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somethingimworkingon · 2 years ago

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“You had to be there”: in conversation with Albert Watson for Vogue CS, April 2023

Carmen Dell’Orefice photographed by Albert Watson, Vogue CS, April 2023

“You had to be there,” says Albert Watson. The legendary Scottish photographer is talking me through his shoot with the every-bit-as-legendary Carmen Dell’Orefice, the original supermodel, who makes her Vogue CS debut this month at the tender age of 91.

In one particular picture, Carmen, statuesque in opera gloves and giant shades, appears to be rising like an Art Deco Venus out of a red and white mosaic cloud, yards of Lever Couture dress pooling below her. How, I want to know, did he make her look so – well, so tall? “There’s a ledge that she’s standing on at the back of the elevator,” Albert explains – “we shot in a freight elevator” – next to the makeup area at the photographer’s studio in New York. Despite the fact that she is “very fragile: two people had to escort her onto the set, if she’s standing for any more than five minutes she gets vertigo,” Carmen remains, clearly, the eternal, consummate professional. “Once she was on the set,” Watson continues, “once that flash went, she [said] to herself, ‘Ok Carmen, pull yourself together, let’s go!’ She would laugh, give a little something [special] for every shot.” She may not have been actually levitating, but some kind of magic appears to have been happening. Not a gesture, not a moment was wasted. “There were sometimes just five frames – click, click, click, click – done.”

The very idea of a nonagenarian with vertigo posing in dark glasses and couture several feet off the ground, in an elevator, is dizzying, and Watson is candid about the challenges. Early ideas discussed with the team in Prague included a shoot with a Surrealist theme. The immense depth of Watson’s knowledge, his decades of experience – not to mention his great gift for storytelling – are evident as he explains to me, in detail, how a Surrealist-influenced shoot would work, how the model would move, how long the shots would take, how the photographer would conduct the sitting. He mentions the Vogue masters Horst and Erwin Blumenfeld, as well as Welsh theatrical photographer and set designer Angus McBean. But then: “I had a coffee with Carmen a week [before the shoot]… She is beautiful, people looked at her as she left the coffee shop… [but] she is fragile,” and he knew that this shoot needed to go in a different direction. “As far as conceptualising it, I knew that my energy was best served to pour energy onto Carmen, to make her feel good about the shooting. If I had a 20-year-old model I could pour my energy into the concept – but you have to accept this is Carmen, a 91-year-old, and that’s kind of remarkable.” And, in the end? “It was fabulous!” Albert says, warmly. “She is a wonderful person” – as well as a part of fashion history. He describes the project as “photographing somebody from another era, even before my time. She pointed out that when I first picked up a camera she had already been working as a model for twenty years – and I’ve been a photographer for fifty years!”

Albert Watson is 81, and has shot over a hundred Vogue covers. He started working with the magazine in 1976 (Carmen appeared on her first Vogue cover, aged 15, in 1946). Born in Edinburgh, Watson retains a soft Scottish accent, despite having lived in the US since the seventies. “I started off at art college as a graphic designer,” he says. Impressively, the fact that he was born blind in one eye seems never to have held him back. “As a craft subject I had two years of photography.” He then spent two years studying film at the Royal College of Art, but it was photography which was to dominate his career. Early test sessions for Max Factor in Los Angeles brought him to the attention of magazines, including Vogue, and his first celebrity image, of Alfred Hitchcock holding a dead goose for the Christmas 1973 issue of Harper's Bazaar, set the stage for a career in A-list portraiture. From Steve Jobs to Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger to Queen Elizabeth II, Watson has photographed many of the most famous faces of our times, as well as hundreds of actors, musicians and other celebrities.

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Going back to the Vogue CS cover story, “I approached the shooting like it was portraiture,” says Albert. “My preparation in this case was that it had to be minimal, treating Carmen as a celebrity [rather than] a model, [where we] catch glimpses of the fashion.” I mention that some of the shots have a feel of Irving Penn, some of the styling, the hats and fascinators, reminds me of Lilian Bassman photographs. Albert doesn’t disagree. “You could sense, when you photographed Carmen, a little bit of a thread going all the way backwards to the 1990s, the 1980s, the seventies, the sixties and into the fifties. You could feel that [history] from her, the way she projects it.”

Carmen Dell’Orefice photographed by Albert Watson, Vogue CS, April 2023

As well as shooting portraits, fashion, and covers for magazines including GQ, Rolling Stone and Details, Watson has photographed major ad campaigns, directed TV commercials, and shot film posters and album covers. He also keeps up a steady stream of personal work, including still life and even landscape photography. You’ve shot so many different kinds of subjects, I say: do you have different mindsets for different kinds of photography? Do you feel differently when you’re shooting different subjects? “I do!” This is a good moment to point out that Albert is also an educator, a teacher of photography students. His Masters of Photography series covers everything from “The importance of casting and hair & makeup” to “Photographing sand dunes.” He tells me about taking time off between fashion shoots to travel in the north of his native Scotland, which in turn leads a fascinating discussion of his methodology when it comes to preparing and conceptualising photo shoots.

“I’m not a landscape photographer,” he says, “but I always wanted to spend six weeks just doing landscapes, no faces in front of me. [In 2013] I went to the Orkney Islands to do ‘portraits’ of the standing stones there. I went to the Isle of Skye [with] a book of paintings by Degas.” While Degas is famous for his Impressionist studies of ballet dancers and jockeys, Watson took a book of his less well-known landscapes. “I was fascinated by the fact that he would paint a rather boring hill – if I was standing behind Degas and took a picture of it [with a camera] and showed it to you you’d go, ‘Ok, it’s a picture of a hill,’ whereas if you look at the Degas painting you say, ‘Wow, what a beautiful painting.’ The thing is that Degas is doing an interpretation of what he sees in front of him, and I’m taking a picture… so I get an exact copy of what’s in front of me.”

Watson talks about how two photographers shooting the same landscape may end up with the same image, whereas two painters rarely will. He’s describing the need to push photography, beyond simply recording what is in front of the camera. “You have to try and control the landscape,” he says, “don’t let the landscape dominate the final image.” Some of his endeavours seem almost like Buddhist meditations – spending three days, ten hours a day, photographing reflections caused by the wind on a Scottish loch, for instance. Or getting up every day at 4.30am to be on the road by 5.30am, when it was still dark, to do “a series of pictures in a beautiful kind of forest, using the headlights of the cars as lights going through the forest.”

Carmen Dell’Orefice photographed by Albert Watson, Vogue CS, April 2023

Watson’s landscape photography isn’t simply an endurance test – even though “I chose October deliberately because the weather was bad!” He approaches it with as much professional preparation as any of his commissioned work: “I had two assistants with me, to make me very efficient, and able to quickly get up a mountain to take a picture, and quickly down.” He also uses it a way of reflecting deeply on the meaning of the images. “I wrote down a lot of things that were connecting landscapes to an emotional response.” On Skye he was musing on “Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Victorian romantic paintings” and when I ask him about how he keeps track of all these ideas, all these concepts, projects, he replies, “I’m taking notes all the time. I have a diary with me, and I’ve a diary by my bedside. Sometimes I wake up in the morning with an idea, go to sleep get an idea…” He talks about jotting things in a little notebook – “Landseer [the nineteenth century English animal painter and sculptor], some of the German Romantic painters from the 1860s, 1880s.”

On Skye, he also spent time taking pictures of the landscape specifically to manipulate them later – “shooting for a computer,” as he calls it. In his eighties, Watson still has a strong interest in innovation, and is unfazed by technology. His Instagram account, @albertwatsonphotography, is beautifully curated (“my son does that, he does a great job”) and has a strong following, but Watson is shrewd about the platform, well aware of what generates likes and what doesn’t. “With Instagram you have to be careful. Instagram is kind of a false reading of how popular your work is.” A combination of old and new, published and unpublished work, the account is also an educational tour through five decades of image-making, an excellent resource for photographers, students, designers and photography lovers alike. I ask him to talk a bit more about his own resources, and what kind of advice he offers to younger generations today. Unsurprisingly, Albert has a wealth of brilliant insights on the topic.

“I always say to younger photographers: ‘preparation,’” he begins. “They immediately think, ‘must charge the batteries in my camera!’ But it’s nothing to do with that. It’s conceptual preparation… When I’m preparing a shooting, I’ll go through a lot of books.” Watson admits, “the one thing that amazes me that young photographers don’t use nowadays… [is] books.” He talks about how books can be a source of ideas and inspiration, even if you end up taking things in a different direction than originally planned. A book is like a road map, but you don’t have to follow it faithfully: “It’s like you head out from London to go to Cornwall and you end up in Wales – the important thing is the book gets you out of London!”

His book collection is “about 30% photography, 70% art. That is a major difference,” he points out. “You’d imagine for a photographer it’d be 92% photography. But there are books on art, architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, books on the Maya, the Aztecs… a complete collection of [seventeenth century English architect] Vanbrugh drawings, Michelangelo drawings...” With thousands of volumes at his disposal – “I have five libraries in my apartment” – it’s also important not to get overwhelmed. Or overburdened on set. Albert’s trick is to use the iPhone to snap images from his library and collect them in albums on the phone to use as reference, especially when travelling. It’s an elegant solution, as practical as it is contemporary.

Watson himself has been the subject of several books, from the educational (Creating Photographs, from the Masters of Photography series), to the spectacular (Kaos, a dazzling career overview published by Taschen in 2017 in a limited edition priced at £2,000). His work has also been featured in catalogues from scores of exhibitions. Watson, The Maestro, at Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul Arts Center through March 30, 2023, is his first retrospective in Korea and his largest exhibition to date in Asia. Meanwhile, those hauntingly beautiful images from the Isle of Skye can be seen in an online exhibition at the virtual gallery, CameraWork.de.

I ask if there any books he would recommend? “One of the best things for photography students, and design students,” he says, “is photography catalogues from [auction houses] Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips – Phillips does nice big ones” (as both a photography lecturer and former Phillips art director, I’m delighted to hear this.) “You can buy these things [on Ebay] going back fifty years,” Albert points out. “For thirty bucks you’ve got a thousand images by classic photographers! It's a great teaching tool.”

Our interview is nearly over, there’s just time for one last question, so I ask what motivates him – to teach, to experiment, to plan, to shoot – “What inspires you to keep doing what you’re doing?” Albert laughs. “I’m addicted to photography!... I always found the technical side of photography a pain in the neck, so I was never enthusiastic about that, but I did realise that if you want to be a photographer you have to have to bite the bullet, do your homework. I’m glad I did, because working hard on things like lighting, it opens creative doors for you. You can solve things quicker if you know how to light.”

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