A MAN of contradictions, he is striking yet unassuming, gentle yet intensely focused, with a softened Scottish lilt that grows stronger as he speaks. Born and raised in Edinburgh he now works and lives in New York City, with a large studio in Manhattan's West Village.
Spanning still life, portraiture and the moving image, Watson's practice moves seamlessly between commercial and personal projects. Many of his film posters are ubiquitous: his Kill Bill image of Uma Thurman in yellow motorcycle Ninja gear is iconic, as is the haunting beauty of the Memoirs of a Geisha poster. Watson's work has also graced the covers of over 250 Vogue magazines, countless Rolling Stone and Vibe covers, and over 650 television commercials. He is equally adept at shooting Snoop Dog or J-Lo as a Scottish landscape - or a theme park in Las Vegas. He conjured Albert Hitchcock holding a dead duck, Mick Jagger as a leopard, Bill Clinton against a steel blue sky; and Kate Moss naked in the Moroccan desert. His photographs capture the very essence of their subjects - for example, Keith Richard's face shrouded in cigarette smoke or Johnny Depp's brooding and boyish good looks.
Albert Watson has also created several books, including Cyclops; The Vienna Album and Maroc. A monograph is soon to be published by Phaidon, and Watson has also been the subject of several large-scale exhibitions. In 2006, he exhibited at the KunstHausWien in Austria, and was honoured with a retrospective at the City Art Centre in his hometown of Edinburgh.
Albert Watson Studio, Manhattan, September 2007
What prompted you to move to the United States?
I've been here since August 28, 1970, almost 37 years to the day. I travelled the States in 1966 as a student and I got a chance to come back in 1970 - my wife got a teaching job for a year in California - and after six months I got started as a photographer. And I really had to learn it' because I'd done four years as a graphic designer and three years in film school. I was trained with a lot of visual stuff, but I wasn't trained as a photographer. I knew how to frame a picture, but a lot of the technical aspects about photography I didn't know. I had to learn from scratch.
Have you moved into digital or do you always shoot film?
No. Film - because there are too many problems with digital. I shoot on 4x5 and 8x10 as digital is still not quite there yet. I think digital has great possibilities at night-time. It looks beautiful in artificial light, but I don't like the process of it. I also don't like art directors hovering around the computer while you're shooting and saying 'that looks good to me but can the hand be a little bit higher?' I would never allow that. I don't work that way. If somebody's paying for a job I'll try to make sure they get what they've got to get. But I much prefer to go the way I see it and the way that I think is correct for a client.
Is that how you began, with commercial work?
For a photographer in the 1970s to make a living in LA you did everything - car photography, some fashion, portraiture' and celebrities.
Which is your favourite genre?
I don't have one. If I do still life for two weeks then I'm desperate to get a live person. If I'm doing a live person for a month - then I'm quite happy to do a landscape or cars.
' and do you approach a portrait of a celebrity in the same way that you approach, say, a portrait of a child in Morocco?
Exactly the same. There's no difference at all. The only thing you do for a celebrity' sometimes there's a little bit more 'flowers in the dressing room' going on. As far as the actual photography is concerned, you're working the same way. Sometimes they have different functions. Celebrities know that and so do I. If you're doing the cover of a magazine it has to work in a certain way. You might have a great portrait that you took in Morocco, but it might not work on the cover of a magazine. What the shot is eventually going to be used for is always a consideration. I chat with them a little bit and most celebrities are savvy, but sometimes they're nervous. Sometimes it's a one - or a three hour - shoot, and other times, all day. I just photographed 50cent and Kanye West together for Rolling Stone, and they were here for two hours. Jaoquin Phoenix was here all day. I did a cover for Fortune today of the CEO of American Express and he was here for just thirty minutes!
I know that you've spent a lot of time in Morocco'
I did a book on Morocco, which was commissioned by the Prince of Morocco, who is now the king. He gave me a tremendous freedom. I felt a commitment to do a good job because he's so proud of the country, so I kept it fairly classic. The book was beautifully printed on a ten-colour press, so it really was well done. I've been going to Morocco for 25 years. I have a house just outside Marrakesh and so I'm there a lot. Marrakesh is pretty exotic, but it's also popular, it's very European now. I rented a house one New Year, then we started looking for land and built the house. We get there often, but it could well be that if I go five times a year - four times I'm there working.
Is Maroc one of your personal favourites as projects go?
Well it was a nice commission because someone says spend 30 days, photograph the country and go to all these different places' do portraiture, landscapes, still lifes, anything you like.
Sometimes the people were very shy, but if you went to the countryside in rural Wisconsin, they'd be very shy. In the cities they were more approachable. It's a wonderful country with wonderful people. They're really interesting - the Arab Berber mix is wonderful'
' and how often do you get to Edinburgh?
Most of my relatives are there. I get back about once a year, I had a show this time last year. As a photographer there's not a lot in the way of jobs. There are lots of things to photograph, of course; it's a beautiful country, but I don't know if you could run a studio. I work all the time. If I went back there I'd need to retire, not work' and you know a lot of photographers don't retire. I heard from Irving Penn's assistant that he has cut back to three days a week' but he's 90!
And how about you, do you want to slow down a bit?
Well, I slow down if I'm feeling tired, but I have good energy. I always have something on the go but I'm quite picky about what I do. I just finished a TV commercial with Charlize Theron, for an Italian jewellery company, and that was very interesting.
Do you think the notion of celebrity has changed over the years? A lot of the celebrities in America look the same now.
Yes, it's a clean-cut thing. There's a mass acceptability and believability to celebrities. But when you look back to late 40s and early 50s you had Rita Haworth, who was amazing looking. The average person back then never looked at Rita Hayworth and said 'she looks like me'. The idea is to find girls who are natural, approachable, pretty - just like the girl next door - whereas in the past, nobody was going to be Monroe or Hayworth. It tends to happen more with women than men. There are no men looking at Johnny Depp saying 'that could be me'. Depp is still a little bit old school. He has an unobtainable beauty. He's just unique. The 'Jennifer Aniston' girls can brush their hair the same way, wear the same kind of tank top and jeans, same belt and high heels' and they're almost there.
You work so seamlessly between colour and black and white.
Black and white is interesting and it's more surreal because a normal person sees everything in colour. Black and white, in some way, makes things easier because it takes the colour problem away. It neutralises colour by removing it. But of course, with colour there's a modernity to it. Very often colour portraits feel hotter to me. For example, I have a very good shot of Pamela Anderson. I think if you do a commercial shot and it's a good cover it can cross over into something more iconic. It's different from, say, the Clint Eastwood, which is a more serious portrait. I think that working between colour and black and white you have to analyse it. You can possibly get away with the same lighting, but a lot of times I use a digital camera to analyse. (AW pulls out a small camera from a hip holster and shoots the fruit on the table, then switches between black & white and colour on the display.) Very often you have to change the lighting to accommodate the shot. That's the problem all photographers have.
What about your personal work? What is your favourite project?
Well' the Vegas project was personal and we financed it ourselves, which was very expensive. We went to Vegas with three assistants for sixteen weeks. After I completed Maroc, which was so classic - so much like a 'cahiers' - I wanted something that was more decadent in all aspects: humanity wise, in colour, architecturally. So I was looking for something violently different from Morocco and, of course, Las Vegas gave me that. It was interesting because in the beginning, when I showed the pictures to my son who is also a photographer, he felt that they were a little bit National Geographic. There's nothing wrong with that, but probably too much of the journalist in me trying to tell you about Las Vegas. I wasn't interested in necessarily showing you Las Vegas, I was only interested in going and working there. You can't do a book on Vegas without doing gambling but I thought - yes I can - because it was a book I was doing in Vegas, not on Vegas. I changed the title from 'Vegas' to 'Shot in Vegas'. The minute I changed it I was off the hook. It made me free to shoot anything I wanted to. It's like Dominatrix at the Refrigerator. I was doing some shots of this dominatrix and she asked if she had time to grab a Coke from the refrigerator. She just opened the door and was looking into the refrigerator - that's what we shot. And for some reason it is Vegas'
'Tell me more about those Vegas portraits.
Some of them were professional dominatrixes, some were street people, some were just people visiting Vegas. We picked a lot of them simply because sometimes they had great colour hair. And that's just a matter of finding people. So instead of saying we'll make her hair red, we chose her because she had that colour hair.
The colour in those photographs is so saturated, but the lighting seems natural. But the most striking thing about the photographs is the quotidian nature of them, the sense of the everyday.
It's budget suites, you know. I shot some of the hotels there because I love them. For me, as a European, a 1958 Vegas hotel is cool, I'm still fascinated by them.
Do you shoot architecture on a different format?
A lot of times you work on 8x10, but I've always worked in every format' mainly 4x5, which transitions into another level of optics that I like very much. I like the spatial thing that it offers. I use it for everything. Without disintegrating at all you can go up to a 9 foot print. I remember a journalist last year said an 8x10 is twice as big as a 4x5. No, it's not twice as big, it's four times as big, because all you have to do is multiply 4 by 5: that's 20 square inches; 8 by 10 is 80 square inches of film. The negative resolution on 8x10 is very good, but not everything can be done in it. There are photographers wondering around New York taking wonderful pictures with a Leica.
Is the objective for your personal work to show it in galleries?
It's an interesting thing that happens with photography in general: that sometimes a photograph can look brilliant in a magazine and have a certain impact. That same shot may or may not be amazing in a book. Put it on a wall in a gallery and it looks not quite as good as it did in a book, but not nearly as good as it did in a magazine. Then you take it from this gallery wall and put in a museum show. Galleries tend to have ten foot ceilings and a lot of museums have 30, 40 foot ceilings. So when you do a museum, you take a fashion shot and blow it up to six feet high, how does it hold up? The image that started its life in a magazine. How does it make the transition from a magazine, to a book, to a gallery wall, to a museum? Sometimes a really amazing fine art shot, which might look wonderful, powerful and strong on a gallery wall - when put it in a magazine it doesn't work. Sometimes a fashion shot can make it all the way through, but you need to be careful. A pretty girl in a magazine can look pretentious on a gallery wall, or not strong enough to be there. Whereas when you come across it in a magazine you go: 'Oh, I love the way she looks there'.
So you keep quite strict curatorial control over your exhibitions?
Oh yes, you have to. I give a little more freedom to galleries who are trying to sell the work, as to where they mount it and how they put it together. Big museum shows with an eclectic mix work very well.
Do you have favourite photographers?
A wonderful photographer is Andreas Gursky. I like the Germans - Struth, Ruff. I like that style of photography. Ruff is more a graphics guy, so I like him: the .jpeg pictures, shooting off TV screens - that's a graphic solution. I like hundreds of photographers. You look at Weston and Paul Strand, amazing. You look at Kert'sz and Brassa', amazing. I'm not a gigantic fan of Ansel Adams, apart from that one of moonrise, which I think is an amazing image. I was never a big fan, because I felt that for someone who spent so much time shooting landscapes, there could have been more emotion in some of them. In the moonrise picture you have it. If you look at the Magnum photographers, Martin Parr is very good. I prefer his work in a magazine - I'm not a big fan of Martin Parr on a wall. I think Annie Liebovitz is a very good photographer. I told her once that I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair and I thought they were not as strong as she normally does. Then I remember looking at it again two days later and noticing she hadn't done the pictures! She influenced so many people, all the guys were trying to copy her but she always did it better. She's a reportage photographer with a graphic sense and that makes her celebrity portraiture unbeatable. I quite like some of the studio portraits, but she's at her best in situation-driven portraiture.
Do you collect photography?
I have a few people that give me presents. I have a beautiful Kert'sz and a Brassa' and a beautiful Wandersee, the person who did all the 1930s pictures in Harlem - my son gave me a print of his. He bought it directly from him, and he signed it. I also have a very nice Avedon Everly Brothers. And two Eugene Smiths. I'm not a big collector. I collect books, which is another story. I have thousands of books. One of my favourite books is just called Women Photographers. I like Sally Mann, Annie Liebovitz, Mary Ellen Mark. My work is very simple... you see someone who's trained for four years as a graphic designer, some years in film and that's it' hopefully combined with a love of photography!
www.albertwatson.net/
PHOTOICON gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of Aaron Watson in making this feature possible.
Kathy Battista is a writer and author based in New York and a specialist in modern art issues. She is currently Director of the Contemporary Art programme at Sotheby's Institute of Art and a contributor to numerous European magazines and newspapers.
