Mapplethorpe: the man & his legacy duffy’s mona lisa the future of food photography lara jade: Behind closed doors the debate: women in photography the new alternative to photoshop Issue #06
Martin PARR
the big interview
Welcome
letter from the editor travel, experiment, be patient, and persist enri Cartier-Bresson said your first 10,000 photos will be your worst. And it’s a sentiment echoed in this month’s big interview with Magnum president, Martin Parr. “I take many, many more bad pictures than most of your readers put together,” he says on page 24. His words should come as an inspiration to us all – “the hard work is making the pictures,” he says. Even Parr, with his decades of experience, countless exhibitions, books and accolades, is striving to make more and more, and better, photographs. Travel, experiment, be patient and persist, as you never know when a great image will appear, is the message. This admission and the flexibility Parr demonstrates add weight to Lottie Davies’ column on page 114, where she says that there’s no room for egos in today’s industry. Everyone has to hustle, and being personable as you get the job done is as much a part of running a good business as managing your accounts. Perhaps it is the digital age that’s been the final nail in the coffin for egomaniac photographers, as Lottie suggests.
With the threat of online reviews and shaming hanging over you, Trip Advisor-style, you can’t ignore the potential damage to your reputation. But it’s a double-edged sword, as businesses in the digital era rely on online hearsay. It brings us numerous opportunities, one of which is access to more potential clients than ever. We hear from the experts on just one of the ways you can utilise this opportunity, using e-newsletters, on page 90. Business knowledge is, of course, integral to your success. But I hope that this month’s issue, above all, helps you to maintain sight of why you’re in this profession: the love of making photographs. Be inspired on page 14, where we revel in a Mapplethorpe retrospective, or pages 34, 50, or 58, where we delve into the impressive portfolios of Ian Teh, Ed Thompson and Connie Zhou. And for yet more inspiration, join us at The Photography Show at Birmingham’s NEC from 19-22 March, where Bailey, Bruce Gilden and Alec Soth are among those taking to the Super Stage. Lara Jade, who shows us around her New York studio on page 96, is also speaking there on Sunday 20. We hope to see you there too. Emma-Lily Pendleton Editor emma-lily.pendleton@futurenet.com
Did you miss any of our first FIVE editions? You can buy back issues of these at www.bitly.com/pp_back. You can also download digital versions – see page 56. MARCH 2016 _ PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY _ 3
contents Issue 6 / March 2016 /
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profiles ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE 14 The life and work of the controversial New York art photographer MARTIN PARR 24 The Magnum president discusses his unique documentary photography IAN TEH 34 The British-Malaysian photographer on targeting the heart, not the head JILL MEAD 41 Jill Mead and stylist Rosie Reynolds on contemporary food photography
MY COVER BRIAN DUFFY Chris Duffy tells the story of his father’s Aladdin Sane cover shoot
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14
robert mapplethorpe: revisited
24
martin parr: THE BIG INTERVIEW
rising stars Peter Zelewski The portrait photographer on his acclaimed series of street shots
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Personal projects an unsettling sight 50 Ed Thompson explains how infrared can cast everything in a new light A SENSE OF SPACE 58 Connie Zhou discusses her shoot at the TWA terminal at JFK Airport
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to subscribe turn to page 56
The Business STORAGE WARS 78 With image files getting bigger, we explore your options for storing data round table 84 Experts examine how new feminism is influencing photography
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ed thompson: AN UNSETTLING SIGHT
MARKETING 90 How to use email newsletters to boost client bookings
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Ian teh: DARK DREAMS OF NEW WORLDS
Š natasha caruana
my space 96 Fashion photographer Lara Jade walks you through her workspace
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round table: FEMINISM IN PHOTOGRAPHY
regulars
58
connie zhou: A SENSE OF SPACE
martin middlebrook subscription offers news calendar expos & festivals Bookshelf read this... pro kit the long view next month lottie Davies
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Contributors Issue 6 /March 2016 /
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This month’s featured pros
Just some of the photographers, industry experts and writers that feature in our sixth issue…
martin parr
CHRIS duffy
Lottie Davies
In our exclusive interview, the Magnum president reveals all about self-publishing, beach experiments and a most unexpected sideline.
The son of Brian Duffy tells the story of how his father collaborated with David Bowie to create the legendary album cover for 1973’s Aladdin Sane.
In her latest column, Davies ponders whether arrogance is more important to success in the photography world than the quality of your work.
connie zhou
jill mead
peter zelewski
Connie Zhou explains her overriding passion for large, daunting structures, and talks us through her latest project: capturing the TWA terminal at JFK.
Editorial food photographer Jill Mead discusses how she and stylist Rosie Reynolds are leading the way in contemporary food photography.
Street photographer Peter Zelewski explains how he lies in wait for several hours in the centre of London, looking for the perfect portrait subjects.
ian teh
Martin Middlebrook
ed thompson
Ian Teh discusses his unique perspective on Asia’s economic miracle, casting subjects as tiny figures within vast, dystopian landscapes.
Middlebrook returns from Kenya, where his passion for photography was re-ignited. He launches a campaign to return for the project’s completion.
Ed Thompson explains how he uses infrared to cast our world in a whole new light, and bring the strange and uncanny to the fore.
paul martineau
Lara Jade
Greg Woodward
Paul Martineau, who is curating the Getty Museum’s exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, talks us through his ground-breaking work.
Fashion photographer Lara Jade shows us around her workspace and home studio in New York City; a conversion from an old lingerie factory.
The sport, lifestyle and advertising photographer explains why his Sony A7R II is the most versatile camera he’s ever owned.
catherine grant
Craig Fleming
Al OVERDRIVE
An art historian and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, Grant shares her views on the influence of feminism on today’s photographers.
Fashion photographer Craig Fleming explains why newsletters are a more effective way of getting work than speculative emails or phone calls.
The picture editor and photographer chooses a favourite title from his bookshelf, Dan Winters’ story of his career to date, The Road to Seeing.
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© Vignes Balasingam
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Editorial contributors
Editor Emma-Lily Pendleton emma-lily.pendleton@futurenet.com Art editor Michelle McLaren michelle.mclaren@futurenet.com Designer Rosie Webber rosie.webber@futurenet.com Operations editor Tom May Head of testing Angela Nicholson angela.nicholson@futurenet.com
Future is an award-winning international media group and leading digital business. We reach more than 49 million international consumers a month, and create world-class content and advertising for passionate consumers online, on tablet and smartphone, and in print.
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Kathrine Anker, Brian K Arnold, Matthew Bennion, Colby Brown, Natasha Caruana, Michael Clark, Amy-Rose Deffley, Victoria Dovey, Catherine Grant, Tony Hampel, Mark Holbourne, Max Houghton, James Howe, Lara Jade, Ali Jennings, Rod Lawton, Paul Martineau, Brodie McIntosh, Kevin Mullins, Chris Orange, Al Overdrive, Rui Perera, Rosie Reynolds, Matthew Richards, Olivier Richon, Britt Salvesen, Mihir Shah, Jenny Stewart, Tom Tate, Ian Teh, Ed Thompson, Greg Thurtle, Greg Woodward, Jess Yarwood
Advertising
Advertising manager Sasha McGregor sasha.mcgregor@futurenet.com Account director Matt Bailey matt.bailey@futurenet.com Account manager Claire Harris claire.harris@futurenet.com
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Column _ Martin _ Middlebrook
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Martin _ Middlebrook _ Column
i have no pride. I had no choice As Martin Middlebrook casts off his pride, he regains his passion I have returned from Kenya, where I’ve been working on a project about elephants, the ivory trade, and its people. My client is a charity. The crunch is that funds need to be allocated to core activities, of which – despite profound protestations – I am not absolutely central. The nerve. So I’m going to jump into a pond I have stared at on many occasions but never dipped my toe into: crowdfunding. Last week I sat in a cold Parisian apartment, looking at two cameras and talking utter rubbish for two hours. Somebody very clever then turned that into a finely-honed missile: the video pitch. It was difficult; not the talking rubbish bit – that’s a speciality – but trying to compact so many emotional and political components into four coherent minutes. As I finished my punchy 20-second opening, I was told I’d been speaking for nine minutes. There is a deep irony here, of course. A crowdfunding campaign’s success relies on social media participation, something I’ve said I find to be a fruitless illusion. But I’m happy to be viewed as a complete arse from this point on, as long as we succeed in funding this project’s completion. In an underground bunker in Nairobi I viewed 140 tonnes of collected and confiscated ivory; $100m-worth that will be burned in a symbolic ceremony in April. Amongst the horde were some of the largest tusks that once roamed the savannahs and forest of Africa. If anything remains, it will be a subspecies with impoverished tusks – in the evolutionary war, it now pays to be small. As I photographed the ivory strong room, I was moved. For the first time in a long time, I thought, ‘This is why I do this’. Photographers are enormously privileged, and I forget this too often. The more I have lived and breathed this, the more my heart has jumped and the more passion I have felt. I knew I was doomed in a bunker in Kenya. I realised there and then that I would happily prostitute myself on social media to fulfil this brief – I have no pride. I had no choice. This is what this job does to you. You can have all the theories in the world, but in practice I am prepared to embrace whatever might edge us closer to our goal. After all, saving the elephant is hardly unimportant, and I am guessing a good few billion others feel the same. MARCH 2016 _ PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY _ 9
My _ Cover _ Brian _ Duffy
Pop’s Mona Lisa David Bowie and Brian Duffy’s chemistry reached its zenith with the Aladdin Sane cover. Chris Duffy tells the story behind the shoot As the world absorbed news of David Bowie’s death on 10 January, there was an explosion of interest in his work. His face was on every newspaper, his albums soon flooded the charts and Bowie-related websites surged in popularity. One of them was the site for photographer Brian Duffy, which recorded 50,000 hits in the two days after Bowie died. It was a reflection of the close association between the two artists.
[Right] The cover image for 1973 album Aladdin Zane
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“We’ve been completely inundated with requests for images,” says Brian Duffy’s son, Chris, who became the Duffy Archive director after his father’s death in 2010. “It was amazing to see the outpouring of affection for David and the astonishing effect he had on people around the world.” Duffy, together with Bailey and Donovan, formed the so-called ‘black trinity’ of ambitious, streetwise fashion photographers who, in the 60s and 70s, elbowed aside the more genteel older generation. Arresting, provocative and inventive, Duffy’s fashion and portrait work featured top models including Jean Shrimpton and major cultural figures from the Beatles to William Burroughs. He worked with Bowie between 1972 and 1980 on publicity shoots for Ziggy Stardust, The Man Who Fell to Earth and album covers for Lodger and Scary Monsters. However, his most significant contribution to rock iconography was his cover to Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album. This powerfully theatrical image is sometimes referred to as the ‘Monoa Lisa of Pop’, a nickname Chris Duffy himself coined. The cover shoot, which took place in January 1973, was hurriedly arranged by Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries. Duffy had a matter of days to come up with an idea, shoot it and produce the finished image. He later recalled that Defries “set out to make the most expensive record cover he could possibly get RCA to pay for.
Brian _ Duffy _ My _ Cover
MARCH 2016 _ PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY _ 11
My _ Cover _ Brian _ Duffy
This rare shot of Bowie is featured in the Scary Monster shoot section of Five Sessions All images by Duffy © Duffy Archive™
Five Sessions, a book on Duffy’s Bowie shoots by Chris Duffy and Kevin Cann, is published by ACC Editions. Prints of Duffy’s Bowie images are available from the Duffy Archive, www. duffyphotographer.com
If it cost them fifty quid – so what? If it cost them £5,000, now they had to sit up and pay attention.” Accordingly, Duffy used the dye transfer process for the cover image as, in his words, it was “a genius method of spending the most amount of money in reproducing a colour transparency onto a piece of paper”. He opted to get the plates made in Switzerland, as it was “the most expensive place in the world”. Duffy made sure his fee also met Defries’s high expectations. Chris Duffy puts forward another reason his father chose to make a dye transfer print. “Duffy had previously shot the Pirelli calendar with artist Allen Jones and they’d used a technique of airbrushing that had to be done through the dye transfer process,” he explains. “I think that was because C-type prints weren’t stable enough to airbrush.” Bowie wanted to have a lightning flash incorporated into the image and on the day of the shoot, make-up artist Pierre La Roche began applying a small flash tattoo. “When Duffy saw it he said, ‘No, not like that,’ drew the outline of a flash across David’s face and asked Pierre to fill it in.” During the airbrushing process, Duffy directed artist Philip Castle to add a water drop (or teardrop) symbol on Bowie’s collar bone. “It’s surreal, it’s a phallic symbol in water representing sexuality and emotion. People have been arguing for years about what it means. I think it was a way for Duffy to put his stamp on the image.” The Aladdin Sane session was over in a few hours. The majority of the images were head-and-shoulders shots, though some full-length shots with Bowie in white underwear were taken for the androgynous airbrushed image in the album’s
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gatefold. The shot of Bowie with his eyes closed was an unconventional but perfect choice for the cover. “At the time, the cover artwork was quite outrageous,” Chris Duffy says. “The Aladdin Sane image was a giant leap for David, although Ziggy Stardust was a stepping stone on the way. It was certainly pretty ‘out there’ compared to what else was happening. “When David died, every single paper that came out the next day had the Aladdin Sane image on it. If you had to choose one image that encapsulated David Bowie, that would be it.” Bowie and Duffy worked together three further times after Aladdin Sane and gelled both personally and professionally. “Duffy was always very contentious,” his son recalls. “He’d say outrageous things to stir the pot and I think David connected with that. They threw a lot of ideas around and just had a chemistry that worked.” The Aladdin Sane image is a permanent record of Duffy and Bowie’s creative collaboration and, 43 years on, remains as fresh, striking and luminous as the day that it was made. David Clark