TIMOTHY WHITE
Celebrity portrait photographer TIMOTHY WHITE creates his best work, Annabel Tan discovers, in the sweet spot between confidence and insecurity
TimothyWhite looks at life through a frame. Everything in it, he meticulously controls. For everything else, he throws caution to the wind.
The same goes for his craft, which the American photographer has honed for over 30 years. He has photographed celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford and Julia Roberts. “When I put a camera up to my face, that frame is there. And I can instantly just feel where to put things.”
White was in Singapore for just 48 hours to shoot Singaporean swimmer and Olympic gold medallist Joseph Schooling for Hugo Boss’s Fall/ Winter 2019 campaign. He had seen Schooling’s previous campaign for the fashion brand and thought, “I can make him look really great.”
His confidence is not unfounded. White has a knack for interacting with his subjects and making them feel at ease, resulting in portraits that often reveal a lesser-known side of celebrities. While there is no tried-and-tested formula, he says it boils down to his personality and experience.
“I’ve been doing this a long time and I like to say I have a big bag of tricks,” says the 63-year-old. “When you’re passionate about your work and confident in what you know, people can see that and will trust you enough to want to come along for the ride.”
Under White’s instruction, Schooling was literally bending over backwards and jumping through hoops (sans the hoops) over and over on set to nail the action shots. “I wanted to shake things up and that meant pushing Joseph out of his comfort zone. I told him I needed him to believe in me and to try something different, but he also saw it in me through the process. He could tell that I was also into it, he knew that I cared and that we were going to do something great.”
This confidence also comes through in the fact that White accepts that not everything is within his control and thrives on this uncertainty.
“Too much information clouds my ability to be reactionary and open. I’m excited by the not knowing and the challenge of solving problems,” White says. “I leave room for things to happen.”
It is also a way to ensure he is always present with the people he’s working with. “That’s the way I live. I’m about the connection to people. I don’t know many things, but I do know that our interaction with people is what we’re all about on this planet.”
This ability to connect with people was something he also found in his business partner, lawyer and film producer Tan Min-li. They had met at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 and hit it off after discovering their shared passion for the arts. Last year, they started White Light Editions as a business to expand the reach of White’s archive, especially to the Asian market. This ranges from holding exhibitions to merchandising and licensing deals. He also works on special projects like the one with Hugo Boss.
“Min and I are very different, yet similar in our tenacity, ability to connect with people and our vision. We just want to reach a lot of people and allow them to appreciate what we create. We both understand that my work needs to go forward beyond me.
“These images freeze a moment in history. Most of the people whom I’ve photographed were people who have broken records, changed the world or affected us in some way. I’m lucky enough to have this lifelong body of work that is voluminous and consequently, we need to do something with it.”
White says he does not care for having his name on the images; he only hopes they will one day be as big a part of society’s collective consciousness as iconic images such as “the Beatles crossing Abbey road or the Vietnamese general with a gun up to a person’s head”.
“If even just a few of my photos are remembered or are carried forward because of the people that I photographed and their importance in history, then that’s kind of a great thing.”