Why do you shoot? I shoot for the moment, when the person I photograph stops pretending. It doesn’t always happen but when it does it’s beautiful. There is something holy about it.
Equipment? For the longest time, I worked with a mix of Olympus Mju 2 and Fuji 6×4.5 plastic cameras. Hot lights, if any, or on-camera flash. A lot of times I would start shooting without anyone taking it seriously. Half way through my shoot, people would ask: “So when are we starting the real thing, where is your equipment?” “This is the real thing,” I’d say, and “we’re almost done.” This “we don’t care” atmosphere was exactly what I wanted in my pictures, and those cameras helped a great deal to achieve that.
Sometimes people felt disrespected though, by my little effort on the tech side. When shooting Marilyn Manson for example, his manager took me aside and told me to ‘organize a proper camera right away or this shoot would be over.’ Since the digital age, I have been waiting for a camera that does the same thing for me, but the digital snap shot cameras are just not there yet in terms of quality. For the moment I am shooting on a 5D and hating it. The quality is great, but it’s just not a tool I can identify with. It might sound silly but to me, it’s important that I can identify with my equipment, fall in love with it, look forward to using it, enjoying the sound it makes.
What do you love shooting the most? Anything that is either “a moment” (as in a possibly unrepeatable fraction of time) or situations that are a bit absurd. I have a tendency to also shoot things that are “just beautiful,” but they bore me when I see them in other peoples photographs, so I tend to edit them out.
Favourite photographers? Helmut Newton for attitude I would say, and Tazio Secchiaroli for keeping his subjects alive at all times. I actually carry a page I tore out from an issue of French Vogue. They ran a tribute to Newton right after he had died. On one side of the page, it shows him at the airport in Nice ready to take off to somewhere. On the other, he is resting in a chair in his apartment in Monaco, both taken during the late 70s. Whenever my spirits run low, I look at that page. Both images – one tired, one energetic – display the same attitude to me: It’s good to be here. And Secchiaroli I reference basically all the time. There is not a single of his photographs where the subject feels dead or staged. He seemed to have had the gift of making people feel like they could be themselves in front of his camera.
Favourite shoot experience? There is no favorite really, but just recently I shot Alexander Scheer for S Magazine. Alexander, a German actor who was in the just released movie Carlos, showed up on set and it was obvious that he was not only crazy, but also not at all in the mood for another photo shoot. The weeks before that I had seen a lot of shoots where people had used body painting in various forms on celebrities and I did not like any of them.
They all had this typical “Let’s do crazy color but it can not at all look silly!” problem. So when I saw Alex I immediately sent my assistant to buy a large bucket of black wall paint. We set up a black backdrop outside, I asked Alexander to take his shirt off and put the bucket down by his feet. He looked at the bucket, he looked at me, smiled and then launched into a crazy paint battle with himself. It was just wonderful. All I had to do was keep the finger on the button.
What is your dream shoot? Tom Cruise doing the paint battle for Vanity Fair. Just kidding. I love it when my subjects are ready to give something to the picture. When they are willing to let go or to challenge standards. Anything that shows that they care.
What is the prefect picture? The one that makes me fall in love with the person in the picture.
How did you get introduced to photography? I had a dream about it. In the dream I was Peter Lindbergh, no kidding. This was when I was a boy back in the Black Forest where I grew up. Then I went, right after high-school, to intern at a local still-life studio and from there to New York to study.
Did you study? Yes, photography at SVA in New York. I never graduated though. I don’t think the school is what shaped me in terms of photography. After school I went on to intern at Interview Magazine in their photo department. From there I got assisting jobs with Bruce Weber and Steven Klein, amongst others. Seeing these superstar photographers at work is what influenced me the most I think. Funnily, not in the way you’d think. Mostly it made me realize what I did NOT want to do or become.
How does traveling shape your work? I don’t know if it really shapes my work. Traveling has an affect on the way I look at the world, and that probably influences my picture taking.
How does the place you live inspire your work? Funny you are asking because sadly, Berlin is really not so inspiring to me. It’s really hard to say why, but after five years of being here I can say that Berlin does not speak to me visually. Neither the place, nor the people. At least not on an obvious level. But I love the normality of being, as in, existing, in Berlin. Nothing is “wow”, nothing is very eccentric or overly exciting. It’s just a very raw place that way. And I guess I have to recognize that this normality and rawness has found it’s way into my pictures to an extend that it has become part of my “style”. So now, when I go to Paris or any other beautiful place to shoot, I have a hard time finding locations because everything looks too nice or too stylized to fit my picture.
You’ve photographed a lot of high profile celebs. How did you manage to get these clients into your work?
I would have to thank Mario Lombardo for that. When I first came back from New York he was creative director at an important German music magazine called Spex. He had loved a series of images I had taken of my girlfriend at the time (editor’s note: Canadian top model, Lia Crowe) and was looking for a similar intimacy in music portraits for the magazine. He let me give it a try, first with younger artists. When we saw that it worked, we went on to more famous bands. Even into Hip Hop after a while. Those images, we thought, were particularly great because they really challenged the standards of Hip Hop imagery. The Hip Hop community at the time hated them though. Mario was always strong minded that way, and I love him for it. The problem with getting celebrity jobs is that most of the time you don’t get chosen for them unless you already have celeb portraits to show. A catch-22 for beginners really. And the only way around it is for someone to believe in you and give you a break.
From these… What was the best experience? Worst experience? Most memorable personality?
The reason why magazines or other clients are hesitant to assign celebrity shoots to photographers who have not done it before is perfectly understandable. The setting of high profile celebrity shoots is completely different from any other photo situation. There are so many egos involved, so many fears, so many people trying to control what’s happening that you as the photographer have to be ready to deliver under that pressure. The Marylin Manson incident for example, was all about the fear of his manager. It had nothing to do with Manson. When I said to him that Universal, Manson’s record company and my client, had specifically asked me to make this look snappy, the manager said, “I don’t care about the record company, I’m protecting my clients interest.” In reality, all he was protecting was his job. Celebrity culture is deeply infested by the fear of making the wrong move and becoming unpopular. People get hired to decide for an artist what’s good and bad and of course to take the fall if things go wrong. Consequently, spontaneity gets blocked because they can’t control the outcome. It takes a lot of confidence and trust for someone famous to step out of that protective chain and a lot of tricks for a photographer to by-pass it. One memorable moment happened when shooting Angelica Huston. I had been allowed to sit in during the interview and she just had the most beautiful voice. She was asked to name ten things she liked and one of them was that she liked to be complimented on. When we were ready to shoot I said to her: “I really love your voice. It’s so beautiful.” She answered: “And I like that you were paying attention.” A few minutes into the shoot, her agent held his clipboard in front of my lens with the words: ‘I think we got it!’ Hahaha.
Tell us about your travels. Your favorite trip and why? Again, no favorites but the Bentley trip to Beirut last year was memorable. I guess the picture explains why. *[see: Bentley Dream Park, Beirut, 2010]
Do you have a message you want to give new/aspiring photographers? Think long term. Don’t compromise.
Whats next for you? I will be shooting Joan as Police Woman tomorrow.
(Source: thinkcontra.com)
