Author: A Photo Editor

I’ve had my fill of the news oriented best pictures of the year lists so I wanted to create my own but I’m a little too lazy to do all the research (the bohemian would agree). Maybe you could give me a hand.

I’ll start off with two amazing covers. Peter Yang’s photo of Obama for Rolling Stone (here) and Platon’s cover of Willie Nelson for Texas Monthly (here). It’s so rare that a great photograph is made into a cover that these really had an impact on me.

Brent Stirton’s Gorilla killing story was one of those pieces that kept popping up everywhere and seems to win an award in every contest it was entered: http://www.brentstirton.com/feature-gorillas.php

Pieter Hugo’s hyena men is another incredible subject executed perfectly by a great photographer: http://www.pieterhugo.com/nigeria/index.html

Damon Winter deserves an award for breaking out of the pack of heavy political coverage this year. His Obama pictures for the NYTimes are stunning: slideshow here

Roger Ballen is of course an incredibly talented and original photographer but it was his performance/talk at the NY photo festival that had everyone buzzing.

Who else deserves recognition?

“You have to be really ambitious but you have to balance that with patience. You have to have both.”

This is part two of my interview with Chris Buck (part one here). I mentioned yesterday how shoots with Chris always came in to the office with pleasant surprises in the contacts. Unexpected shots. I had assumed this was because he was coming up with ideas on the fly, but that’s not quite how it works. Read on to see how Chris manages to achieve these little surprises, how he arrived at his style and so much more.

APE: Was there a eureka moment with your photography where you thought I’m onto something or this feels really good to me?

The build up of my career has been very gradual. There were benchmarks, but they were so far into my career that it didn’t feel like they changed the momentum or direction of my career. When I was about 30, which was 6 years in there was a turning point, because I began to see the various influences on my work come into play and it felt like maybe I’d arrived at having some kind of visual style. If it existed before that I hadn’t seen it. I’d always envied the people in photo school who had a visual style right out of the gate. I didn’t have that. I had an interest in a certain subject matter, but I didn’t have a visual style. it It was probably a good instinct that I didn’t push it, because eventually it found me.

Anyway, one of the pictures that felt like it had that visual style and oddly it’s an Irving Penn homage is a picture of Elvis Costello. What it has in it that feels like me is a certain discomfort with the physical body. There’s a lot of work in ’94 that I’m very proud of that show markers of on my style There’s a certain kind of awkwardness with the body, a certain kind of framing and a certain distance from the subject. Then just a little bit of a sense of humor that creeps in subtly. My pictures of Chris Farley and Julia Child would fall in there too and those were shot within a few weeks of each other.

I think that may also be a function of having testicular cancer and turning 30 at the time as well. I remember thinking that I had always thought one day I want to be as good as Irving Penn. But then I came to some kind of recognition that I will never be as good as Irving Penn, so I’m just going to be who I am and it will be fine. Recognizing that made me step into my skin more comfortably and in a weird way helped me to get to the point where maybe someday I could be as good as Penn.

APE: On your contact sheets there are Chris Buck moments and there are pictures of people standing around. How do you get clients to pick the Chris Buck moments?

I think to be a great photographer you have to be a great editor of your work. I look at the photographers I admire and a lot of it is in the editing. When I look at my contact sheets I think of it as being a sculptor. How they start off with this big piece of stone and they chip away till they find whatever it is they’re trying to create.

When you go into a shoot you have your intentions and your hopes, but when you look at your contact sheets you have to do the best that you can to separate those hopes and intentions from what you actually have. Because, you may have some gems in there that don’t really connect to what you were trying to get out of the shoot. You sometimes just have to go with that so you whittle down the shots to find the perfect piece in the middle. I do a first edit and then a second edit to get down to those 6 frames to hand in.

APE: Do you have a few secrets about the business that you can share with us?

You have to be really ambitious but you have to balance that with patience. You have to have both.

APE: Can you tell me something you did early on in your career that led to your success?

Living with my parents. It allowed me financial flexibility. For the first five years of my career I didn’t make much money, but I kinda didn’t need to. I lived at home and saved money and then that little bit of money I saved I brought to New York with me when I moved here and I lived off that. In New York I basically only took the jobs I really wanted, so I wasn’t sitting around thinking what compromises do I need to make to make a living. I ended up doing jobs pretty much how I wanted. Even when I did shoots that were commercial I always shot stuff for me as well, so when I got to the point where I had some success, my original vision was largely intact. That was really, really crucial.

I didn’t want to become one of these people who starts off kinda interesting with some edge and then 15 years in you have a successful commercial career but the pictures are unmoving and not very interesting. Not compromising served me well, because when I started getting commercial work, I only got top level commercial work, but there is also a price to pay. I’m not nearly as successful as I’d like to be in magazines or in advertising. There are a lot of subjects I don’t get access to because I don’t make overly flattering pictures or power portraits. In this last political year I got one call and that was to photograph Al Franken. So, I’m definitely aware of the work I lose because of how I shoot, but don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to come off as sour grapes. Ok, look there’s some bitterness about it but still in the end I will choose having the career I have, doing the pictures I like, as opposed to another career where I get all the access.

APE: I wanted to ask you about marketing. What are your thoughts about marketing and how important is it for your career.

2009 is going to be a really big promotional year for me. It’s sort of lined up with the way I’m redoing my website because besides the main portfolio I’m adding a bunch of sections that I can launch every two months, so it gives me an excuse to send a little email like “hey, I’m doing a thing” to clients and I’ll have a rotating gallery that’s themed as well. I’ve been shooting long enough that I can show all pictures with a red theme or pictures with musicians. The new site will launch quietly between Christmas and New Years.

APE: I tell photographers all the time that if you want people to come visit your site you got to put something new up there. Don’t send that email every month that says go check out my site because I checked it out the last time you sent it to me.

It seem like young photographers are better about updating their sites and portfolios maybe.

APE: Yes.

They probably have more time but they also have more to prove. They’re also getting better so the last shoot they’ve done may be the best one they’ve done.

APE: I’ve found the young photographers to be incredibly savvy and they’re using the web, blogging and projects to get their work out there.

I believe there are two kinds of photographers. There are those who look at other peoples work and there are those who don’t. I’m not one to look at someone else’s work. I find it more distracting than helpful. I tend to be generous with young photographers and I’m open to meeting with people but I don’t really look at my competitors work.

APE: That actually fits with how I would describe your photography because I think the pictures are quite unexpected. So, maybe looking at the work of other photographers would invade your thoughts.

Yeah, maybe.

APE: Is marketing a big part of becoming successful as a photographer?

I do think it’s important. There’s not a lot of opportunities for Photo Editors or Art Buyers to actually meet the photographers so if you can send out a printed piece and email that has some personality they can get a sense of who you are and how you might deal with subjects and how pleasant you might be to deal with on the phone. That stuff is crucial to getting jobs. People are still gonna hire people that they kind of like the vibe of.

I don’t market as much as I should and to be honest I got to the point where the work I was creating on shoots assignments wasn’t holding together well enough enough as a group for a little booklet to send out. So, I started shooting from scratch for my promo pieces and I’ve been shooting three projects over the last two and a half years, two of which are ready now and I’ve got one that I’m going to shoot for another year or two. The two that are pretty much shot are ISN’T, a series of portraits of celebrity look-a-likes, and Chris Buck’s Chris Bucks, which are all portraits of other people with my name.

APE: I have this idea about how you shoot, that everything happens on set. Do you know what the picture is going to be beforehand?

I do a lot of research before a portrait shoot, because I don’t want to go into a shoot scratching my head thinking what am I going to do here and I don’t really have time during the shoot to come up with ideas.

Here’s a typical shoot: I’m given an assignment, I research the person a bit, read some interview’s, then talk to the magazine and finally go away and write up 7 different ideas for shots. I’ll go somewhere quiet and sit and think of ideas. I also have a list of ideas that I’ve been building over the last 10 years or so.

APE: Wait, you have a written down list with 10 years of ideas?

Oh, it’s like 10 ten pages long, but I’ll get back to that in a minute. So, I come up with a rough list, just free association ideas like 2 or 3 pages on a notepad. Then I’ll go back and see, what can I really build an idea on here, then I’ll email the magazine and say here’s what I’m thinking but I won’t tell them all my ideas, maybe half of them and these are only the ideas I’m seriously thinking of considering. I don’t tell them all the ideas because I don’t want them to come back and say no to things that I know I can pull off relatively easily. I might buy a simple prop and have an idea that I can do with the subject that I don’t even need to tell them. I always have ideas I tell them and ideas I don’t, because if I tell them and they say no then I do it anyway, they will ask why I’m wasting time on ideas they’re not interested in.

When I actually go into the shoot I’ve learned I need to be ready to throw the ideas away if I realize they’re not going to work out or something better comes along. So, when I go to location I start over again with my pad of paper and write down places I think are interesting. Then I go back to my original idea list and say I want to throw out these and keep these. One of the reasons I mentioned this is I really put a full range of ideas from “this person will do anything” to “this person will do nothing” in case I need to find a safe shot that will still be visual. For example when I shot with Buzz Aldrin he was very uncomfortable being shot and he wanted to know why we were doing each shot, so I had to place him in a beautiful environment and all he had to do was sit there and the shot looked really cool. But there’s other people who are willing to do crazy shit and you want to be ready for that because you can’t always know. For example when I shot Billy Bob Thornton I had this idea of him urinating on the backdrop and amazingly he said yes so I try to be ready for both. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way because I’ve gotten in there with someone and they’re like “what have you got? let’s Let’s go crazy” and I wished I’d prepared for it.

You thought that I work it out on the spot but the reason why I make the notes is I get really nervous. So, otherwise I’d just forget.

APE: Ok, back to this master list. When do the ideas go on the list?

After the shoot I’ll put the ideas I didn’t use on the list. But on a new shoot I definitely go to the master list last because I don’t want to be recycling ideas I’ve already thought of. I want to come up with something new. I think the best ideas are the fresh ones anyways but when I’m not sure of what I have I’ll go back to that list, but it literally will take me 45 minutes to go through it. It’s so detailed now.

APE: Are there ideas at the beginning of the list that you’ve never done that are good ideas.

There are ideas on here that are so crazy I don’t think I will ever do them. That would be a great idea for a book, to actually shoot every idea on the list.

APE: That would take you like a year.

No, no that would take me ten years. Here I’ll break out the list and read to you from it. Alright well I actually have 2 two lists. One list is the original list I made which is broken into sections like: Working The Location, Location Ideas, Lighting, Poses, Styling, Props, Backdrops and Studios, Technical Stuff and then General Approaches. And then I have a section called Vows and Declarations which is just things I want to be doing in the future or whatever. Then I’ve got another list and it’s basically a list of people I’ve photographed and the ideas I wanted to do with them and didn’t do. So here’s the top of the list:

Moby: with a fat whore, broken glass, bubbles, pulling an actual prank, in the trunk of a car, hotel lobby with his pants down, not exciting.

Obviously some of it is very vague like “not exciting.” That could be anything. Once I do a shot I take it off the list because it’s a successful execution and I don’t want to do it anymore.

Werner Herzog: Taxidermy rooster (he thinks roosters are evil), holding a bunny, feeding an animal while dressed as the same type of animal, with a celebrity impersonator, doing something precarious, drinking from a water fountain, washing his face.

APE: What about working with publicists. It must be a challenge for you to get some of these ideas past the publicist.

For a long time I just kind of ignored publicists and if they stepped in and said “we’d rather not do that” obviously I respected their wishes but I’ve learned through experience that some publicists are shy people and they need to be invited into the process. That’s something I actively do now and it’s working out really well.

There’s often some aspect of compromise on my part. They will say “you know Chris I see why it’s an interesting picture but I don’t see our subject doing that.” I find they tend to say “we will do this but we wont do that.” I don’t present ideas that are terrible so I’ll say “I love this idea will you give it a go” and more times than not they will say “yeah, why not” or they’ll say “let’s do a test and see how it looks.” If I deal with them one to one they tend to be very open. Most tend to be very open to what I want to do.

APE: But, not always, right?

Here’s the idea I had for William Shatner: In the living room wearing a bathing suit dripping on the carpet. I told him that idea and he was like, “that’s the worst idea I have ever heard.”

So, I shot a picture of him getting arrested and crossed “getting arrested” off my list.

“I think there’s a certain arrogance that goes with wanting to do something like this.”

That’s Chris Buck telling me what it takes to become a photographer; it’s one of many astute insights he had when I talked to him on the phone several weeks ago. Chris is one of my all time favorite photographers. I worked with him several times when I was Photo Directing and the best part is always when you get that box of contacts after a shoot because it feels like Christmas morning when you open it. There are the smartly executed pictures you talked about and then there are always surprises, pictures and ideas you weren’t expecting in there as well. You will discover why that happens and more perceptive insights into the business in part two of this interview tomorrow.

I consider Chris to be one of the great editorial portrait photographers of our generation, he also cares very deeply about the business of photography and was very generous with his time for this interview. Here’s what we talked about:

APE: You just had your 20th anniversary.

That’s 20 years just being a full time photographer not making a living any other way. I say that because that’s how I define being a photographer.

APE: Yeah, that’s how I define professional photographer as well.

I was the photo editor at a pop magazine in Canada called Graffiti for a year after getting out of college.

APE: I would love to get a snapshot of what you were like 20 years ago and what was going through your head.

Funny you should ask, because I just ran across this footage from 21 years ago where I was interviewing my mom and sister and they turned the camera on me and started asking me questions, “what are you up to, what are your plans for the future” and I talk a little bit about how I want to photograph bands and I want to photograph other people and just shoot portraits for a long long time. It’s amazing because I ended up saying what I ended up doing.

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APE: So, what made you think you could become a professional photographer 20 years ago?

Well, obviously I wasn’t totally sure. I think there’s a certain arrogance that goes with wanting to do something like this. I was living in Toronto at the time, I looked around at the photography that was being made in Toronto at the time and thought, this is really lame, this is not the way portraits should be done. And I think that was the impetuous that gave me fuel to last me through the first five years, when I was really not making a living financially.

APE: That’s a pretty bold statement to make. It’s not something you would really hear from photographers today.

I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, I had a fair amount of humility, I still lived with my parents in the suburbs. I considered assisting and looked around and thought there were two, probably actually one photographer that I felt like I could learn something from and so that’s how I felt. I saw the work I was doing at the time and felt it was as good and I kind of imagined what I could do and thought it was far more interesting than what was being done. I really think that’s important and If you don’t feel that way at the beginning of your career or after a year or so out of college then you probably shouldn’t be shooting.

One of the things I say to young photographers now is that what you react against is far more powerful than what you are influenced by. I loved Irving Penn and Anton Corbijn at the time and it’s one thing for me to be influenced by them and say I want to make cool pictures like them but it’s something completely different to see the mid 80’s sunset lighting with blue sky behind (that was the prominent look at the time) and think “how lame.” For me there’s no mystery to it and it’s very heroic which is also something I didn’t like, so I find my reaction against that stuff to be far more exciting

Reacting against photography was much better for me, because there were many more avenues to go down and say “this is what a portrait should look like,” instead of saying “I want to make pictures that look like this.” When you react against something you can go in so many different directions then when you are influenced positively because that’s a much more narrow influence.

APE: Ok so you meet with a lot of young photographers and you have this internship program, so do a lot of them have this attitude.

The arrogance?

APE: Yes. I want to know if it’s changed in 20 years. Do young photographers still think like this?

I think different photographers find their paths in different ways and some do start off being very influenced by someone and then they shake that off after a few years. So, I’m not saying someone who is influenced by Nan Golden or Philip Lorca DiCorcia is necessarily someone to be written off. They might develop into something really interesting but I don’t think it’s the best way to start out.

James Mahon is someone who assisted me and is now shooting fashion and we will have huge arguments about how things are done. He definitely has some arrogance and in many a ways it’s one of the most powerful things about him.

APE: It’s interesting because as a former client of yours I wouldn’t necessarily call you arrogant.

Oh really? There was that one shoot I did for you where someone who was working for you at the time sent me a shot list and I called you and said “Rob, I assumed you hired me to do what I do, is this really what you’re looking for.”

APE: Oh right. I guess I never felt you came off that way, but maybe it’s because that how I expect photographers at your level to act.

You factored that in, but some may see it as arrogance.

APE: That brings up something interesting because many young photographers feel like their hands are tied when it comes to client demands because the client can just go off and hire someone else. When you were young how did you behave.

Honestly, it’s an issue I still deal with. I was in Austin recently and I looked up Dan Winters and we went for lunch. And I asked him “Dan, you have a reputation for handing in just one picture or however many pictures they might run. You’ve got to be kidding me, you really do this?” He was like “Yeah, I do.” We talked most of the lunch about that. It was really inspiring for me. I try to give much tighter edits now. It’s important because potential clients will look at my work in magazines and either say “Chris Buck is not as interesting as he once was” or they will say “this is a really cool picture and this is what I expect of him.”

But, you know I live in a real world too and it’s a place that’s complex and not always generous to you, so there are clients I give more pictures to, but from 2 years ago to now it’s half as many frames as I used to turn in. I went and saw Larry Fink recently and he talked about being on a shoot and being humiliated by the shooting circumstances. He’s been doing this for 40 years now and he still puts himself in those situations. It’s good for young photographers to hear that, because it’s not like you get to a point where everything is easy.

APE: Are their myths that you have to dispel when talking to younger photographers about the business that come up over and over again?

There are so many things.

One of the main things is that most people don’t make it quickly. They think that If you are meant to be successful in photography it should just take a few years and the obvious stories are about Irving Penn, or David LaChappelle. Larry Fink is a great example of the alternate narrative and one of the things I really admire about his career is that in a way his name became known to most people 30 years into his career and that’s kind of amazing. The young photographers tend to know about the people who made it in 5 years but that’s really, really unusual. If you go look at the top 100 photographers working today most of them made it in 10 to 15 years not in under 5. I think that’s really important to know. People get into it and in 3 years they’re like “I’m getting good feedback but I’m not getting a ton of work.” It took me 12 years before people started saying to me “wow, you’ve made it.”

Another thing that’s like a personal crusade for me is trying to talk young photographers out of assisting. Because, I really think it’s a dangerous road to go down. I really try to discourage it. The example I give is that assisting a photographer to become a photographer is like assisting the CEO to become a CEO one day.

APE: That’s an unusual point of view.

Well, if you look at the careers of assistants there’s a number of problems with it. You can certainly learn things from assisting, but I guess what I recommend for people if they feel any clarity about who they are as a photographer then I would really recommend that they intern rather than assist. And, I mean a real internship not sweeping floors. Don’t intern for photographers where you have no access to them or the shoots. People tell me they intern for big name photographers for their resume, but why do you have a resume. If you’re a photographer you don’t need a resume. Your portfolio is your resume, not some piece of paper.

You can certainly learn more from assisting, fair enough, but if you’re any good at assisting you end up doing it for 5-8 years. That’s a long, long time to not be focusing on your own work. And people say they’re only going to do it for a couple years but if you’re any good at it you don’t.

APE: When I think about some of the famous photographers who were also assistants for famous photographers, they didn’t really do it for too long. Maybe they assisted a couple years and they usually had a bad attitude about it too.

I was having lunch with a couple of my assistants on a shoot and one of them said “half the people I work for never assisted”. When you think about it, that you’re assisting to become a photographer yet half the people you assist for never did it. Statistically it’s kind of a crazy number. So, is that really the ideal route to becoming a photographer? I think it’s certainly one but there are other routes that aren’t really being talked about. When you’re 32 and you want to stop assisting and try and shoot full time and you’ve been making a decent living for awhile how do you transition to shooting full time when you’re not going to make any money for 2-3 years.

APE: I see the same thing with people who want to transition to Photo Editing mid career, because you reach a point where you can’t really intern or work for no money anymore.

Also, having to live as a starving artist at 32 is a really painful thing. When you’re 25 living as a starving artist is actually kind of fun.

APE: You have assistants, so as soon as you get a new assistant do you tell them about this?

No, of course not, if they’re great assistants I don’t want to lose them.

Part 2 tomorrow.