From the archives, a portrait of Steven Soderbergh taken on assignment for Rolling Stone France at the American Film Festival in Deauville, 2002.
Why dig this one up ? To say a little about the – often frustrating – logistics of even a simple portrait and why the “profit” you make from a job isn’t always a question of money.
So you (I, we) get to the Festival and work out pretty quickly that it’s not really geared to photographers, more an opportunity for print journalists. Everyone you want to see has a tight schedule and press relations minders to make sure they stick to it. Only the big magazines have pre-arranged photo shoots set up with the stars. Pictures – if you are allowed to make any at all – are low on everyone’s list of priorities. Everyone, that is, apart from the photographers and their clients.
You hang around. A lot. Nervously. We hung around in the corridor outside Steven Soderbergh’s suite for a very, very long time. It was then end of the day, he was behind schedule, it happens. This was not a problem: I’m a fan of his work and was delighted just to be there.
Long enough of a wait to plan for a whole series of ideas for the portrait only to abandon them one by one as the light changed outside. This happens to me regularly (it’s amazing how quickly light changes when you don’t want it to) and is one of the reasons I end up using relatively light-weight lighting systems. If you have complicated set-ups, you tend to install your kit before your sitter arrives. You can pre-light up to a point but there are final adjustments you can’t make until the real subject is available. When they do turn up, sometimes you find that your original idea simply wasn’t that good (at least I do). If the set-up is simple, you can easily re-locate. If the lighting equipment is cumbersome, you are generally forced to go with the initial – not so good – idea, simply because there is no time to change.
Photography lesson: try not to get attached to your own bad ideas. Sounds simple? It’s not. Especially when they have required considerable effort and (misdirected) reflection.
We begin with the interview. I’ll do the portrait afterwards. I still don’t know today if this is the right order in which to do things: sitting through the interview lets you watch the subject for a while and – if you listen – provides some topics of conversation for the shoot. There are a couple of dangers though: start making photographs during the interview (most of which will be bad) and, when it comes to your turn to do the “real” portrait, you risk your sitter saying that you have surely already got enough pictures. The other danger – not at all the case here – is seeing the journalist with whom you are working use up all the available time. I’m a photographer so it’s (so very, totally) obvious to me that a journalist can fill in any missing information through follow-up phone calls or e-mails while I have to get my job done on the spot. Surely I should have priority?
Mr Soderbergh was charming, the conversation fascinating. At one point he spoke of “experimental” cinema, remarking that for something to be a real “experiment” the outcome must be unknown, with the risk of failure. An “experiment” that doesn’t involve that risk isn’t an experiment at all, although it may appear to be one.
That falsely simple remark clicked – enough to think it important to mention it today It has been, for all the value it has been to me since, the real lasting profit drawn from the session. Sometimes our own thinking jumps forward as a result of meeting someone who can better formulate an idea that has been hovering on the periphery of our own consciousness.
Second photographic lesson: risk failure. This is especially appropriate today when (I believe) it is simply impossible to obtain total mastery of an ever-changing technology. If you wait for the day you have limited all risk of failure you’ll never do anything… And certainly nothing of any great interest.
Some links:
Solaris (of which I am very fond) and, as we are almost there, a door into Tarkovsky country.
