Texas Monthly Talks
Mark Seliger
Tommy says: It's funny reading about Mark. I grew up with him in Houston (he lived across the street from me). Mark's creativity started early in life. I think we were about 11 years old when we made a movie with hid dad's 8 mm movie camera with a bunch of neiborhood friends. It was called The Good, The Bad and The Different. It was hillarious. Mark was the Clint Eastwood character. That was just one of many fun things we did as kids. (November 30th, 2008 at 6:00pm)
(Page 2 of 2)
One of my favorite pictures—it’s not in the book—is of Neil Young. I did it for Rolling Stone when [his album] Harvest Moon came out. It was probably the most unlikely situation you could ever imagine him being in. We were in a studio in Chicago. We had two hours. We went into his bus, which was actually the Buffalo Springfield bus, and we picked out ten flannel shirts, and we photographed him for about an hour and a half doing all kinds of different things. For one shot, we sat him in front of a gray background with a wind machine blowing his hair. If you look at the picture, what you get is this sense of emotion. It was the way I had thought about Neil Young. I had thought about him in this airy, soulful environment—when you listened to him, it just felt good. That was what I wanted to create with this portrait. But if you had seen the whole setup, you would have thought, “How’s that going to work?”
I have to believe that Neil Young’s favorite thing in the world isn’t being photographed for hours on end. You could probably say that about most musicians.
Musicians, for the most part, are a tough wrangle. I approach them a little differently than I do actors.
How come?
An actor will play a role. A musician doesn’t have to. Some of my favorite pictures of musicians are really just simple, unaffected portraiture. Like the photograph I did of Kurt Cobain in a very shallow depth of field. It was darn lucky, because it was a Polaroid. It was bittersweet. I felt like we had this moment where all the walls were down. It revealed a sense of openness, a forlornness that I think a lot of people didn’t want to believe. That was pretty interesting to me. Usually when you’re assigned something, you’re appeasing the magazine that assigned it to you rather than trying to find something new.
As an editor, I would say the best thing you can do is give a photographer the most latitude to do the work he wants to do.
You’re absolutely right. I’m in a perfect situation now, because I work for two magazines that give me that latitude, and Rolling Stone did too.
You were at Rolling Stone for ten years. How did you land there?
I moved from Houston to New York to apprentice as a photographer for six or seven months. I thought I would return home and work as a corporate photographer, because that was what you did. Then I got a taste of editorial [photography]. I’d always been a fan of Rolling Stone. I wasn’t one of those teenagers who sat around reading it every weekend, but I really liked the artwork and the design. A lot of the photographs I saw in the seventies and early eighties were just remarkable—[Richard] Avedon, Annie [Leibovitz], Albert Watson. I felt like, “Wow, that would be the ultimate place for me to end up.” Because I love music and I think of photography as entertainment. I got a job from them about a year into being a freelance photographer.
Do you remember what it was?
It was three students from New York University’s film school. I procrastinated because I was so worried about it. I got the picture done two days before the deadline. After I turned it in, the photography editor, Laurie Kratochvil, left me a message on my machine that said “We are so excited about this picture, and we want to let you know that there will be a hell of a lot more work coming your way.” I was like, “Well, that’s pretty great.”
Couldn’t be a better thing to hear than that.
A little under a year, they called me to do a cover of Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Paul Simon. But they said, “There’s only one thing: If you want to do the cover, you have to do it today at three o’clock.” And it was like nine o’clock. I think I had an assisting job at that time, so I got somebody to take over for me and I booked a studio. Literally, I didn’t even have time to blink. It was a big deal. And then I get a call. It’s Paul Simon. I pick up the phone. “Hi, how are you?” “Hi, Mark, I’m in the car. Are you sure we’re gonna have enough time to do this?” “Um, yeah, I’m here all day.” He came, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo came, and they sang for us for half an hour. It was great. I thought, “I’ll never have to do another cover again.” That was the start of my relationship with Rolling Stone.
What was the last cover you shot for them?
Oh, man, it might have been Britney [Spears].
You’ve been shooting for GQ and Vanity Fair since 2002. How is that different from shooting for Rolling Stone?
The workload. With Rolling Stone I was doing ten covers a year and over one hundred assignments. I was shooting two or three days a week, all kinds of photographs. Wherever they needed me to be, I was there. At GQ and Vanity Fair, it’s a different kind of workload. But it’s also a different time in pop culture, so it’s not nearly as organic. For Rolling Stone, people would just kind of show up, and if they didn’t want to wear what you had brought along, it was whatever they came in. That machine’s just changed drastically.
Everybody has to wear the right clothes?
Well, it’s GQ and Vanity Fair. But I still try to steer people to a place not far from where they’d otherwise be.
That has to be a trick. How do you make people who are used to getting their way—who are these type A, big-ego guys—comfortable enough to do things that result in a photograph more interesting than the standard, straight-ahead shot?
If it feels like it’s going to be bigger than life or it’s going to be a concept, I try to convey to the subject that it’s a collaboration. That it should be fun. That there should be a sense of drama. A sense of shock.
Most of them are willing to go along with you?
Yes and no. The ones who won’t you never know about, because you never see those photographs. They’re not taken. But there are people who I know are going to be willing participants. We just did Jimmy Kimmel for the cover of GQ. I said, “Let me talk to Kimmel and see what I can do with him.” And I said, “You know what I think would be funny? Every president has a bit of dirt. Or they have a funny little story that’s in their closet that you’ve got to pull out and make a reference to.” Nixon—the victory pose. LBJ—he would hold press conferences in the bathroom to intimidate people. Kennedy and Marilyn. And Kimmel was like, “Oh, I love that. That’s great.” It just built from there and became this really funny shoot in which he portrayed all these different characters.
He was totally game?
He was so game that we could have gone for four days.
Give me an example of a celebrity who was unwilling to play in that same way.
Jerry Seinfeld, who’s an incredible collaborator. We wanted him to wear this big fake tongue and paint his face up like he was in KISS. Didn’t like it. But we ended up doing this even more brilliant idea of skinny Elvis and fat Elvis. That’s the way you have to think about it if you are going to do something conceptual. You’ve got to ride that wave.
Okay, one more question—and I’ve saved the best one for last. If I’m a budding photographer, what’s the one bit of advice that you, a famous photographer, can give me that would make me take a better picture?
Focus. And never settle for the ordinary. I’ve always found that the personal journey comes from self-critique. Don’t be afraid. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would erase a lot of the fear that drove how I created my earlier work. I wouldn’t have struggled so much in the early days, and I would have enjoyed it a lot more. It was never the process. It was never the experience. It was never, you know, the intrigue of doing it. Fear was, to me, the hardest demon to overcome.
Watch episodes from six seasons of the PBS program Texas Monthly Talks.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
