steal it, it is not a style. Don’t look outward for your style; look inward.

– Know your stuff. Luck is a nice thing, but a terrifying thing to rely on. It’s like money; you only have it when you don’t need it.

– Say no. Say it often. It may be difficult, but you owe it to yourself and your clients. Turn down jobs that don’t fit you, say no to overbooking yourself. You are no good to anyone when you’re stressed and anxious.

– Know your style before you hang out your shingle. If you don’t, your clients will dictate your style to you. That makes you nothing more than a picture taker. Changing your style later will force you to start all over again, and that’s tough.

– Remember that if your work looks like everyone else’s, there’s no reason for a client to book you instead of someone else. Unless you’re cheaper. And nobody wants to be known as “the cheaper photographer”.

Read them all (here).

http://www.paoloroversi.com/

APE: I talked to you about a year ago right after Canon announced the new 5d markII that shoots video. I called because I wanted to talk with someone who was actually a filmmaker and a photographer to get their opinion on the new product. We got into this huge conversation about film vs. digital and I’ve always wanted to get you on the phone again so I could record the conversation and make a post about it.

I think our conversation was actually a challenge to me. I have a great affinity for film, and it has been interesting to really start studying and testing new systems like the Red and the Canon 5d Mark II.

APE: Originally you were still stuck on film, as many people are, because of limitations you’d discovered shooting digital.

I think I will always be stuck on film and anyone who grew up on it will be. I understand the client’s point of view on a movie poster or big advertising campaign and why they need it to be shot digitally. They’re building an image sometimes from 36 files and they don’t want to have to deal with the back-end post production of scanning all that film. I get it. Digital is a really a quick way to do something.

APE: Didn’t you have a retoucher who preferred to scan a negative over getting a digital file?

All of the good ones do. The 6×7 negative, there’s not chip that’s that size and film has it’s own look and color palette. We’re never going to lose that. The retoucher I’m working with now, who has done some of the biggest fashion and advertising work for the last decade, would much rather work from a film negative than a digital file in terms of skin tone and color. In fact, he even still sees photographers who prefer shooting only on 8×10 polaroid and scanning those images. There are cases where he is making a composite with the skin from polaroid and the product from a digital file. So, when money is no object, digital is just another tool.

My feeling is, when film is the best thing to be used in a certain situation and you love film then you should use it. I love the way a negative comes out of my Mamiya camera or my Leica camera. I love the way it looks straight out of the chemicals, the first time you see it. I never feel that way with a digital file. With digital you have to work hard to get that feeling. I think most people who became photographers did so because they had that one moment in the darkroom where something came up and they looked at it and went “wow that’s cool.”

In the long run, the idea is still the key to the whole thing. If it’s not a good idea and it’s not a well executed photograph from the get go it doesn’t matter. You can make a bad picture on film and a great picture on digital. The percentage of bad pictures to good pictures is still the same and it always will be.

APE: Tell me about the testing you did?

Well, a large aspect of digital photography is the digital tech, or techs, who come to the shoot and help capture and process files. If you’re a company like Warner Bros. or Fox you want a digital company to manage all those files for you. A photographer comes in does his thing and leaves and you have a digital company manage everything. This has been the bulk of my digital shooting experience, and I wanted to test some of the smaller cameras against the big Hasselblad with the p65 back that we use on big advertising shoots. There is no denying that the file produced this way is very very big and impressive, but it is also a very cumbersome and expensive way to work. So I started comparing those files to the Canon 1ds Mark III and the 5d Mark II.

APE: What’d you come up with?

In some ways I like the Canon better. It looks like a smaller file to someone who isn’t familiar with how things work, but the difference between is negligible in terms of resolution.

APE: What about on a billboard?

I think the distance that you are from the billboard makes it so the resolution is not an issue. You know those billboards they have all over LA now, the digital billboards. Apparently those files are very small, so they have to be down res’d to be usable anyway.

APE: What about the clients? Aren’t they demanding that you shoot with the camera that gives you bigger files?

I’ve been doing both and I show the client on screen and it’s funny how often they pick the shot from the 35mm digital. The Hasselblad is almost too medical in a way. You have to do a lot to it to make the skin look good because it’s so detailed.

APE: Isn’t working with digital difficult on set with publicists and celebrities and the whole gang of people who show up at those shoots? Especially when you’re tethered?

People are now used to seeing everything immediately and so it’s more detrimental to come in and do a job where the client expects immediate gratification and you try and tell them they can’t have it. I think that was also the case making movies in the 70’s and 80’s when all of the sudden the video monitors got good enough that there were separate camps setup so everyone could watch video playback. I’m sure the first generation of directors that were dealing with video assist went absolutely bonkers because their actor was coming up and saying maybe I should do it like this or they were running back to hair and make up. And then they got used to it and figured out ways to make it work.

APE: But, hasn’t that turned a movie production into a $100,000,000 project because they have to do so many different takes?

Yes, but it’s just the inevitable progression of it. People just expect a different kind of thing. That being said, I think there is a conversation to be had with the actor where you say “look I want to photograph you and get you to not think about me photographing you.” And honestly, I don’t think that people who are being photographed want to see it as it’s happening. They think they do but once they see it they really don’t. They think “I did my stupid thing where I turn up the corner of my mouth, I’ve got to remember not to do that.” Then you’re telling them something and they’re only thinking about the corner of their mouth. We would all do it, we’re human. First thing people think of when they see the picture is not the context, but what they look like in the picture.

So, it makes it harder for a photographer to find the picture. I’ll give you an example. I just photographed an actor for the cover of a magazine. I was shooting digital and I wanted to try a little different lighting thing, so before the shoot I tried it on my assistant and it looked really cool. When I got the actor in the same setup, it was awful lighting for his face. That’s just something you can’t know until you get your subject in front of the camera. Now if I’m shooting film I would just keep going and say now let’s try this next and try to find my light. But, I’ve now got the publicist, the hair and make up and his people seeing these pictures coming up on the monitor. For all I know the publicist is standing behind me pointing at the monitor and shaking her head to the actor, and there goes his trust in me.

It’s really important that the subject feels confident that the photographer knows what they’re doing. Because, if you’re a celebrity you can have anyone you want to take your picture and it’s your career and business on the line so if you don’t look however it is you wanted to appear, it’s a serious problem. So, with people being able to see the first frames the photographer shoots, he doesn’t have time to figure out the face. It’s no different than shooting a still life. Just like Edward Weston figuring out how to shoot that particular pepper. Each one is different, and you have to find your way. It is just, with film, you could find your way without everyone on the whole shoot watching you.

APE: So, how do you do this digitally now?

What we’ve started doing is create almost a video village like on commercials where we have a second monitor setup and we tell everyone there’s a 5 min. delay before you will see what we’re doing. I run back after 30 shots, do some quick edits, make adjustments and throw it up on the other monitor. We put a little color and exposure package together digitally so when they do take a look it’s ready for them to see. I’m trying to get it back to a polaroid experience where the monitor is black in the background and there’s not a bunch of thumbnails where the actor comes back and starts pointing at thumbnails and wants to see them. There’s never been a situation in the past where someone has sat down and gone through all your film and It’s very strange when that happens now. I try to make a black box around the tech and keep him a little like the wizard of oz, you know, don’t look behind the curtain, there’s no one there,that type of thing.

I do think a photographer has to make a stand for what process will make the best picture, and take the time to educate the client about the choices he has made. I think everyone is figuring out their system because there is something you miss when you keep interrupting the moment to examine the moment you just captured.

APE: And, that’s working?

Yes, it’s working although by the end of the shoot they end up crossing the barrier, but you still get that first impression. And quite honestly if I’m shooting someone who gets the whole thing they don’t want to see every picture anyway. Once they see what I’m doing they’re ok with it. So, you have to gage the person and see that they can give you what they need.

APE: On one shoot we were on you told me that earlier in your career you would script everything out beforehand and then later on in your career it evolved into being a little bit more loose and finding those moments.

Yeah, when I was young I was just inexperienced and I felt like I had to do more homework so that if nothing presented itself I had backup plans. I use to even come up with questions to ask to get different responses like surprise or laughter or whatever and I would tape these questions to the back of the camera and I would make sure and pick the right music too. I still do my research but I try to leave enough time to get something that surprises me too. If you’re too intent on getting your list then your subject never gets to their list. I learned that almost more from directing than from photography. If you have notes every single take for the actor they’re so busy trying to do what you want them to do that they never get to do what they want to do. They have a list too. You’re dealing with a professional actor and if you can get them acting a little bit you unlock this whole bag of tricks and experience they have.

I remember a line from a biography about one of my favorite directors where he said, always roll one for them after you get the one you like. After I get what I need then I always say now you do what you want to do and I’ll just follow along. Some people are like no, no you tell me what to do, but some really open up at that point, and great stuff can happen. And, you’ve got to indulge them because even if they go over to a spot where the light isn’t as good or the background’s not good, they might give you something new. I think the thing to remember too with shooting pictures is that it’s just a picture right. It’s just clicking the button and you need to quit being such an editor in your head saying oh, that’s not a good picture. The road to a good picture is through a lot of bad ones.

APE: Do you think you’ll ever switch completely over to digital?

Do you remember the transition from chrome to neg? Photographers used to shoot chrome all the time but then they switched over and for a long time I was shooting both because I couldn’t stop shooting chrome in certain situations, the light was too perfect for it. I’m sure it will be the same way with digital.

APE: Ok but some things are still better on chrome but now you shoot neg. Why is that?

I haven’t shot chrome in forever just because it’s less versatile. It takes longer to shoot, you have to be way more precise and it’s harder to make prints out of so that went away a long long time ago once prints got good enough.

APE: Interesting. So, maybe the same will happen with digital eventually. Digital is way more versatile.

Yes, digital is more versatile but film still looks like film to me.

APE: Yeah but how did you transition from chrome to film because nothing looks like chrome, right?

Yes, you’re absolutely right.

APE: How does the current economic climate affect your decision to take on a job?

In my head there’s always three reasons to do a job. It’s either money, creative or relationship, or a combination of those. So, a job is not always about money, but it certainly is tough when budgets are slashed to the point that you can’t have the support crew you need, or you lose out on a job to another photographer who basically decided to “buy” the job in order to get the work in their portfolio.

APE: Photographers are obviously not happy about fees being reduced, and the practice of undercutting. Is this just the new way, and are we in trouble because of that attitude?

No, because there will always be a fee structure based on ability and experience and there’s only a certain number of people who can do these jobs. I think it will roll more with the economy. If everyone is making money you’re going to hire the best person but if the economy is down you need to cut some corners and people need to adjust and restructure their budgets to make it work.

If you’re a freelancer that’s what you sign on for when you get into it. No one promises you that you will always get the fees that you got last year or that people will still call you. This business is littered with people who had really high years and now can’t get work. That’s on every photographers mind. There’s nobody that’s bullet proof to making a living, so you have to be careful. You can’t assume since it went one way one year it’s going to go that way the next year.

APE: But, you’re still confident that there’s a future for photography, right?

Yes, absolutely. When I’ve been successful it’s because I’ve been trying to do something that’s a challenge and that’s interesting to me. As long as I’ve done that I’ve been ok.

APE: So, what does the future hold for Sam Jones?

Shooting pictures is my main emphasis, I just shot U2 for Rolling Stone. I also have some film projects in the works, both dramatic and documentary. One of the things I am excited about is using smaller cameras like the 5d to make films that were simply not affordable a few years ago. I have a few esoteric and decidedly non-commmercial ideas up my sleeve, and being able to make those projects happen without outside financing is very intriguing.

APE: Wait, what? Last time I talked to you we were both trying to figure out how anyone could do something serious with that camera.

Well, they cracked the chip and made it manual so you can manually adjust exposure and shutter speeds and then several companies developed follow focus systems and mounts for it, making it way more viable for a cinematic application than when we last talked.

APE: I think having video in your still camera is awesome but it’s really irrelevant if you have no filmmaking skills, right?

Filmmaking was never about the equipment, except in terms of budget. Filmmaking is storytelling, and if you don’t know how to do that, there is no piece of equipment in the world that will help you.

APE: Ok, so why would you pick a 5d over a Red or 35mm or 16mm then?

Well, I wouldn’t, if I had financing. Having the choice to use any camera at all, I would always still choose 35mm. That is the look all these other systems are trying to duplicate, and it is what I use whenever the money is there. But having the financial freedom to go out and say, make a film about the world’s only giraffe jockey, or a documentary on the best chorizo in Los Angeles, well, maybe the 5d is the perfect camera for that, because you can make something that looks very good for very little money, relatively.

APE: So, you can make a movie in your garage then?

Well, yes and no. You still can’t cut any corners on nuts and bolts of filmmaking. You still need a crew–a soundman, an assistant cameraman, a DP or at least a gaffer, etc. And you can’t skip the finish, it takes a lot of post work to realize the potential of the camera. It’s just an interesting new tool that has many possibilities, and is definitely cheaper than the Red or any film-camera system.

APE: What did you shoot your Wilco documentary on?

16mm black and white film stock. Most of the up front expense of that documentary was in the film, processing, and camera rental. But the post production cost as much as the entire shooting budget.

Look, the bottom line is, there are so many ways to produce a project these days, and there is so much speculation about where the photography and film businesses are heading, but one core thing hasn’t changed. Quality work will always be rewarded, and there will always be an audience for powerful images and storytelling. As equipment becomes more affordable, maybe more people will have a chance to make something interesting, and that is always a good thing.

I consider Sam Jones to be one of the top photographers in the country at shooting men. And there are plenty of people who shoot men as people or fashionable or sexy but very few who shoot them “manly,” which is something I love about Sam’s photography. So, that’s a very thin category that I put him in and of course he does a lot of things very well but I’ve worked with him a lot on covers and feature stories because he was at the top of that list. I also discovered that he loves to surf, so I put him on some portrait and cover shoots with the big surfers that worked our really well for me. I also noticed something when working on set with Sam that really makes a difference when he’s shooting celebrities. He knows a lot of Hollywood insiders and not just actors, but the cinematographers, editors and sound guys who are respected by actors for their craft. He’ll get into a conversation at the beginning of a shoot with the subject and start talking about the industry, the people they both know and you can see the I’m-on-a-shoot patina start to fade away. Sam made a critically acclaimed documentary in 2002 on the band Wilco called I Am Trying to Break Your Heart and was rumored to be working on an Infinite Jest movie with David Foster Wallace at the time of his death.

Here’s part one of the interview:

APE: Tell me how you got started and how you got into shooting actors and doing the Hollywood thing?

In college at Cal State Fullerton I was a photojournalist at our college newspaper and they had a really good daily newspaper that won the equivalent of the pac 10 competition of newspapers. That led to being a stringer for the associated press, where I worked for over 3 years covering news, sports, and entertainment. I moved to downtown LA and lived 2 miles from the bureau and just threw myself in it. I actually had one stretch where I shot for 61 days without a break.

APE: Did you know before college that you wanted to be a photographer?

No, not at all. I was in bands and always thought I was going to be a musician and make records. I was doing both but I got so busy with photography. Working for the AP was amazing, because we were photographing the national news. You weren’t sent in if it didn’t have some kind of national appeal and in LA we had the Dodgers, Raiders, Lakers, UCLA, Academy Awards, Riots, Savings and Loan Fraud, Courthouse Stakeouts; ­that whole era was just crazy. If it was national news and it happened in LA you were expected to shoot it. That was 1989 – 1992.

The Associated Press had a syndication company called AP Wide World at the time and they would syndicate the images we shot to magazines. They would take the photos that stringers made for very little money and resell them to publications like Vanity Fair. They resold some of my Los Angeles Riots images to VF, and the actor Tim Robbins saw it. He was getting ready to direct a movie called Bob Roberts at the time, and he wanted those kinds of photojournalistic pictures to publicize his movie. So, he found me and called up and asked if I knew how to shoot actors. Part of the AP job was you had to go to those 20-minutes-in-a-hotel-room-with-Harrison-Ford-and-make-a-portrait-of-him movie junkets. I was always doing that stuff so I told him yes, no problem.

So, I got hired to be a still photographer on Bob Roberts and got to shoot the movie poster and the whole thing. He had a bunch of big actors playing small rolls in that movie like Susan Sarandon, James Spader and John Cusack. During the shooting of the movie I would pull these actors aside and make large and medium format portraits of them.

APE: Wait, is it common that someone shooting a movie is going to be making portraits on the side too?

No, I don’t think that it was, but this was not a normal shoot at all. Tim wanted the film to have a very realistic feel, so he let me do a lot of my shooting, especially of press scenes, from wherever I wanted. This included being able to walk into the scene, shoot without a blimp, and even bump the cinematographer during press scrums.

APE: You were in the movie too?

Oh yeah, the back of my head is all over the movie. He wanted me to be like a press photographer who was assigned to the beat of this politician [Bob Roberts]. They would set up the scene for a press conference and Tim would go “does this look right?” I remember once telling him that the person handling the press conference should not be saying “you there” because they would know everyone by name.  I told him to use reporters first names, and they actually changed the script to reflect this advice. I was having a blast and was thinking this still photography gig is awesome.

Then I got my rude awakening. Someone referred me to New Line Cinema for another film, and they said we’ll give you a job being a still photographer on this movie but it shoots in Chicago and we can’t afford to send you there so you have to work as a local. I had to call an acquaintance that I went to school with to ask if I could sleep on his floor for $100/month. It was freezing and the crew was pretty shitty to me.

APE: So, you went from acting in a movie you were shooting and giving the director notes to just another guy on set?

Oh yeah and on the Tim Robbins movie his cinematographer was Robert Altman’s cinematographer Jean Lepine and he totally took me under his wing. I used to come in and ask him how he was lighting this scene, why are you doing this, why are you doing that, why are you changing all the bulbs out? I learned so much from him and looking back on it I was probably a total pain in the ass, but he was so nice. So the main people I talked to on set were the DP, Producer and the Actors. Then I go to this job in Chicago and I’m persona non grata. It’s winter and all the shoots are night shoots, the blimp is freezing to my face and the camera would just stop working. It pretty much sucked, and I barely got paid a living wage.

So, I did that and got another New Line job doing a film called Loaded Weapon and I’m a pretty friendly guy so I made friends with Sam Jackson and some other people in the cast and crew.  New Line says they’re going to put me up to do the poster. Then they came back to me and said Emilio Estevez doesn’t want you to shoot the poster he want’s Bonnie Schiffman to shoot it. I was a kid at the time, like 22 and I got kind of pissed off so I walked up the Emilio and said “hey man why didn’t you want me to shoot the poster.” I’m sure he was like, what is this still photographer doing talking to me? After that I decided I wasn’t going to do any more still jobs, because I basically don’t like doing jobs where I’m not wanted. With photojournalism there was a little of that, but being the still photographer on set there was a lot of that. It takes a totally different kind of personality. I think the photographers who do amazing work on films are stealth people who like not being seen and staying in the shadows getting the picture and not talking to anyone.

APE: Yeah, not asking the DP why he’s lighting something a certain way or helping the director with a scene.

Yeah, exactly. If it wasn’t clear what my calling was after that, it was clear it was not doing something behind the scenes.

APE: So, how did you move past that?

I just started flying to New York and meeting with people. I don’t know if it was just out of stupidity, but when you call a photo editor and they say portfolio drop off day is this and pickup day is this and if you’re out of town FedEx it to here, I just figured my portfolio didn’t have much of a chance of being looked at. I decided I’m just going to go there and tell them that I’ve flown here all the way from LA just to see them. I picked my ten favorite magazines and told them I only have one portfolio and I’m only here for 3 days, so If I drop it off I won’t have it for my next meeting. It worked. Maybe they took pity on me, but I had a lot of face to face meetings, and Entertainment Weekly ended up giving me my first magazine job.

APE: How was your book at the time? Was it a decent book?

It was all 4×5 chromes in these black mattes so you had to look at them on a light table, but 4×5 chromes were impressive to look at. I had Tim Robbins, John Cusack, Susan Sarandon and Gore Vidal. It was pretty much a mixture of the film stuff and some AP portraits.

Then, I started getting little tiny jobs at magazines. My first EW job was a parking space. I had to shoot Tom Arnold’s parking space. It was the dumbest job ever. He was feuding with some other actor over a parking space.

APE: And, you crushed it [laughing].

Oh my god, I must have shot 20 rolls. I brought lights and grabbed some security guard and said ok you walk through the background. I lost sleep over the parking spot shoot thinking, I’ve got to impress them.

APE: Right, you were thinking this has to be the best parking space they’ve ever seen in their life. And it was, right?

Quarter page in the back of EW. They ended up using the shot with the security guard’s feet in it.

APE: And they called you the next week to shoot Tom Cruise?

Ha, No. I moved from parking space to Doogie Howser and that was 1/4 page as well. Then there was also a bunch of business stuff that I was shooting. There were some AP environmental business shots that I had blown up in my portfolio, like the president of Bank of America, that kind of thing. So I ended up getting work from some business magazines right off too.

APE: I think a lot of people want to know how you go from 1/4 page of a parking spot to shooting the cover?

You know what it is? The photo editor sees the whole shoot and so it’s not just the one picture in the magazine that they judge you by. I shot features for a long time before I got to shoot a cover. Even when I was doing a 1 page shot I was always trying 3, 4 and 5 setups. I was shooting like it was a cover and full feature because you never know, it could get bumped up. I think there was a couple photo editors early on at Time, EW, US and Premiere who just started making a case to their Art Director and their Editor that this photographer is working his ass off and is good and they should let him do it. That was the case with me, where someone finally said we should give him the cover, or at least I remember it being a cover try. I think back at what I made actors do for 1 page, because I was telling them it might be more pages, so we need to shoot more setups and try a bunch of ideas and we had extra clothes and locations ready. I was syndicating my pictures with Gamma Liaison at the time and because of all these setups, I actually had several syndicated covers before I was assigned an actual cover. So, those tear sheets were in my book and that helped me out as well.

APE: I recall a really big cover run you had at Esquire and GQ. You seemed to be the cover guy for those magazines.

It was funny because there was a period where I was shooting covers for both, and often in the same month. I don’t think that went over too well.

APE: I don’t think it would really. How did you pull that off.

I didn’t have a contract with either one so in my mind I figured it wasn’t a problem. I had originally thought having a contract was the way to go, especially since a lot of photographers that I admired had them, but for me, it turned out to be a better thing not to have one. I never wanted to have to shoot an assignment I wasn’t interested in, just because I was contracted to do so.

APE: It seems like a lot of actors and publicists have a list of photographers they want to work with, so how much does it help to be on an actors list? Like Clooney, I’ve seen you shoot a lot of George Clooney covers and heard you two are friends.

That cover with the hats for Esquire was the first shoot I did with him and he didn’t know me from Adam at the time but the magazine suggested me and he said ok. Then I shot him and we had a good time, so we developed a pretty good working relationship. I will say I feel lucky to have done so many shoots with him, because he is not the type of guy to demand a certain photographer. He’s a lot more low maintenance about that kind of stuff. However, he has been very loyal, and he will ask for me when he has a commercial shoot in Japan or something like that, and I’m very grateful for that.

APE: Ok, but on the other hand if I have a Clooney shoot I might hire Sam Jones because I know I’ll get more than 30 minutes, because you guys are friends.

That’s true, but there’s also the other side of that. A magazine isn’t always going to want the same photographer to shoot the same actor, and I get that. No magazine wants to be told they have to use a certain photographer. I have certainly lost out on jobs where the magazine wanted to use me, but the actor requested someone else, so it works both ways. I have, like a lot of photographers, a few actors that regularly request me, and it is great to have that security of knowing you will be asked to do a lot of shoots with that person.

APE: What about the publicists who are pushing certain photographers?

There’s publicists who really know their job and who really want to match up the right photographer with their client. If you’re an actor, one of the things you expect your publicist to do is make sure that when the cover comes out and you’re on it, that the shoot worked out. That is a publicists job, so I understand the really pushing for a photographer they trust. However, this focus can become rather narrow, and it is tough to lose a job you know you are right for because a publicist stayed with a familiar choice. Anyone that’s been taking pictures in Hollywood is so used to not getting the job for some weird reason that makes no sense. You have to accept it too. I was just on hold for two weeks for a movie poster, and had even started production on the job when the lead actor informed the studio he wanted to work with another photographer who is a good friend of his. You have to just say ok, because I’ve been in the position where I’ve done that to another photographer, so it all comes around. And then sometimes you will be in a situation where there’s several actors and publicists involved and one actor says they want to use a different photographer, where the other actors and publicists may not even know or care about the decision, so it’s crazy.

I understand the element of sucking up that goes on, I’m just not very good at it. I always try to come at it from the perspective of making great pictures, and making sure the magazine, or client gets what they need. This may mean pushing for more risky set-ups or pushing the actor a bit to try something new, which can be uncomfortable for some publicists.

APE: That’s probably removed you from a couple lists.

Yes, but also it’s kept me working in the editorial environment, where pictures need to be more than just safe and pretty. I always loved working for magazines because that’s where I started and you go out and spend a day, or a few hours, with an actor and a writer spends a day with them as well and you photograph them at that one moment in their lives where you try to get something that’s revealing, interesting and compelling about them. If the story and pictures work well together it’s still one of my favorite things to read. I always want to be able to do that.

Part 2 tomorrow.

I’m hearing via email sources and twitter that the great Irving Penn has died (age, 92).

NYTimes Obit: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/arts/design/08penn.html

I don’t remember seeing these videos when the big Terry Richardson, Belvedere Campaign came out several years ago so I’m posting them now. Even though I know there are plenty of haters out there I still think it’s fascinating when any photographer at the top of their game talks about their craft.

Photographer Rodney Smith has a new book and a blog he’s using as a promotional tool which is great, because he’s dropping some real gems in the posts. Like this one:

To say a photographer has a vision is to say the photographer has something unique to say to about the world. Why do some photographers have something unique to say, when so many others just shoot pictures that are general and lacking vision? Most people would say it has to do with talent. Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe it has nothing to do with talent. Maybe it has to do with the ability to express one’s feelings. The person who presents a strong vision has figured out a way to express his or her feelings, while others are struggling to do that. Talent, then, becomes not so much artistic talent, though that may be a good part of it, but rather emotional talent.

via Rodney Smith- The End Starts Here.

Over on Gizmodo (here) Teru has practical advise for photographers headed into the war zone:

The daily mechanics of photographing in a “war zone” don’t have much to do with photography—mostly it’s about getting from point A to point B without getting your head cut off, then finding a signal and an outlet.

For what it’s worth, here’s some advice for first timers heading out to the badlands.

Wear Your Seat Belt… it’s the traffic that’s most likely to kill you.
Learn How To Say “Hello” and “Thank You” and To Count To Ten
Stop Looking For the “Front Line”—It’s a Mirage..”battlefield” has been replaced by the “battlespace,”
Equip Yourself With the Right Gear… Avoid the faux-commando stuff …Bring plastic (not your credit cards)… Pack your go bag – AKA, your grab bag, jump bag, snatch bag, bug-out bag, etc.
Embedding Has Both Perks and Consequences… You can spend an entire deployment embedded with the US Marines in Diyala or Helmand, but don’t fool yourself that you know anything about Iraq or Afghanistan—what you’ve seen is the inside of an armored bubble.
Get In Shape Before Deploying… I’m hauling a backpack that’s more than 50% of my body weight.
Fixers: The Tour Guides of War Reporting… don’t trust them blindly… many of the ones I’ve worked with are dead now.
Don’t Follow the Pack…by the time it’s “news,” it’s pretty old.
Visit Lightstalkers.org… sharing network of people who do inadvisable things in sketchy places.

Found it on Exposure Compensation.

NY Magazine has a well reported story by Andrew Goldman on the financial predicament Annie Leibovitz finds herself in today. There’s some awesome quotes in the story referencing her legendary temper and insecure perfectionism but the financial meltdown is simply astounding to read about.

No matter what you think of Annie’s pictures today she’s clearly a very talented photographer, has long been a pioneer in this industry and deserves some level of respect from everyone. But, of course these quotes are too juicy not to republish:

[…]Her bloated work expenses were a chronic concern. Anthony Accardi, Leibovitz’s onetime printer, recalls that jobs were often rushed, like the time he had to show up to a lab at 3 a.m. to pick up film of Bill Clinton and have work prints ready by 7 a.m., a job so hurried that he billed Condé Nast three times his regular rate. Accardi was stunned by the number of work prints Leibovitz would order, and apparently so was Condé Nast. After Accardi printed 300 oversize work prints of a Roseanne Barr shoot and billed Vanity Fair some $15,000, he received a letter from Graydon Carter himself, informing him that after this job, he’d be paid for no more than 50 such prints. “Like I was going to tell Annie that?” Accardi says with a laugh. “She would’ve boxed my ears.”

Eccles says Leibovitz could be downright tyrannical. “I once narrowly escaped being hit by a pair of shoes,” he says. “To this day, I’ve never been as nervous photographing a subject as I have assisting her. And that includes the several times I’ve been sent to the White House.” Leibovitz, Eccles says, once slammed her fists on a table, swearing she was going to kill him after a lighting test hadn’t gone well. “Go ahead, hit me,” Eccles said. He was by then so accustomed to the behavior, he says, that he didn’t flinch. “You’re not afraid of me,” Leibovitz lamented, skulking off. “It’s not fun anymore.” After her outbursts, Eccles says, Leibovitz would almost always call and apologize. Still, he left on good terms. “I adore Annie,” he says. “I’ll go to the mat for her as the greatest photographer there ever was in any genre.”

[…]In 2007, Leibovitz agreed to take Tina Brown’s portrait for her Princess Diana biography. “I thought she would just take a snap at my home,” Brown says. Leibovitz insisted that the shoot be on the beach near Brown’s summer home in Quogue, even though it was March and freezing. Leibovitz showed up in a van with a stylist and assistant. A second car stuffed full of clothes soon arrived. A wind machine would eventually be engaged. This was all on Leibovitz’s dime; she refused to charge Brown a cent. Unsatisfied with the day’s work, Leibovitz suggested that they try again the next day. “We’re through!” Brown told her, appreciative but worn out. “She’s a massive perfectionist,” Brown says, “and absolutely doesn’t care about the impact on her own bottom line.”

[…]Leibovitz has to come up with $24 million, plus interest, by this September. Under the terms of the agreement, says a person familiar with the loan, Art Capital could be entitled to up to 22.5 percent of all the proceeds from the sale of any of Leibovitz’s work—even for two years after she’s paid off the loan. And that percentage could increase to close to 50 percent if she were to default.

Read the entire story on the NYMag website (here).

Stella Kramer interviews (here) photographer Louie Psihoyos (spent 17 years traveling the world shooting for National Geographic) about his career and his new movie The Cove.

Any advice for new photographers?
The only advice I would have for a young still photographer would be to forget all advice and follow your passion with a passion. The Universe has a strange way of supporting lunatics like us that refuse to live inside the box.

There is no box.

The film looks amazing:

“I would rather have 10 people who understand and appreciate my work, than ten thousand who get excited because they’re told it’s the thing to do. I love appreciation, we all do. But, I don’t photograph for anybody but myself.”

“I don’t think of it in terms of money. Once the work is completed that’s a different thing. I might make a portfolio to sell, but I don’t have that thought in mind when I go out to make a photograph. I do it just for the love and excitement.”

Read the full interview (here).