In the entire history of Hollywood photography, no photographer has ever documented the craft of filmmaking the way David Strick has.

There have been many notable celebrity portraitists, from George Hurrell to Herb Ritts, who have captured the glamour of movie stars. There also have been many photojournalists, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Douglas Kirkland, who have documented movie making. But no one has done it the way Strick has been doing it for the past 30 years or so.

Strick’s images capture the often funny and sometimes poignant interplay between the reality of the filmmaking process and the fantasy of the movies themselves. These are the moments when the actuality of craft and creativity are transformed into what Strick calls Hollywood’s “industrial magic.”

“The end product of this process affects all of us so deeply, but no one ever really has paid much attention to the work itself,” he notes.

Strick published his first collection of images in the 1987 book Our Hollywood, and for many years his work was seen regularly in Premiere magazine. Beginning this summer he became a contributor to the Los Angeles Times with a weekly feature called “David Strick’s Hollywood Backlot”that can be seen both online and in the Thursday edition of the newspaper.

This publishing arrangement gives Strick a unique platform for his visual ideas and has reignited his career. He talked with American Photo recently about working in two media at once, as well as his singular vision of Hollywood.

American Photo: Not many photographers are given regular features by newspapers, so you really are breaking new ground with this new job.

David Strick: Newspapers and magazines have lots of writers who do regular columns, but this is a fairly unusual situation for a photographer. I think the most interesting part is working both for the newspaper’s online and print products.

AP: Why is that?

DS: The web is changing everything in our culture. Magazines and newspapers, where I have always published my pictures, are trying to cope with it. And the entertainment business is facing real challenges related to the Internet — diminished advertising, lower DVD sales, and piracy. I wanted to explore how the Internet could work in a positive way for all the sides I deal with.

AP: Please explain more.

DS: For one thing, the Internet has become very important for movie studios because of the way movies are marketed now. The whole idea of success now is based on opening weekends — if a movie doesn’t have a big opening, it’s going to be bad news. So generating attention to upcoming movies is the Holy Grail of all publicity efforts. About 80 percent of film reviews are now read online.

AP: That’s is an amazing fact.

DS: Also, the viral aspect of the Internet has been an essential ingredient in the marketing of movies. Studios start putting out trailers for films a year in advance of the release date. One of the advantages of early publicity like that is that the studios can take advantage of the viral aspect of the Internet. One of the first movies we featured when my column debuted in the L.A. Times was Twilight, which has a huge viral audience of dedicated fans from the books it was based on. The studios were very happy to get that early publicity from my project.

AP: Is it hard to get access to movie sets?

DS: Yes, even for someone with a track record like me. Studios and production companies are not interested in supporting somebody’s art project. They’ve got their own art projects to worry about. If you’re going to be on their sets, you’ve got to be able to show that what you’re bringing to the table is a positive thing for them.

AP: How did you take up photography?

DS: I was a typical high school photo geek. I took a picture that won an award from the Boys Club of America — it was probably the best picture I’ve ever taken, and I’m still trying to recapture that magic. Sad, isn’t it? I did a year at UCLA and later studied at the California Institute of the Arts, but I never graduated. I went to work at a startup weekly called L.A. Newspaper, but it only last six months until the investor’s money ran out. But we had some great people: Roger Black was the art director, Terry McDonnell was an associate editor, and Barry Siegel, who later won a Pulitzer for the L.A. Times, was a reporter. It was a children’s crusade.

AP: And after that?

DS: I started freelancing and worked as a stringer for the New York Times. I started putting together magazine assignments and began to come into the orbit of Hollywood assignments. Then in 1975 I shot a story for the New York Times about the decline of the city of Hollywood, and it was published so disappointingly that I realized I was turning into a complete hack. I realized that if I wanted to do anything of interest I was going to have to self-assign and do more personal projects. So I began this work on Hollywood.

AP: You have a very particular take on Hollywood and filmmaking . . .

DS: I grew up in Los Angeles and my family has been connected with the movies for three generations. My great aunt was Gale Sondergaard, who won the first academy award for best supporting actress for the movie Anthony Adverse. Her husband was Herbert Biberman, a producer. My father was a television director and producer, and my mother worked as a publicist for Universal for a time. So I have this background. But my family was always also a little on the outside of the Hollywood world — they were left-wing intellectuals. My aunt Gale and her husband were blacklisted during the McCarthy era. We were more outsider-insider Hollywood people.

AP: That’s a pretty good description of your work.

DS: With my background, I probably started with a baseline that was different from the way most other photographers looked at Hollywood. Throughout the history of Hollywood, photography has been the happy handmaiden of the studio publicity machine, with the eager partnership of magazines and newspapers. There really hasn’t been much photography that has gone beyond that kind of standard celebrity-publicity photography. The very first time I was on a movie set, I wondered why all the other photographers were doing pictures that were so predictable.

AP: How does your work differ, would you say?

DS: I’m as amazed by the craft of filmmaking as anyone else, but I wanted to go beyond that. I’m interested in something that’s not on the surface, if I can possibly find it. My style is completely documentary — everything un-posed, candid, which is important, because when you’re dealing with Hollywood, you’re dealing with a high degree of artificiality. Recapitulating artificiality by posing actors and directors in imaginative ways doesn’t appeal to me.

AP: Has working for the web changed the way you shoot?

DS: Absolutely. When you shoot for print you are constrained, whether you even realize it or not, by the format. Magazines need a lead picture, they need a horizontal, and they have room for one or two pictures on the following pages, maybe. Then you might shoot a few extras if you think the subject will syndicate well. But with the web, you can run an infinite number of pictures, and you can shoot in many various ways.

The post Behind the Scenes on Hollywood’s Biggest Movies appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Photojournalist Ed Kashi says, “At the tender age of 50 I became what I always wanted to be.” Kashi describes his trade as “advocacy journalism.” His goal, he says, is to tell visual stories that not only inform viewers but also inspire them to find “activist solutions to social problems.” Kashi, a longtime contributor to National Geographic magazine, has earned a reputation as a dogged journalist, covering the plight of the Kurdish people of Iraq and working in troubled areas such as Northern Ireland and the West Bank. But his career breakthrough occurred in 2003, with a project called Aging In America: The Years Ahead. The tender look at the issues of aging was at the forefront of a new approach to photojournalism — an approach that combined still photography, video documentary, an award-winning book, and a resource-laden website to reach as wide an audience as possible.

Kashi’s latest project, about the oil industry of the Niger Delta region of Africa, takes his notion of advocacy journalism to a new level of sophistication. First published as a 30-page feature in National Geographic in 2007, the work has been leveraged in a number of media, including a website (www.curseoftheblackgold.com), an eight-minute multi-media piece, an exhibition at the George Eastman House museum in Rochester, New York, that runs through September 1, and a new book called Curse of theBlack Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta (powerHouse, $45). The work focuses on Nigeria, one of the world’s largest producers of oil. Despite the riches the country has earned from this valuable resource over the past 50 years, its people live largely in poverty, the result of rampant corruption and a form of government the New York Times has called a “brutal kleptocracy.”

“Of all the places I’ve been as a photographer, I’d never seen such an example of injustice,” says Kashi. Coming at a time of climbing oil prices and potentially catastrophic climate change due to fossil fuel consumption, Kashi’s images are a reminder of the human cost of the world’s oil dependency. “I came away from this project feeling that oil is just this nasty, dirty stuff,” says Kashi. “It pollutes everyone and everything that it comes in contact with.”

American Photo: It’s a remarkable moment in history to bring out this big project on oil, a subject that seems to be dominating the news.

Ed Kashi: I think our response to the current oil crisis will be one of the defining issues of humankind.

AP: Like a lot of people, I associate oil production with the Middle East. So it’s interesting that you are focusing on another oil-producing region.

EK: This year marks the 50th anniversary of oil production in the Niger Delta. America buys half the oil produced there. That means that all of us in America are burning Nigerian oil — far more from there than from the Middle East. So we have a real interest in Nigeria.

AP: How did you get started on the project?

EK: In 2003 I went to Iraq to cover the aftermath of the American invasion there, and when I came back I was invited to give a lecture about my experiences at my son’s school in San Francisco. One of the parents who attended the lecture was Michael Watts, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a human-rights activist, and afterward he came up to me and told me about the situation in the Niger Delta. He’s been going there for 30 years and was working on a book about the area. He said we should work together. That was in December 2003, and by the following July I was in Nigeria shooting.

AP: And what did you find there?

EK: I’ve never been so gripped by a subject. There has been $600 billion of oil wealth accumulated in the Niger Delta over the past 50 years. This area should be as rich as Kuwait — the people should be living in wealth. But the fact is that most Nigerians live in crushing poverty. There are various reasons for this, of course. Nigeria is not a small Arab country in the Persian Gulf; it is the most populated country in Africa — one out of five Africans live in Nigeria. But the social and economic injustice is unbelievable.

AP: How long did you actually work there?

EK: That first trip lasted a month or so, and I went back in 2005 and 2006. I pitched the story to National Geographic. That was a turning point. With that backing I had the funding to spend enough time to do the story. More important, it helped me get access to the oil works, which I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. The oil companies there — Chevron, ExxonMobil, Agip from Italy, Totale from France, Shell, and others — usually don’t allow photographers to shoot their facilities.

AP: Nigeria is known for its institutionalized corruption . . .

EK: All this money, it’s intoxicating. At every level of the Nigerian government, from the national level to the state level to village chieftains, there are kickbacks and a siphoning of wealth into private hands. People love to point fingers at the oil companies for the misery in the country, and those companies could certainly do a better job in terms of protecting the environment and supporting communities. But the real problem is the Nigerian government. In a perfect world, Nigerian officials would be the guardians of their own people. But as a Nigerian environmentalist pointed out to me, even though Nigeria is a democracy, politicians are not really beholden to voters. There isn’t a tax base — government gets its money from oil. So ultimately, the politicians are going to represent oil interests.

AP: Your book explains that this kind of corruption pre-dates oil production in Nigeria.

EK: It really goes back to the 1600s and 1700s, when Nigeria was one of the main African ports for the slave trade. Then in the 1800s it was an exporter of palm oil, which greased England’s industrial revolution. All this time the chiefs and officials in Nigeria have been in the position of receiving foreigners who come and say, we want what you’ve got. And they reply, you’re not going to get it for free.

AP: What was it like working in Nigeria?

EK: I’d say it was the most dangerous place I’ve ever worked. Iraq was dangerous for obvious reasons — things exploding around you. But Nigeria was dangerous in a different way. You never felt safe there.

AP: Can you explain?

EK: In June of 2006, I was detained for four days by the Nigerian military and held for no reason. It was worse than being pinned down by fire in Iraq. When you’re being shot at, you can tell yourself, well, I’ll either live or die. But being held by the military felt like everything had been taken away from me. I wasn’t told what was going on, or why I was being held.

AP: What happened?

EK: While I was being transferred from one location to another I was able to get a cell phone call out to my assistant back in Montclair, New Jersey. I said, “Listen very carefully, here’s where I am, call everybody.” My wife is a journalist and very resourceful, and together with the National Geographic Society she was able to put pressure on the right people, and within 24 hours the BBC and Reuters were carrying stories about an American journalist being held by the Nigerian military. The American embassy also applied pressure, and I was released. Afterward, I kept thinking, I am so lucky. What if I weren’t working with a big organization like Geographic? What if I weren’t an American?

AP: What were you shooting with?

EK: Everything was shot digitally, with Canon DSLRs — the EOS 5D and the EOS Mark II. The photography is meant to be striking, but overall what I wanted to produce wasn’t an art piece but a documentary piece. I think you can look at the images and appreciate them as pure photography, but the real goal was to wake people up about this issue.

AP: That is the goal of advocacy journalism?

EK: Exactly. It’s about driving the issue forward. And what I learned doing my project about aging is that to really drive issues forward you have to get your work seen by as many people as possible. So we have taken a multi-media approach, with a traveling exhibition, a website, a one-hour television documentary, and of course a book. I think the book is still a very important part of this, even though it may be seen by only a relatively few people, compared to television or the interest. Without the book, none of the other stuff happens. It serves as a fulcrum. If a photographer does a great body of work and creates all these multi-media outlets for people to see it, if there isn’t a book involved you feel that there is something missing. A book has a certain thing-ness, it’s a tangible quality we still need.

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Diana Walker has photographed the political operators of our nation’s capital through five presidential administrations, or roughly since Gerald Ford became president. “I just missed out on all the excitement of Watergate,” she says. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., she knows the corridors of power intimately, from “up on the Capitol Hill” to the Oval Office, and she has applied that knowledge effectively over the years as White House photographer for Time magazine. She is one of the great masters of the ultimate D.C. photography game — getting access to guarded newsmakers and capturing them in private moments.

Indeed, if there is a typical Diana Walker image, it is the “behind the scenes” shot, such as her famous image of Al and Tipper Gore kissing onstage at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. She used a small degree of her guile to get on the platform, while other photographers could only shoot from below. Hers is a view of politics unlike any other, based often on relationships built up over years of experience. She is the consummate Washington journalist.

Walker has just released a new book called The Bigger Picture: 30 Years of Portraits (National Geographic Books, $40), and in it you will find many examples of her intimate brand of photojournalism — though not all of her subjects over the years have been politicians. Along with the Gores and Hillary Clinton there are shots of actress Jamie Lee Curtis and Apple chief Steve Jobs.

No matter what the subject, however, Walker’s success is based on her ability to engage with people and to get them to trust her, while never forgetting that she is a journalist whose needs may sometimes run contrary to the person she is shooting. Recently, Walker visited American Photo to talk with editor in chief David Schonauer about that remarkable professional balancing act and her long career.

David Schonauer: Let’s start at the beginning. How did you become a photographer?

Diana Walker: Photography was a childhood hobby. I remember when I got my first Brownie Hawkeye. My first serious camera was a Kodak Pony 135, which came from the corner drug story. I had a darkroom in our basement in Georgetown, and put the developer and the stop bath and the fix on a plank of wood over the washing machine. And it was always treacherous because my father would walk across the floor above, and dirt would come down off the ceiling into all my trays. So my photos were always spotty.

DS: Did you go into photography as a profession after that?

DW: I got sidetracked with the idea of theater and all kinds of other things, and I was in my early 30s when I started to get back into photography. A friend of mine who had been stylist for the photographer Bert Stern here in New York said, “You don’t want to do what you’re doing now, why don’t you start taking pictures?” We set up a business — she kept the books, and I did the photography — called “I Am a Camera.” I don’t know if Christopher Isherwood would have like that, but apparently he didn’t hear about us. We did weddings, bar mitzvahs — anything that moved. Then I was asked to take pictures for a small magazine called Washington Monthly. The assignment was to photograph asparagus for a story on produce. That led to a job. The editor, Charles Peters, said, “I can only pay you $25 per picture used, but I’ll get you your credentials for shooting on Capitol Hill and the White House, and then you could go freelance.” Charlie launched many well-known journalists on their careers, but nobody remembers he also launched a photojournalist’s career. I think my first assignment was to photograph Nelson Rockefeller, who was about to be nominated as Vice President by Gerald Ford, in 1974.

DS: So you became a political insider…

DW: I was in Washington, and the product of Washington is politics. If I’d grown up in Cleveland or New York, my career would have been different. I didn’t do what I advise young photographers to do: I didn’t go and work for a small-town newspaper.

DS: Let’s talk about a couple of your pictures that illustrate what it is you do. What about the 1997 photograph of Hillary Clinton, who was then the First Lady, riding in her limo with her chief of staff, Melanne Verveer.

DW: Time was doing a cover story on her — “Hillary at 50.” I went with her that day when she was attending an event for a children’s group. After the event, I was trying to do a “Hillary behind the scenes” shot. I asked Melanne if I could ride back in the car with them. Hillary agreed. I scrunched up by the door of the limo. I had maybe a 24mm lens. I loved it, because the two of them were having a wonderful time. I can’t hear when I take pictures, because I’m trying so hard to take the picture that I don’t hear anything. So I don’t know what they were laughing about.

DS: We see Mrs. Clinton this way more now, where she looks relaxed and happy. But in 1997 it wasn’t the typical shot of her.

DW: You really didn’t see anything like this then. I sent this image to Time in New York with a star on it saying, “This is the First Lady having fun.” And it ran double-truck across the lead of the story.

DS: And what about that shot of the Gores kissing. How’d you get that?

DW: You mean the one where you see all my colleagues down on the floor? I had asked to be behind the scenes as much as possible at the convention. By the way, usually when I say “behind the scenes,” I mean I was getting like a minute behind the scenes. Being behind the scenes is not at all like being a fly on the wall. In this case, I was with Al Gore as he was on his way to the convention. He was being introduced to the delegates by Tipper and, instead of coming out from behind the set, as nominees usually do, he walked down the floor of the convention to the stage. I was attached at the hip to his staff photographer. They actually liked having me there, because that way his staff could keep an eye on me. We were in front of him as he walked through the convention, and we had time to run up onto the stage ahead of him. There were already some photographers on one side of the stage, so I went to the other side, got down on my knees, and we were just there when the Vice President came up on stage. I had a camera with black and white film, and another with color film. I focused on him, and this extraordinary thing happened — this embrace, which wasn’t a stage kiss, but a real, romantic kiss. It went on for a long time, so there was plenty of time for me to get the shot right.

DS: What happens when you photograph someone who didn’t like the story about them when it eventually appears? How do you deal with that when you photograph that subject again?

DW: Well, I don’t want to sound too callous, but really, all I have to say to that person is, “Tough.” Anyway, I can’t remember anyone ever getting mad at me for a story in Time. Politicians and journalists understand the way this world works.

DS: How do you balance the demands of getting access to people with the demands of being an objective journalist?

DW: You have to remember first of all that you are a journalist. You happen to use a camera; you don’t use a pencil. And this is where I have a slightly different take on the idea from a lot of my colleagues. I’ve had many long arguments with other Washington photographers about this. I believe that to maintain my balance and do what I’ve been sent to do I don’t listen and I don’t report. When I’ve been given access to the president I don’t come out of the room and say, “Guess what I heard! Where’s my writer…quick! We’re going to war!” My tool is my camera, not a tape recorder. I am there to show you as much as possible about what I saw and give you as much information as you can have, whether it’s out front or behind the scenes. My editors know that about me, and I would hope that the people I photograph would know that about me too.

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Eileen Gittins views traditional book publishers in terms any high-tech entrepreneur from San Francisco can understand. “I think of them as venture capitalists for authors,” she says. “To succeed with a business-oriented venture capitalist, you need to go in with a recognizable name, a track record of success, a demonstrable market; it’s very much the same when authors or artists try to get their work published. If you are the new guy on the block, either as an entrepreneur or as an author, good luck!”

The analogy comes easily for Gittins, the CEO of a year-old company called Blurb and an advanced amateur photographer in her own right. Essentially an online application for self-publishing high-end art books, Blurb grew out of Gittins’s own frustration at getting her pictures published. She reasoned that there were many photographers like her, pros and amateurs alike, who would pay to economically produce their own hardcover coffee-table books.

The old publishing model, she says, is giving way to a new one: “The line that used to exist between amateurs and professionals is getting pretty porous,” she says, “And we are breaking it down even more.” In that sense, Blurb joins the ranks of Websites like Flickr as well as a new crop of microstock agencies in opening up commercial photography opportunities to the masses.

Blurb’s hook is that it allows photographers to easily produce books that until now only large publishing companies could make. Gittins worked with technicians and graphic designers for more than a year to develop its proprietary software, called BookSmart, which allows photographers to drop images into a range of templates. (Go to blurb.com.) Or they can synch up a design from other software. Back-end production is handled through integrated printing firms, where books are printed digitally with HP Indigo and Xerox iGen technology in a range of formats. And all that is achieved with a speedy turn-around time of only seven to ten working days.

Prices begin very low — a 40-page softcover book measuring 7×7 inches costs $13 — and go up. A 240-page hardcover book measuring 8×10 inches (good for landscapes) or 10×8 inches (for portraits) costs $60. A 350-page hard-cover large-format landscape book, at 13×11 inches, costs $160. (Various discounts are available depending on the number of books ordered.) For now, all books are printed on 80-pound paper with a semi-matte finish, though Gittins is looking to add a pricier option as well.

The dimensions and print quality of the books set them apart from other available print-on-demand services, which offer smaller photo albums, calendars, and similar products aimed largely at amateur photographers. After launching Blurb in 2006, Gittins caught a break when blogger Michael Arrington at electronics blog TechCrunch took note of the service. “Within 24 hours we were getting downloads from all over the world,” says Gittins.

A recently added social-networking feature should make the service of interest to groups of photographers who want to work together on a book. “Everyone uploads their photos to the site, then one or two designated editors put the book together,” says Gittens. “The final book is placed in our bookstore area, and all the contributors can buy a copy.”

In the end, says Gittins, her new company “doesn’t make much of a distinction between pros and amateurs.” They are now all essentially on a level playing field, at least as far as technology is concerned. “Look at what is happening throughout photography and publishing,” says Gittins. “People everywhere are now producers, and not just consumers. Blurb is part of that whole revolution.”

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“The whole wine thing, I really don’t know much about it,” says photographer Bettina Rheims. That should come as a surprise — not because she is French, but because she is in New York City this week to promote a new project which, in theory, is all about the seductive glamour of French Chablis wine. To Rheims’s way of thinking, you don’t have to drink it to savor it.

The new project, called “Liquid Gold,” could be seen as a departure for Rheims, one of France’s best known artists. But again, to her way of thinking it is not. Sponsored by the Chablis wine making region, it consists of 11 images of a statuesque model named Margarita Svegzdaite decorated in various golden disguises, each printed in large format on shining aluminum sheets. In June the prints were unveiled in windows at Bloomingdale’s in New York. This month the exhibition moves to the Palace Hotel and later to Grand Central Station.

This was certainly not the first big commercial job Rheims has taken on. She regularly shoots for magazines and advertising clients like Chanel and L’Oreal. But, as she notes, the boundaries between her personal work and her commercial work is blurry.

The images in the new project, with titles like “Dream,” “Pride,” “Desire,” “Femininity, “Magnificence,” and “Thirst,” touch on themes that Rheims has focused on throughout her career. A former model, journalist, and art dealer, she turned to photography in 1980 with a breakthrough series on strip-tease dancers and acrobats. Her first book, “Female Trouble,” a collection of portraits and nudes of actresses and models, was published in 1989. That was followed by “Modern Lovers,” a series of portraits of androgynous teenagers, and in 1992 with her acclaimed book “Chambre Close,” in which she turned to color to create a fictional erotic tale featuring women in hotel rooms.

That work, and later books such as “X’Mas” (2000), “Shanghai” (2003), and her recent “Heroines,” have secured Rheims’s reputation Europe. In the United States, however, she has remained largely unappreciated and, in her own words, “simply misunderstood.” She is often associated with the late Helmut Newton, who was one of her mentors. But while Newton’s fashion and advertising work was based on his own fantasies of luxury, decadence, and eroticism, Rheims’s imagery is grounded in her notion of reality. She cites Diane Arbus as a major influence.

“People might think, ‘Oh, she only creates scandalous pictures, nudes,” says Rheims. “But that’s not the point. My work is not about provocation. And I freely go back and forth between commercial and artwork, which puzzles some people. But I make no distinction. I see no contradiction there.”

Seeing no contradictions where others do may be the perfect definition of a misunderstanding. On the morning after the opening of her Bloomingdale’s exhibition, Rheims met with me over coffee at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo to discuss the new project and to explain, or at least try to explain, why she still hasn’t achieved the fame she deserves in the U.S.

AP: How did you decide on this approach to the project, with a model dripped in gold?

BR: I really am a stranger to the culture of wine. I’ve seen the film “Mondovino,” but that’s about it. But the concept was wide open, so I thought, why not do something as glamorous as I would for a perfume campaign? I told them to bring me in everything that had to do with wine, and they came back with big pieces of wood, the grape, and we began talking about the color of the wine.

AP: And you went from that to painting a girl in gold?

BR: As the concept was building up, I began thinking of paintings. I was thinking of Caravaggio, all these interpretations by Italian renaissance painters of the feast. It had to be a feast; it had to be joyful. It had to be full of pleasure…the pleasure of the wine, with nobody drunk at the end.

AP: And the girl?

BR: Well, we looked a long time to find the right girl. It should have been a French girl, because it’s a French wine. Unfortunately, we are not so rich today with French models; we couldn’t find the perfect French girl. So we found a Canadian model, and she speaks French. It was close enough.

AP: What was the production like?

BR: Big, like a movie. I brought in a makeup artist, and I told him we were doing everything gold. He’s like a magician. He came in with gold powders, gold liquids, gold foil. He had to learn how to put gold material in the model’s hair without making the hair look dirty. It was fun.

AP: What camera did you shoot with?

BR: I shot it all with a 6×7. That’s the format I usually use.

AP: Do you see a connection between this work and what has come before it in your career?

BR: Certainly. I have always believed that whether the work is my idea or a commission, it is personal work. When I do advertising jobs, I always think, “Will one of these pictures have another destiny? Will it become a lasting, important picture?” In the end, as my old master Helmut Newton used to say, there are only two kinds of pictures: the good ones and the bad ones.

AP: You mentioned thinking about paintings. Your last book, “Heroines,” is a collection of portraits of beautiful and famous women seen in a harsh, unforgiving light. They look like paintings…

BR: I got the idea for the book when I was in Vienna. I was having a big retrospective there and had some time to kill. So I went to several museums. Of course I knew Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, but I looked at them in a different way. I looked at Degas’s dancers. I always looked at the skin.

AP: And that was your jumping-off point?

BR: In a way, all my projects start with skin. My first question — even before I start to think about black and white or color or camera format — is “What kind of skin do I want to represent?” For “Heroines,” I shot with a 20×24-inch camera; it was the first time I used that large of a format. I wanted to show raw skin: skin and blood, skin and veins, scars, imperfections. It was not the usual kind of glamorous skin. It wasn’t Hollywood skin. It was the skin of pain. The pictures were about women today, about being able to assume your femininity as well as your strength.

AP: And yet the images are very sympathetic to the women. In an interview with American Photo in 1991 you said, “People often come to my studio to scare themselves a little.”

BR: I am always sympathetic to my subject — especially the ones in “Heroines,” because I chose women whom I consider icons. It was a very special moment. I was asking these women for a moment of abandon, to give up whoever they were.

AP: Early in your career you shot only in black and white. Now everything is color. How did that change come about?

BR: When I did “Chambre Close,” I wanted to do a tribute to all those old, turn-of-the-century pornographic postcards I saw in flea markets in Paris. But I didn’t want my pictures to look old-fashioned, so I began using color. But I wanted strong, colorful color. Again, it started with the skin. I wanted the people in the pictures to look like Rodin sculpture. I wanted viewers to feel like they could touch the skin of the models. The funny thing is, today I can’t work in black and white. I see the world in color.

AP: Why do you think your work has never become as famous in the United States as in Europe?

BR: Well, I don’t have a gallery here, for one thing.

AP: What you do defies easy categorization. It is fictional, and deals with fantasy, like Helmut Newton’s work, but it also has elements of documentary work….

BR: I’m proud that I can’t be categorized. I think a lot of artists find something and do everything in that way. They are careful not to change, and to make pictures that can be identified instantly. I would be happy to be recognized, who wouldn’t? I like it when someone comes up to me and says, ‘I like your work.’ But I’m with myself most of the time and I want to be happy with what I am doing.

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Compared to the soaring peaks of the Rocky Mountains, or the curving sensuality of the California coast, the Flint Hills of Kansas wouldn’t seem to have much to offer a photographer. Jim Richardson doesn’t see it that way, though that may be because he was born and raised in Kansas and lives there now, in the town of Lindsborg, about 50 miles from the Flint Hills.

A longtime National Geographic photographer, Richardson looks on the Flint Hills as a great American landscape, and the last of its kind. Once, a great belt of tall grass prairie covered the country’s entire heartland. Now, the Flint Hills area is about all that is left.

“It represents about four percent of all the prairie we once had,” says Richardson. “This section was saved because it was in ranching, and it was in ranching because it was too hard to plow. Eons ago this was the bottom of the Permian Sea, and layers of rock were laid down flat as they eroded out of the Rocky Mountains.”

Richardson’s work has taken him all over the world — in recent years he’s done stories on the Celtic heritage of Brittany and the whiskey lands of Scotland — but he often found time to shoot in the Flint Hills. He confesses, however, that he never had much luck there.

“The prairie is difficult to photograph,” he says. “These are low, rolling hills, and every time you pick up a camera and point it at them, they kind of get small in the distance. They aren’t like the Tetons, which are big enough to fill a 4×5 frame.”

Nonetheless, two years ago Richardson proposed a story on the Flint Hills to National Geographic, and to his surprise the magazine said yes. “I think it helped that the editor in chief, Chris Johns, used to work with me at the Topeka Capital-Journal,” he says.

The challenge to Richardson was to capture in photographs the beauty he saw in the area. “They have this lovely maternal look to them, in the grace of the curves, the rifts in the valleys and all,” he says. He approached the assignment as he does all his other Geographic work. “You drive a hell of a lot of miles to find the places that have the look you want. You go out at every time of day, in every kind of weather, and if you can to hire a plane and shoot from above. You basically work the story for all it’s worth.”

Richardson shot the entire project with a Canon EOS 5D digital SLR. The choice to shoot digitally allowed him to make a photo that would become one of the story’s signature images. “I read somewhere that because of city lights about 80 percent of the world’s population cannot see the Milky Way any longer, but that is not a problem in the Flint Hills,” he says. “I was lucky to be shooting digitally, because there is no film fast enough with a high enough quality to get that shot.” In the picture, a small tree on a low ridge is visible in the foreground. “I lit the tree with a small Maglite flashlight, then exposed the entire shot for 30 seconds at f/1.4 at ISO 1600,” he says.

The story, which appeared in the April 2007 issue of National Geographic, followed the Flint Hills through it annual cycles — from early March, when prairie chickens start their courting rituals, or “booming,” through the burn season, when local ranchers burn off the dead, dry grass of the area to keep other species of vegetation from taking root. “That’s basically a man-made version of what happened naturally on the prairie,” says Richardson. He then shot the regrow period, when new grass turn the hills an emerald green.

Prior to the article’s publication, Richardson arranged with the magazine to allow the images to be printed and shown in small towns in Kansas. “I think we Kansans have an inferiority complex” he says. “This show was to say, look, this is a great resource we have here, and we need to cherish it, value it, and protect it.” The traveling exhibition has proved popular: It is now booked in various Kansas towns through 2009.
Richardson is one of several environmentally conscious photographers to be featured in American Photo’s first-ever Green Issue, available in September.

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I grew up on a farm, and though it wasn’t a dairy farm I certainly have spent enough time around cows to know their ways. And I must tell you that I have not been impressed by them. Cows at best are contented, but they don’t have much charisma, which may explain why the characters in all those Saturday-morning cartoons I used to watch were rabbits, ducks, chipmunks, cats, mice, birds, magpies, dogs, and bears, but never bovines.

Now I have seen Glen Wexler’s new photo book, The Secret Life of Cows, and I am being forced to re-examine my feeling about cows. More important, in talking with Wexler I learned some valuable lessons on photographing problematic subjects.

Wexler’s pictures, which will also be shown at the Track 16 Gallery in Bergamot Station in Santa Monica from July 7 through August 4, re-imagines cows as heroes out to save their own species-playing against type, since real cows don’t really do that. (You have my word on it.) Simply put, hero cows are funny. (By the way, the comedic opposite is also true: to be funny, a lion had better be cowardly, as in the “Wizard of Oz”; a brave lion, like Mustafah in “The Lion King,” is just a tragedy waiting to happen.)

A successful commercial photographer based in Los Angeles, Wexler has shot a number of very famous album covers for artists such as Michael Jackson, Van Halen, ZZ Top, and others. He’s probably best known for his early and expert adoption of digital technology to create elaborately produced images for advertising clients.

The cow pictures, in fact, came about as an advertising job for the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain. The company’s ad agency had built up a marketing campaign that used cow characters to advocate the consumption of Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches instead of hamburgers. Wexler was brought in to produce the chain’s 2004 and 2005 calendars.

That’s when the photographic problem solving began. Before Wexler came on board, the photographers hired by the company would simply dress up cows in costumes and shoot them. But, as has been over-abundantly stated here, cows are not natural performers. Plus, as Wexler notes, bovine bodily functions are both unpredictable and frequent.

Instead, Wexler enlisted the aid of artist Charles Rivera to sculpt a realistic one-third-scale cow, from which a mold was made. The mold in turn was used to create foam castings that could be cut up and reassembled into a variety of cow characters.

Each image required about two or three days of principle set and element photography, followed by several days of shooting actual cows that were lit and photographed in perspective to match the sculpted body doubles. Wexler estimates the entire project consumed 600 hours of post-production time. Some of the images required special-effects teams to set off explosions. Elaborate costumes were required for other shots. (This was done by James Hayes, who also costumes the Muppets.)

That’s a lot of work just to make cows look funny. Wexler says the humor of the images comes from turning our assumptions about the “perceived credibility” of photography upside down. Mixing elements of the real world and a fantastical world together creates a surreal, absurd effect, he says.

I intend to contemplate this question over lunch. Guess what I’m going to order…

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The year was 1962, the last of Marilyn Monroe’s short life. In April she began shooting a comedy for 20th Century Fox called Something’s Got to Give, a remake of the film My Favorite Wife, cast opposite Dean Martin. This came about a year and a half after her starring role in The Misfits, with Clark Gable, and a little over a year after her divorce from playwright Arthur Miller.

The story of the filming of Something’s Got to Give has long since become Hollywood legend. Monroe’s frequent absences from the set, due to personal issues but also to health problems resulting from a severe respiratory infection, delayed shooting and angered the studio and the film’s director, George Cukor. Then, on May 19th, she added to the studio’s irritation by flying to New York City to attend a Democratic fundraiser and sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy, with whom she’d been having an affair.

When Monroe returned from New York, there was far more drama on the movie set than in the film itself. And the blonde star had a surprise in store for everyone when she arrived to shoot a scene in which she was to frolic in a swimming pool.

“There was a line in the script that said she appears nude,” recalls Lawrence Schiller, the famed photographer/writer/film producer, who was on the set that day to shoot a story about Monroe for Paris Match magazine. “[The script] didn’t say that she was going to be nude. [It said] she ‘appears’ nude. So you figured she was going to wear a flesh-colored bathing suit, but you had no idea what was going to take place.”

What happened on the set was this: After a few minutes of swimming in the flesh-colored bathing suit, Monroe slipped out of the suit’s top, and later its bottom. Shooting began. There are those who say Monroe, who had lost some 25 pounds since her last film, never looked more radiant and beautiful.

“I shot everything with a Nikon SLR and a 180mm Sonnar lens sold to me by [photojournalist] David Douglas Duncan for $50,” Schiller recalls. “The lens had been specially modified at Life to fit the camera. The color film was high-speed tungsten Ektachrome pushed one stop, and the black and white was Tri-X.

It was the first nude scene ever shot by a major Hollywood star, and the film might have gone on to be a major hit — except that it was never completed. In early June, angered at Monroe’s behavior, the studio fired her from the movie, only to rehire her at Dean Martin’s insistence and reschedule shooting for the fall. But on August 5, 1962 Marilyn was found dead in her home in Brentwood, apparently of a suicide or accidental overdose of pills.

Since then, Schiller’s pictures of the swimming pool scene have become historic photographic artifacts. Most of them have been published over the years, but not all. And while Schiller himself made prints of them from his negatives for Paris Match and other organizations, he never thought of the work as art or collectible, and never made archival prints for galleries and museums.

Recently, however, Schiller has done just that, working with the venerable Modernage lab in New York City to create a limited-edition set of his Something’s Got to Give images, as well as other work from 1960s and 1970s.

The Marilyn pictures are on display now at an exhibition called “Marilyn Monroe 12,” at the Pop International Galleries in New York City. The magnificent prints add a new footnote to Marilyn’s much-photographed life. They also should launch a reassessment of Schiller as a photographer.

Schiller shot for Life, Paris Match, and other magazines from the 1960s through 1975. When the big picture magazines of the era folded, Schiller “cut the umbilical cord” with photography, only to become one of the most intriguing personalities of the time — a Zelig-like figure roaming through American culture at the end of the 20th century.

He has published books, including W. Eugene Smith’s Minamata and Norman Mailer’s Marilyn. He also collaborated with Mailer on The Executioner’s Song and directed the television mini-series of that book, starring Tommy Lee Jones as killer Gary Gilmore. He produced and directed a TV movie about photographer Margaret Bourke-White starring Farrah Fawcett. He’s been a consultant for NBC News, written best-selling books (American Tragedy, Perfect Murder, and Perfect Town) and even worked for the defense during the O.J. Simpson Trial.

“I knew Simpson well; my daughter used to baby-sit for the family,” he says. “Every person deserves the right to a fair trial, even O.J., though he was certainly guilty.”

After a heart attack in 1992, Schiller found himself unable to work in the motion-picture business. “I was uninsurable for films costing more that $5 million,” he says, shrugging. In the past few years Schiller has been re-examining his photographic archive, which includes indelible images from films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as portraits of actors like James Earl Jones, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward.

But the big attraction at the moment is his images of Marilyn from 1962. That final shoot was actually the second time Schiller photographed the star. The first time was on the set of the movie Let’s Make Love in 1960, when she had already emerged as an American movie icon. “Marilyn was sensual. But not beautiful,” he says. “She knew how to handle her body. She knew how to handle her lips. With Marilyn, when everything was working, there was no one single element.”

By 1962 Monroe was on the outs with her studio and facing competition from new sex symbols, especially Elizabeth Taylor, who was getting a million dollars for starring in Cleopatra for 20th Century Fox. (That costly film nearly put the studio out of business.) Monroe was getting only $100,000 a picture. “So, coming to Marilyn the second time around I knew I was coming to somebody who was living on eggshells,” Schiller says.

Two other photographers were on the set that day: William Reed Woodfield, from Globe Photos, and Jimmy Mitchell, a studio employee. “I started shooting with a long lens,” Schiller recalls. “All of a sudden she came up to the edge of the pool and she didn’t have the top of the swimming suit on. I shot 11 or 13 rolls of black and white and four rolls of color. It happened in two hours.”

Recognizing an enormous marketing opportunity, Schiller and Woodfield combined their take to sell worldwide. “I told him, ‘Bill, two sets of photos will just drive down the price. One set, and we control the market for these pictures.” Mitchell’s images remained at the studio, unused.

Marilyn herself later approved Schiller’s images, using sheers to cut up the negatives she didn’t like. “She was a very intelligent business woman about these things,” says Schiller.

Schiller saw Monroe again on August 4, stopping by her house in Brentwood to discuss plans for a photo shoot for Playboy. “She was out in the garden, pulling up weeds. She seemed at peace with herself,” he says. That night he went to Palm Springs and was awoken the next morning with word of her death. “I couldn’t believe that I was there talking so simply with her,” he says.

Over the next four decades most of the negatives sat in boxes in Schiller’s office. Hugh Hefner purchased several negatives for his private collection, providing scans of them for the new group of prints. Schiller scanned his own negatives. The prints themselves were made on silver-gelatin paper with a De Vere 504 DS Digital Enlarger.

“I’m seeing things in these new prints that I was never able to see before — textures and details in the light areas, especially,” says Schiller.

Marilyn herself remains luminescent.

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The spring 2007 photography auctions in New York get underway on Monday, April 23 at the Christie’s auction house in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. The bidding starts at 5:00 pm with a sale of Horst photographs from the collection of Gert Elfering, followed at around 5:30 with modernist photographs from a European collection. The larger sale of images from various owners begins around 6:00 pm and concludes the following morning at 10 pm.

On Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning the action moves to Phillips de Pury & Company. Then on Wednesday evening and Thursday morning come the sales at Sotheby’s. By Friday we will know if any images have broken the current world record, set in February in London, when Andreas Gursky’s “99 cent II, Diptych” sold for $3,346,456.”

For art enthusiasts who can’t wait that long for all the results, American Photo will be posting regular updates on the auctions throughout the week. If recent auction results are any guide, next week’s sales will see a lot of money changing hands.

The Horst auction at Christie’s on Monday evening may also set some new precedents. While auctions often focus on work accumulated by a single collector, they rarely focus on the work of a single photographer, notes Philippe Garner, Christie’s International Director of Photography and 20th Century Arts. “We’ll just have to see how it works out for us,” he says.

Best known for his fashion and editorial work for Vogue magazine throughout the mid-20th century, Horst reprinted many of his iconic images over a period ranging from 1985 to 1995. (Horst died on November 18, 1999.) “He wanted to make exquisite prints that would remain as his legacy,” says Garner. Like other photographers during this period, such as Irving Penn and Herb Ritts, Horst made platinum and platinum-palladium prints, sometimes on canvas. “It’s sort of the ultimate in bespoke printing,” Garner says.

German collector Gert Elfering acquired the Horst images over the past 20 years. “The first photo exhibition I ever saw was about Horst,” Elfering recalls. “At that time I could only afford a poster and a book.”

The Horst material also represents a new trend in the art market — at least according to Garner. “Right now the 19th century seems very distant, and even the pre-war period seems remote,” he says. “But there is a great appetite for post-war photography in general and editorial photography from that period in particular. Horst is one of the great names of that type of fashion and lifestyle photography. Along with Penn he was one of the great photographers of the Conde Nast stable.”

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Photographer Taryn Simon admits that the similarities between her two most recent art projects are not readily apparent. But they certainly do exist. Each, in its own way, is a story about America.

Simon’s breakthrough 2003 book The Innocents was a collection of portraits of former prison convicts who had been exonerated through DNA testing. The elaborately lit and staged portraits (in some cases, the former prisoners posed with the very people they had been accused of victimizing) were filled with blank and bitter gazes. In accompanying interviews, the former prisoners often questioned notions of justice and the merits of freedom.

In her latest book, titled An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (Steidl/D.A.P., $75), Simon turns her attention to particular American places and spaces — rooms and landscapes that “lie deep within the borders of the United States at the foundation of a national culture.” In one way or another these are all essential places: essential to the functioning of government and science, and essential to the way we think or ourselves as Americans. They also happen to be inaccessible or hidden from the general public. (There is also an exhibition of the work up at the Whitney Museum of American Art through June 24.)

Simon’s pictures document everything from a nuclear waste storage facility in Washington to a room at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York where seized contraband is kept. There is the Avian Quarantine Facility of the New York Animal Import Center in Newburgh, New York, and the Marijuana Research Grow Room at the National Center for Natural Products Research in Oxford, Mississippi; the Church of Scientology film screening room in Hollywood and a great white shark in a tank in an aquarium in Monterey, California.

“Shooting pictures without people in them was something I hadn’t done for awhile,” says Simon, who spent a little more than four years on the project. “When I was doing The Innocents I’d been concentrating on portraiture. So that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this new project.”

But what links the two bodies of work? In each case Simon gazes at corners of America that normally remain out of view — spotlighting prisoners whose lives might have otherwise gone unnoticed, documenting rooms that are literally hidden from most of us. There is an underlying sense of haves and have-nots: those with the power of freedom to move about and witness, and those without that power. In both there is also the sense of exploration and cataloging, as if Simon were a naturalist examining and collecting the flora and fauna of an exotic, perplexing, and sometimes dangerous land.

Recently, Simon spoke with American Photo about her new project and discoveries she made on her journey through hidden America.

AP: How did the American Index idea come about?

TS: When I completed The Innocents I went back to my older work to find what I had done previously that I thought was successful or not. And the photograph that I kept coming back to was a shot I’d made of the Palace of the Revolution in Cuba.

AP: What brought you back to it?

TS: I was attracted to its geometry and formal lighting and the absence of a figure in the photograph. But what I also liked about the shot was that its impact was bound to the fact that it showed an inaccessible space. The combination of the aesthetics and the hidden dimension of the place is such an important part of photography.

AP: There is something purely photographic about using the camera to show a place that is hidden from view…

TS: Yes, and then I wanted to find photographs that had that combination of qualities within America’s own borders — places that were unseen and could reveal something about the foundation of America and its mythology and how it works.

AP: How did you research and find these places?

TS: The Internet played a huge part in that process. I worked with three producers on the project. I began with a wish list of the places that I had imagined would be what I was looking for. Then through my research process I would arrive at places far different from what I imagined when I started. Some places came from our own original ideas. Sometimes we’d be looking for one place and that would lead us to another place.

AP: That sense of surprise is part of what is interesting. The viewer can’t imagine where you’ll take them next.

TS: A large part of this project is its entropy — its disorder in the way it jumps from one subject to another, from entertainment to security to religion to nature. There were certain categories within those themes that I wanted to fill. I worked in such a calculated way. For instance, I knew I wanted to photograph in an avian quarantine facility. I had no idea what an avian quarantine facility looks like, nor do most people. But I knew I wanted to address the subject of avian influenza in some way, because I think Americans somehow expect there to be some place that is protecting them from this kind of epidemic. Then I had to find an avian quarantine facility, and then I had to arrive at this place and had to respond to it with a large-format camera and a lighting setup.

AP: The subjects you photographed are so different, and yet in the end you need to come away with images that hang together visually. How do you do that?

TS: As I said, I generally am extremely calculated. I like things to be very ironed out when I go into a photographic situation. But I also had to be somewhat spontaneous within that framework. That was a contradiction for me. The lighting setups changed from subject to subject. But in general I wanted to create a kind of strange, eerie beauty in each setting. I shot with a large-format camera most of the time, though there are some cases when I was unable to use that. I shot a Native American sun dance in Texas and had to use a smaller camera that was more discreet because photography was not allowed there. For a shot of an exploding warhead I made at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida, I couldn’t use a photographic camera, so I used an IMAX 70mm film camera and pulled a frame from that.

AP: How do you see this body of work fitting in with what you did in The Innocents?

TS: From a visual standpoint, the connection is how both projects set up a seductive stage to show subject matter that typically wouldn’t receive that sort of treatment. A huge part of what I do is to simply finding subjects that aren’t being given attention or thought and then applying this seductive aesthetic that draws in a larger audience.

AP: Did you do much post-production work on the images?

TS: The only thing I use Photoshop for is preparing files for my lab to make Lamda prints. I tweak the images so they’ll look right on the conventional paper that the printer uses.

AP: I want to ask about the book’s design. It was a perfect marriage of design and photography.

TS: I know. It was done by a designer named Joseph Logan. He has his own company and does a lot of art books. We both wanted to make the cover look like an old index — sort of like those 19th century books that documented plants and animals and exploration. This project does have that element of exploration in it.

AP: Can we come away from your pictures with any conclusions about America or our culture?

TS: To each his own, really. But certainly for me I would say the process of doing this work revealed something to me. I photographed a lot of government sites, and I was struck that so many of them looked like they hadn’t really evolved since the 1960s or the 1970s. They felt locked in time. That felt surprising to me. You just rely on these places to be modern or powerful in some way; you take for granted that you are being kept safe by the work done in them. To see the reality can be a little frightening, or dream crushing.

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