Persuasion With Sensibility
Sunday, August 04, 2013
Alex,
Just a short note to say hello. It has been
a while but I have been following your travels and travails off and on via your
blog and I hope your health issues are but a speed bump on a long and winding
road in a Malibu.
It is hard to believe that you are 70,
although it's harder for me to believe that I will turn 50 later this year.
Maybe I just won't.
When we met in 1986 -- Swervin' Mervyn
Fernandez and the Concorde! Al Davidson, the crushed football and the green
filter! Jim Nelford and the balancing tee! Primo and Secondo playing bestia
with my dad! -- I was not yet 23.
Now, I have a son who's not yet 23 and has
moved to NYC to work as a designer (plus a 20-year-old who's doing school and
working here).
Speaking of kids and family and your blog,
I have a question for you to answer -- not for me but for your blog readers (in
other words, it's blog fodder for you): Do your family and many friends ever
resist you taking their photographs and, if so, how do you persuade them to
participate in your art one more time? I'm sure your many readers would be
interested in the answer(s).
Take care, Alex, and here's hoping for a
good summer in the garden.
Rich
I received the above communication from
Richard Dal Monte who is the Editor of the Tri-City News. As you might guess he
and I worked on a few stories (he the writer and me the photographer) for
Vancouver Magazine in the mid 80s.
Unbeknownst to Rich his suggestion on my
writing this blog has much more relevance than he might have surmised.
Sometime in the mid 80s I called a very
beautiful exotic dancer called Sandi H and asked her, “Sandi will you pose for me?” It was
understood that I meant that she would have to undrape. Her answer is one that
I had never ever received before or since, “Alex I would be honoured.”
Except for people I have photographed for
magazines in the few fashion shoots I have been involved in, where the magazine
paid the models for their time, I have never ever paid any model to pose for me.
In the case of my 11-year-old granddaughter Lauren, of late I have had to resort to culinary bribery. She will pose if I satisfy and abide to her choice of the menu for our family Saturday afternoon dinners.
For Vancouver Magazine in the 80s I was
dispatched to photograph four people involved in the fashion and fitness world
who would reveal next to their pictures their special diet to keep their body
looking as beautiful as it was. Editor Mac Parry indicated, “Try to have the
least clothing possible.” I took that as a dare and decided my subjects would
not wear anything and I would use lights to hide what had to be hidden. I got
the then fitness queen Dana Zalko to remove all her clothes by telling her that
her rival at the Olympic Gym Carla Temple had agreed to remove all of hers. I
told Temple the
same story.
Getting people to shed all their clothing
is easy if you use the right language when you ask. I first found this out when
teaching a class at Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design as it was called
then. My class assistant asked me thusly, “Do you want a draped or undraped
model?”
The key then is to ask your subjects with
that word that does not sound offensive or aggressive, “Will you pose for me
undraped?”
I shot a series of women in tubs and this
became a very good gallery show. I called the 18 women I photographed and told
them I was doing women in tubs. Of the 18 only two wore a bathing suit which at
the last moment they would push away but not revealing anything. Nobody assuming they were going to pose inside a tub of water would ever think of wearing clothes. So I was asking them to pose for me in the nude without asking them to pose in the nude! They simply took all their clothes off and immersed themselves as most do in tubs,
with nothing on. While shooting these my Rosemary asked me one Friday, “What floozy
is posing for you this weekend?” I did get a bit of pleasure when I answered, “A
floozy you know, our eldest daughter who asked me point blank to be part of
this.” The story of my daughter in that does not end there. At Emily Carr a
week before I had been having lunch with a fellow teacher who was designer when
I spotted a beautiful red haired woman lining up at the food counter. I pointed
out how beautiful her hair was and how nice it would be to get her into my tub
series. My friend told me that she was his student, gave me her name and simply
told me (those times were so much more innocent it would seem), “Why don’t you
ask her?” I went up to the young woman and did just that. I photographed her at
the same hour as I did my daughter to make it easier for me; after all I was my
daughter’s father. The redhead was a great help.
Another story with a quick resolution was
of the beautiful peroxide blonde who would mysteriously eat alone by our table
at the Railway Club on Thursdays where for many years we had a group of
writers, artists, photographers and poets who met to converse. The woman was
extraordinarily beautiful but an enigma. I went up to her one Thursday and
said, “My name is Alex Waterhouse-Hayward. I am a photographer and I would like
to photograph you undraped.” She answered, “Sure, where and when?”
What does not work and I have told countless
photography class students is the indirect and sleazy method used by
photographers who have given the industry a bad name.
The model might show up for a head shot and
the photographer will little by little push the session into fewer and fewer
articles of clothing while playing ever louder heavy metal rock while offering
his (they are mostly males these sleazy ones) subjects wine and or drugs.
For portrait shoots at Focal Point I always
made the school bring in models as nude models (the were paid more) so if at
any moment you wanted the model to lower his boxer shorts a bit you did not
feel you were asking for something that was unwarranted.
When asked to photograph Prime Minister Turner for the cover of Vancouver Magazine, Turner’s campaign manager told me
that Turner had no time to pose for a city magazine out west. He further told
me that Turner in his visit to this city would be busy shaking hands with
potential voters. I had photographed Ron Basford a few years before. He had
been a powerful minister in Trudeau’s cabinet. I called Basford in Ottawa and he told me he
would handle it. I got my shot.
I used the same method to photograph
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson. I called Senator Larry Campbell who arranged
for the studio session for me.
Key to all this is to always leave a good
impression with those you photograph so that later if your need their help they
will give it to you. And most important is an easy going and polite phone voice
and style. If you ask right you get it.
In the small world that Vancouver really is if you want to photograph
someone you don’t know it is always possible to find someone you know who knows
the person of interest to serve as your intermediary.
Negative psychology can work very well,
too. Here is an example not exactly about getting someone to pose for me but to
get someone to review a photography show I was part of. I had been invited to
participate in a fund raising show at Presentation House Gallery (to have a straight
show there, not just in a group fund raising show you have to be either very
famous abroad or dead. I don’t qualify for either category). It was a show of pinhole photographs. I called the Georgia Straight’s art critic Robin Laurence
and told her, “There is this show at the Presentation House that you must not
cover because I am in it. Since I often work for the Straight this might be
seen as a conflict of interest.” Laurence indignantly retorted, “You are not
going to tell me what to review or not review. I will review it if I want.” And she did.
The above is I think mostly self-evident
and I think that it satisfies most of Rich Dal Monte’s suggestions for the
blog. But now I want to go to the part that most interests me at age 70, my
present age. The world has definitely changed from the magazine world I worked
for in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
In those days there was such a thing as a
real professional photographer who did not “work out of his home” (photo speak
for he/she does not work). In fact photographers could be sports photographers,
magazine photographers, photographers for newspapers, table top photographers
and photographers that worked in advertising. There were fashion photographers,
yacht photographers and forensic photographers. There were industrial
photographers and photographers who specialized in cars. There were portrait
studios and studios that specialized in school pictures and in sports team
pictures. These classifications, if they exist, they do so in a much reduced
world where a photographer with a name that is recognizable is as rare as rock
group that lasts more than a year.
Who, now under 30 years of age would
recognize these names, Bert Stern, Philippe Halsman, Annie Leibovitz or even
Helmut Newton? One of the last ones
might be the Brazilian Sebastiao Salgado. Fewer would ever suspect that Dennis
Hopper considered himself to be a better photographer than an actor, and that
Oscar Peterson (who’s that?) was a very good photographer.
The Colt Peacemaker made everybody a
potential gunfighter. The digital camera has leveled the field. A photographer
with a name is an anachronism of a past age.
In the age of magazines of which Vancouver was part of
until the late 90s I was, in this small pond a relatively big fish with a name.
If I called and wanted to photograph somebody they would instantly say yes.
That has changed. I am a face, an aging
face in a world of people with cameras. The idea of a professional photographer
has as much credential than that of a politician.
And there is Photoshop. My 15 year-old granddaughter
called me one day to ask me if I had a program to narrow a person’s face. I
have always used lighting to achieve this. Photoshop has in the same way as the
digital camera, leveled that playing field. Portraits are now resplendent in
their Photoshop Diffuse Glow.
While Sandi H was honoured when I called
her my prospective subjects now more often think I am a creep and to use the
new coinage think I am Weinering them.
The paradox is that at age 30 or 40 I
wanted to photograph women in the nude because I was a healthy, sexist, male
heterosexual. I used to haunt the best Vancouver
strip parlous and within minutes I would have two or three of the best of them
sitting with me. Now I cannot abide in entering one of those places. I have
changed and my concept of taking pictures of the undraped woman has changed,
too. I opt for more clothing. Age has brought with it subtlety and understatement.
In an era of pornography, subtlety and understatement are far more erotic. I
don’t think I have ever photographed a woman of any age or persuasion with some
element of eroticism in my mind.
While not resorting to heavy metal and
booze my intentions then where no different from those other photographers I
castigate. I now have more respect and restraint and I am aware of the
ramifications of what I do and of the symbols I might draw on.
And yet if I were 35 now would I be perceived
as a creep?But the most troubling conundrum I am
facing now is that only recently have I finally accepted that I am an artist.
An artist does not choose. An artist is compelled.
The photographs here are of a young woman,
Aja, who had many freckles and an ease for posing undraped. From her I learned
a lot and her pictures in the tub (the tub of my friend Mark Budgen) are the
prototypes that led to my women in the tub series. I asked her to pose and her
affirmative answer felt as natural as my asking.
