Not many artists have put their time in school to better use than Albert Watson. Born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, New York-based photographer Watson, 82, studied graphic design at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee, and film and television at the Royal College of Art in London, where he also studied photography.
Watson is renowned for his fashion and celebrity portraiture, which has appeared in magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He has also done commerial photography for brands like Prada and Chanel, created movie posters for well-known films, and has published numerous photo books. He’s won Lucie and Grammy awards and a lifetime achievement award from The Royal Photographic Society, and Queen Elizabeth II bestowed him with an Order of the British Empire in 2015 for his lifetime contribution to the art of photography. Professional Photographer spoke with Watson about his photography journey, which shows no signs of slowing down.
Mark Edward Harris (MEH): What are you working on now?
Albert Watson (AW): I’ve always been busy, and I guess I always will be. Tim Jeffries, who [is director of] the Hamiltons Gallery [in London], said to me recently, “You’ll have one foot in the grave taking pictures as they bury you.” Probably that will be the case. For the past six months I’ve been working on a huge commission from the city of Rome for an exhibition at the Palazzo Esposizioni Roma this summer and a book. It’s not so much a book on Rome as it is a book of me in Rome. … Basically, I photographed the young people as they were, but I had to go deeper and find local artists that had an interesting style and eccentricity. One was an amazing-looking tattoo artist. Another was film director Paolo Sorrentino. I spent two days photographing a fabulous woman in a gladiator outfit who performs with birds of prey in a place called Cinecittà World. In the end I did everything from nudes to cardinals from the Vatican. ... I did the whole thing with two cameras, the Leica Q3 and the Phase One IQ4, and sometimes used small Profoto strobes. The Phase One is very good for architecture and detail shots. We made our workflow double and triple efficient by doing tremendous pre-production in part because I spent seven years in my 20s in art college. The good news is, I spent seven years in art college. The bad news is, I spent seven years in art college.
MEH: What are the good and the bad about that?
AW: The good news is you have a really tremendous education in art and architecture. I started out, after four years, as a graphic designer. I then went to film school for three years and came out as a director. If I look in the mirror and ask, “Who the hell are you?” Well, you’re a graphic designer, filmmaker, and photographer. I had a successful career with fashion photography in the 1970s where I was working with handheld Nikons walking backwards while taking pictures of girls laughing, eating ice cream, or pretending to fall over, or whatever, all spontaneous hand-held motor drive shots. When I got into the 1980s, I began saying, “Well, I should do a book.” But when I began studying my pages from Vogue, the material looked thin. Sometimes a fashion picture looks really fabulous in a fashion magazine. And then put that picture in a coffee table book and it doesn’t look as good.
MEH: How did you come to create your career in the United States?
(Watson and his wife, Elizabeth, arrived in Thousand Oaks, California on Aug. 28, 1970, as his wife had gotten a job as a teacher. They moved to Los Angeles soon after.)
AW: I had a small portfolio and one connection in Los Angeles, a producer with an advertising agency. He said, “I know somebody at Max Factor. They’re one of our clients. I’ll make an appointment for you.” He sent me to their creative director and it started from there. In 1976, I did my first job for Vogue, so we decided to move to New York that same year.
MEH: In 1995, I was a guest in your class at the Santa Fe Workshops. One of the many things I took away was your use of negative fill. I don’t think it was a common approach to use black flats and black foam core back then. How did you come up with that technique?
AW: A lot of the studios you go to are white. The light bounces around, hitting walls and everything else. For me, the ideal studio is basically a black box, so the light I’m dealing with is the light I created. I once had a black studio, but it was depressing, so the studio I’m using now in New York is white, but we use a good amount of setup time getting it black. That’s where all the black foam core and so on comes in. I want total control of the light. I’ve always had the philosophy that every face has a landscape. You have the mountain of the nose and the plains and hills of the face. If you really want to photograph and explore somebody’s geography, why use the same light all the time?
MEH: What images have been most important to you so far?
AW: Probably the Alfred Hitchcock (above), not because it’s great art but because the way that picture came about changed the structure of my forward thinking. Harper’s Bazaar asked me to do a picture of Hitchcock for their holiday issue. He had given the magazine a recipe on how to cook a goose and they wanted a photograph to illustrate it. The magazine said, “You could have him hold the serving plate with a cooked goose on it.” I responded, “OK, I can do that.” But I thought about it overnight, “Wouldn’t it be nicer if the goose is plucked but not cooked yet, and he’s got a hold of it by the neck?” I offered that to the magazine and added, “I’ll put some Christmas decorations around the goose’s neck.” They loved that idea. That’s what made that shot important. I challenged the traditional approach.
Another one, which is even more minimal, is the Steve Jobs photo (below). When he came into the room, he asked, “What do you want me to do?” I said, “I actually want you to do nothing other than imagine being across the table from five or six people, and they disagree with you, but you know you’re right.” And he said, “Well, that is very easy, because I have to do that every day.” During the entire shooting he never blinked once. He just looked into he lens and had an intensity with a slight-attitude smile. It’s a minimal shot but there is something going on inside his face. That’s often a problem with models. They have the tendency to say, “I’m very pretty, don’t you think? I’ll give you pretty.”
MEH: So how do you get beyond that?
AW: Sometimes I make them laugh and when they stop laughing, I take the picture. Basically, the face begins to move or something happens. For example, I worked with an actress for the Rome project. We were in a café, and I gave her a scenario: “You have an appointment to see the man in your life. You’re waiting for him at a table, and you have a cigarette. Through the crowd of people, you see him come in. He stops at the bar and kisses a woman. What do you feel when you see that? React to that. Say anything you want with your face, with your expressions.” That’s going to give you a lot more than saying, “Oh, you look great, beautiful, beautiful, fabulous, fabulous, wonderful, wonderful!”
MEH: Can you tell us about your show in Rome this summer?
AW: It is massively confusing. All 200 prints are a minimum of 5 feet long on heavy linen adhered to a paper backing and pinned on a wall. What you’ll see on the walls is a storyboard. I presented it to the curators there that it would be like doing a movie on Rome with whatever I found interesting there.
MEH: Where do your ideas come from?
AW: I don’t have a formula and often thoughts come abstractly into my head and I’m not sure where they came from. I have a collection of almost 20,000 art books that are endless sources of inspiration. I think about a lot of young photographers. I say, “Preparation, preparation, preparation,” and they give me this argument, “I like to be spontaneous. I like to find things and just grab them.” I say, “No problem. But don’t run your life like that unless you’re Mozart. Most people can’t just pluck a tune from nothingness and make it into something that lasts a thousand years.”
Mark Edward Harris is an award-winning writer and photographer based in Los Angeles.
