Pirelli Calendar 2019: the inside story
legendary photographer Albert Watson brought his creative genius to the 2019 Pirelli Calendar. Steve Fairclough found out about his vision for ‘the Cal’
In May 2017 Albert Watson’s New York studio got the call from Pirelli to ask if he would consider shooting the 2019 Pirelli Calendar, aka ‘ The Cal’. Ironically, it came many years after Watson was first approached to shoot the calendar – that was a project he declined as he didn’t think the ballet dancer theme of that year suited him at that time. He laughs and says, ‘But I guess it eventually came round to me again!’
Watson prepared for the 2019 project in his usual meticulous fashion. He explains, ‘I had a storyboard of references of my own pieces and sometimes random things, like an old still of a man teaching a woman to tango. I had 24 fairly extensive boards and each board had about 10 images on it, so about 240 or 250 images were prepped as inspiration.’
Like many of the recent Pirelli Calendar photographers, Watson took the decision to move away from the nude pin-up style of earlier calendars. He reveals, ‘ That kind of pin-up calendar almost seemed that it had run its full course... Pirelli came to me for a concept; I gave them one. We made a slight adjustment regarding location and that was it. We went ahead.’
Casting the shoots
The 2019 Pirelli Calendar, titled ‘Dreaming’, was shot over just four days on location in Miami and New York. It tells the stories of the lives and dreams of four very different women. The cast included model Gigi Hadid as a wealthy heiress, with her mentor played by fashion designer Alexander Wang, and actress and model Laetitia Casta as an artist who is supported by her boyfriend, played by Ukrainian ballet dancer Sergei Polunin. Real-life ballet star Misty Copeland played an aspiring dancer, with her boyfriend played by fellow ballet performer Calvin Royal III, and actress Julia Garner played a promising botanical photographer.
Watson says the casting was ‘kind of a joint decision’ with Pirelli and adds, ‘A lot if it now is connected to social media, so celebrity is very important, whereas in the past they could just be models. Some of them were supermodels, so they were good for social media, but for the most part they [Pirelli] were looking for people who had pretty big followings on things like Instagram or social networks.’
He had previously photographed Sergei Polunin and Laetitia Casta, but it was the first time Watson worked with Misty Copeland, Gigi Hadid and Julia Garner.
Thankfully most of the shoots were very smooth, as the 76-year-old Watson explains: ‘At this stage in my life I’ve photographed about five million people so, unless somebody comes in and is a pain in the neck, usually I can handle nearly all situations.’
According to Watson the total shoot was four days of 12 hours each, although owing to tight schedules, he only had an eighthour shoot with Gigi Hadid in New York to produce 14 high-end images. He describes that as, ‘a little bit of a stretch’, as for some of his images Watson shot three or four frames to give a single shot ‘a strange dimension’. He explains, ‘Very few people will notice that in the images, but I notice it. To shoot three frames with a long lens, for example, like a 150mm, and then re-assemble the image to make it look like it was done with an 80mm lens is, in the midst of all I had to do, a pretty solid challenge.’
Using the 16:9 format
The aim was to tell stories by shooting stills that looked like they could have been shot on a movie set; hence the choice of the 16:9 format for the images. This is unsurprising, given that Albert Watson trained in film and television at the Royal College of Art in London, has made films, and many of his still images have a clear filmic quality.
Watson explains, ‘Basically they were meant to be stills taken out of a movie. The idea was not to make them overtly driven by photography or pure portraiture, but more by film stills.’
He reveals, ‘I shot it all on a Phase One camera with an 80-megapixel back. Some of the shots I did multiple frames for re-assembly [later] to help me with that 16:9 [format]. The 16:9 format was quite difficult for me because it’s not a format that I work with all the time. Although it was my idea, as I went into it I realised that it was more difficult than I thought because it means that everything is 16:9.’
The key for Watson was to maximise the detail to give him more dimensional final images but he admits, ‘I always knew that the detail that I was going to give the printer was way above what the printer was going to need. I think you get a more dimensional looking image when you pack as much information into it as possible.’ This meant that some images had well over 200 megapixels
of original information in them before post-production.
Working with a 2 ¼ in format Phase One camera Watson mainly used 80mm, 110mm and 150mm lenses for the Pirelli shoot. In terms of lighting he deployed ‘a lot of portable Profoto strobes and also proper mains-driven units as well. I had plenty of lights with me. I had some tungsten lights as well, which are quite handy to mix with daylight sometimes.’
Biggest challenge
Aside from the responsibility of tackling an iconic project such as the Pirelli Calendar, Watson notes, ‘I think the biggest challenge is to do 14 or 15 stills per day on a person. You’re talking different situations where you’re in a bedroom, then you’re in a garden, then you’re in a truck, then you’re in a strip club and then you’re moving around like that. To move a crew like that around with equipment and be in different locations and different scenarios; it was quite tough.’
One of the keys to handling such a punishing schedule is Watson’s stripped-down approach to shooting. He reveals, ‘I’m pretty economical. What’s important now, the way I’m working, is that I’m absolutely visualising a shot and forming it in my mind and then I’m headed down the road towards that shot. It’s at the end of a road but it’s never a straight line to get to that shot. So, when you have something in mind, there’s a lot of preparation. I’ve said time and time again that the one weakness of photographers is that they don’t prepare.’
Post-production workflow
The post-production was extensive and handled by his team of fulltime retouchers in his New York studio. He explains, ‘ The assembly of the images was probably three weeks. I made all of the selection myself and the choice that I gave Pirelli was that we always knew that we were either going to be at 40 or 44 final images. I gave them 52 definitive, individual, different images, so there were more photographs there than they needed but I knew that; I did that for myself as well as for them.’
Watson explains the ethos behind his approach to the calendar: ‘ The one thing I wasn’t going to do was [ just] to do 12 pages. I wanted to make it more complex than that. I wanted to do it so that the images almost didn’t relate to each other. I wanted to make it more complex because I think in the modern world people can easily accept images that don’t interconnect. If you spend some time going over Instagram nothing connects in there.’
But did Watson actually enjoy shooting ‘ The Cal’? He recalls, ‘I remember my son, when he was watching me working, asked me that question and said that it didn’t seem like I was enjoying myself. I was actually quite shocked that he said that and I said, “No. I love every minute of it.”’
Watson adds, ‘I’m the kind of person that’s not casual when I’m shooting. I can’t do it any other way. If I’m casual then it’s too “easy peasy”, so I’m quite solid. That doesn’t mean to say that I’m not communicating with whoever I’m photographing at a very intense level of concentration. I’m really working with the person, and you could almost say that if a bomb went off next to me I would probably not notice it.’
He concludes, ‘If you’re going to do something like the Pirelli Calendar – which has a very high visibility – you want to make sure that if you have this vision of doing 48 individual images that it’s a big challenge. There was a lot of preparation in it and I did a lot of research on what I wanted to do. I think that Pirelli appreciated all of that work because they saw me doing it. The thing that was most satisfying is that it ended up being what I set out for it to be.’