Portrait maestro
mark seliger has been shooting portraits of the world’s most famous people for over three decades. Steve Fairclough spoke to him about his career thus far and new book Photographs
Steve fairclough speaks to portrait photographer mark Seliger about his career
In the realm of portrait photography Mark Seliger is a superstar, yet he’s refreshingly down-to-earth and relaxed when speaking to AP via Skype from his New York City studio. He’s discussing his new book, Photographs, which features celebrity portraits from the first 30 years of his career – but he reveals his first love was developing pictures rather than taking them. ‘As a kid I was really fascinated with the darkroom. I took a course at junior high school and my focus was on making prints. I wasn’t really that interested in taking pictures at first, but that was probably a good thing. I settled into photography once I got to college.’
A native of Texas, Seliger attended Texas State University and names his then professor, James Newberry, as a key influence in sparking his love of
photography. ‘I was inspired a lot by documentary photography and portraiture. [James] Newberry was really focused on giving us pretty broad strokes of the history of photography, so that opened up my eyes to a lot of possibilities in terms of what I was doing. He opened my eyes to being more involved in portraiture, then documentary portraiture and then connecting to the idea of editorial.’
After a couple of years working in Houston, Texas, Seliger says he ‘sort of outgrew’ a career as an assistant, so in 1984 decided to move to New York City to further his career. This included assisting some local photographers ‘who weren’t particularly big names in the biz but they were great people and had great attitudes. They taught me a lot about how to have a direction and a personality in my work.’
Influences and early career
Seliger actually spent a day working with the legendary George Hurrell, best known for his portraits of the major early Hollywood film stars, which he recalls was ‘ kind of amazing’. Among his photographic inspirations he cites August Sander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. He reveals, ‘Later on I tapped into [Richard] Avedon and [Irving] Penn, and Arnold Newman was a big influence for me because of his use of environmental portraiture.’
Early on in his career he shot for business magazines, including one called Manhattan, inc., which used very bold imagery of business bigwigs in the ‘greed is good’ era of the late 1980s. Seliger describes this publication as giving him a ‘great break’, but admits that in this period, ‘I pretty much took everything I could possibly do in order to be able to support myself purely by taking pictures. It took a year or so before things really started to build and then it became kind of a whacky ride for me.’
In 1987, when showing his portfolio to Rolling Stone magazine for the third time, Seliger secured his first assignment with the legendary US publication – it was to shoot the NYU Film School for the so-called ‘Hot Issue’. The result clearly went down well, as Seliger became a regular contributor to the magazine before becoming Rolling Stone’s chief photographer in 1992. It was a position he held until 2001, when he made the move to the Condé Nast publishing
company to shoot celebrity portraits for magazines such as
Vanity Fair and Vogue. When quizzed about how he developed his photographic style, Seliger states, ‘I don’t think I had an obvious direction to my work. I guess the strength for me was that I was pretty handy with colour, which was a big bonus for the magazine world because a lot of people didn’t really emphasise their colour work. It was pretty bold colour and I think my work probably had a good sense of humour to it – that was a strength and the tool I had.’
Cameras and films
Seliger says he shot some work in 35mm in his early career but he was mainly using Hasselblad medium-format cameras due to his preference for a square format. When he joined Rolling Stone his approach changed as, compared to glossy magazines, the newsprint paper the publication used required a very high-quality original image to print well on the paper.
He explains, ‘What I realised, through experimenting, is that a beautifully lit colour picture printed better, so I would really push my colour. I was using Fujichrome 100, using a lot of lighting outside, and I was kind of in that world of big, bold, saturated photographs. I was even experimenting with super wideangle cameras and lenses, even
fisheyes, and finding a lot of fun in that. That really was a period when a lot of my work was not only visually funny, from the standpoint of the concept, but it was also exaggerated by lenses and by colour.’
These days Seliger primarily uses an IQ back on a Phase One camera, as well as a digital Nikon, but he still shoots film. For his analogue work he has an 8x10 Sinar, 4x5 Toyo and Pentax 67 cameras, with Kodak Tri-X or Ilford Delta his go-to films for black & white work. He explains, ‘For handheld, more “loosey-goosey” [shooting] I use a Contax G2 and I have Rolleis. Cameras are kind of like a paintbrush for me. I typically don’t throw cameras out because I can always come back to them.’
Thirty years of work
Of his new book, Photographs, Seliger says, ‘ This is a really interesting book because it’s a retrospective – a collection of work from the last 30 years. The first picture was taken in 1987 and the last picture was taken about two weeks before the end of 2017. That picture was of [U2’s lead singer] Bono [see bottom far left], and we snuck that in about two-and-a-half weeks before we went to print.’
The tome features over 150 portraits of celebrities from the worlds of music, film, TV, fashion, sport and politics, all of which display a great intimacy, depth and richness. The subjects include Paul McCartney, Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, Keith Richards, Ralph Lauren, Muhammad Ali and Steven Spielberg.
In response to the idea that a sense of intimacy is key to his work, Seliger replies, ‘I guess that’s the way I operate. I work really closely with the people that I photograph. I get enough information about the person to where, when I go into a shoot, I have enough backstory to manoeuvre my way through the shoot where I think they feel they can let their guard down. I feel it’s my responsibility to people that are viewing the image that there’s some level of intimacy to it. I like that.’
He continues, ‘I think about 80% of my job is really about being present and understanding. I typically don’t take an assignment unless I’m invested in it. I think that investment is what helps me come back with something that feels like there’s an original quality to it. It needs to be a picture that can live.’
Prepping the book
Seliger began the book by simply jotting a list of images that came to mind over the course of a year. He explains, ‘ Then we’d go back into the files and look at a particular image and we’d also look at things that maybe we’d forgotten about. I take so many pictures and have so many levels of photographs that I forgot about certain images or there were moments that didn’t really stand out to me because they’d kind of got lost in the edit because a magazine picked something that served them better.’
Despite the bulk of the work being shot in an era when magazines became predominantly full colour the majority of the images, roughly 70%, in the book are black & white. ‘A lot of these images held up for me in black & white,’ reveals Seliger.
He continues, ‘Even though I was connected to the colour images I think the black & white ones in some way took some of the assigned work and gave it a lot of the gravitas of some of the personal work (Seliger often shoots more gritty personal documentary projects), built it up a little bit and gave it a little bit more heft.’
Whether you prefer Seliger’s richly vibrant colour images or his black & white pictures, Photographs is a hugely impressive body of work that is a fitting showcase of the style, humour and technical adroitness of one of the world’s best portrait photographers.
As the interview draws to a close I ask him what he is most proud of in his career. He replies, ‘I’m really happy with pretty much every aspect of my professional life and my personal imagery as well. I’ve been really proud of the books we make and I love my assignment work. Whenever I get a call from an agency or a publication, and I get to go out there and apply myself in my creative world, I kind of pinch myself. I’ve been a pretty lucky guy. To think of 30 years of being able to do the same thing with different pockets of depth, different pockets of understanding and selfdiscovery is pretty remarkable.’