The work is primarily subject-driven. All decisions flow from there. The photographs are all made in response to a unique subject, in particular context, at a specific moment in time. The thoughtful preparedness that defines my working method actually facilitates spontaneity and allows me to embrace surprise. I always have a game plan but view it as merely the jumping off point.
To me, style is like your fingerprint. Nobody else has it.
People aren't hiring just a picture, they're hiring someone they can work with. That plays a big role .
The picture I was hoping for is never the picture I get, but yeah, I think they fail all the time. Fortunately my clients don't think they do, so I can continue to have a career. But I just look at them and think.
There's no reason you'd shoot Mother Theresa and Newt Gingrich the same way.
I never do pictures that I've done before - but I really try not to. Whenever I get an assignment I try to think how to shoot this person for this story in this magazine at this point in time.
Magazines don't have enough confidence to have their own style, so they use a borrowed style. That is shocking to me, but your perception is very accurate. It's a way to be more commercially viable, but to me, that's not having a style, that's having a schtick.
I wanted to grow in terms of making pictures, not adapting to new software and technology. But that's the game now.
Normally I do all my own post work. It's not that I do it better than anyone else, I just do it my way. I make decisions. People who print at labs are probably far better printers, but they won't make my decisions mid-process. I don't want to be out of the loop. I want to be a photographer and do all of it.
I'm an artist in residence, I've still been able to accept commercial jobs, and what I'll do is I'll make little videos on the side that I then bring back to the school and show the students the next day.
My brother used to say some people have an "inferiority simplex." It's not that they're under the delusion that they're inferior; they actually are inferior and they secretly know it.
The weirdest thing to me is that magazines would never do this for their writers. They would never hire a writer who writes for another magazine; they want to have their own stable of writers. Newsweek would never hire a TIME writer, and TIME would never hire a Newsweek writer - but they would both hire the same photographer to shoot a cover for them.
Digital held no romance for me at all. I hated it. I miss my big cameras. The working process, I miss it.
There are a lot of decisions to make, creatively. Now, with digital, you can really be the author of your own work. From the beginning to the end of the process, you control everything.
A lot of the challenge and the reason for the success of those one-shot photographers is that their pictures almost have to be subject proof. Because you usually only have a few minutes with the person. You never know who's going to walk into the room - whether they're going to be friendly, grumpy, sick of photographers, or between meetings.
I was shooting lots of large format portraits then but I've since changed to digital, where you have so much more control. There are millions of things you can do with digital; you can be more spontaneous, and you're more in control of your color palette.
I hate to say it because I think people are risk averse these days more than ever. Before they even pick up the phone, they know what the picture's going to be. So there's a certain comfort in that, a certain security that they can lay out the cover of the magazine and kind of know what it's going to be.
The last thing people want is a surprise, these days.
Shoot what you can't help but shoot
A photographer is responsible for creating a climate in which they can do their best work.
