14.01.10
LA Based Fashion and Portrait Photographer Andrew Macpherson Interviewed
London-born Andrew Macpherson made his name with his fashion work, photographing models such as Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell before moving out to LA and establishing himself as a leading portrait photographer. Always ahead of the game, his views on where the industry is going are concise and to the point. Cass Chapman caught up with him in LA to find out about his past, present and future.
Part of my interview with Andrew Macpherson is spent with him patiently explaining to me how an Amazon Kindle works. Being technologically challenged, I confess to not quite being able to get my head around it, but Macpherson talks me through the function and the form, and it becomes clear he is on top of the world’s rapidly changing technology – and with good reason.
His interest is unmistakable, but he also recognises the impact such changes in technology will have on photography: “I think you’d be a fool to think you can be a photographer now,” he muses. “You can be a video director or you can be a director who enjoys photography, but to try to be a photographer without mastering the art of video now, of film making in all of its forms, you’d just be a fool. You cannot be a photographer alone. If anyone reading this is a kid or at college – [study] video.”
The rapid changes within the photography business and within media as a whole have made Macpherson very aware of the fluid changes occurring. He adds: “I don’t even know that I will make it through the rest of my life doing stills. Half the clients I have now are asking me to shoot video.” With a career that spans several decades and a client list that reads like a Who’s Who of the film and fashion worlds, Macpherson’s experience and success is coveted by many. Yet he is humble, grateful and unpretentious as a person, even going as far as trying to convince me that photography now is “easy”, if you have “the eye” of course: “When I was a kid it was really hard, just to do a transparency and to make it look perfect was really hard. It could take you a day of doing tests to get it right. Now you can do it so easily with Photoshop and digital. The craft of photography now is so simple you don’t need to waste that much time learning it.”
Macpherson makes absolutely no reference to his talent at all, but instead talks passionately about the changing nature of the business and the various projects he has under his belt in Los Angeles, the city he now calls home. Pink, Nicole Kidman, Patrick Dempsey, Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, U2, Reese Witherspoon, Kiefer Sutherland, Dustin Hoffman and every supermodel imaginable are just a few on the extensive list of people Macpherson has shot.
Such success, however, must have been unimaginable to the young teenager who was kicked out of school to start work in London at the tender age of 15. Crediting his school teacher, John Bigglestone, as the man who inspired him initially, the two are still, to this day, great friends. “He came into my art class and looked like Charles Bronson and had a bright tie and a bright smile in this world of grey teachers. He said: ‘Hey, any of you guys wanna draw but can’t?’ And I thought: ‘That sounds like me.’ He was fun and he had that kind of vibe – whatever he’s on, I want one of those. Whatever he’s teaching, I wanna learn. And it could have been anything, but he happened to be teaching photography.”
The meeting of Bigglestone and Macpherson may have been somewhat serendipitous, but it carved out the photographer’s future. “He literally gave me my life,” Macpherson states. Following his expulsion, the two stayed in touch and Macpherson went on to “a big industrial graphic workshop off Fleet Street. I made thousands of cups of tea for grumpy old men. Now I won’t drink tea!” The up-side of this position, though, was that Macpherson felt he was “living the dream”. He was 15 and out of school, working, and learning the beginnings of his craft. He became friends with “some really cool guys at the Colour Lab” who introduced him to some great talents, including Snowdon, who he went on to assist for a year. At just 24, he was shooting for Harpers & Queen with almost a decade of experience already under his belt.
The rest, as they say, is history, and Macpherson has had a career that is still going strong, though he swears never to have had a moment of feeling as though somehow he had arrived at a point of great success and satisfaction. “I’m still waiting for that. What you did yesterday doesn’t matter, it’s all about: are you going to get the job tomorrow?” Continually striving for that job tomorrow, and remaining well aware of how quickly the world in which we live is changing, seems to define Macpherson’s assessment of the business as a whole: “There are two kinds of photographers,” he tells me. “There are people doing photography because it’s a great creative business, and then there are people who love the photograph, the still image. For those who love the still image, the future is going to be more in art, than it is in commerce, and for people who are interested in it as a great creative business, the future is going to be in directing, in making clips.” He sees this juncture in time as significant: “We are at the same point in history where lithography was at the birth of photography. I think the new technology is going to render photography obsolete as a commercial medium.”
Macpherson’s work has been published in a book titled Two Million Miles, which was pitched to many publishers before being picked up because it set about documenting “a photographer’s journey rather than a monograph”, which wasn’t the done thing at the time. Would he recommend other photographers to do books? “It was a nice thing to do because every photographer wants to do a book. To have done a book and know that you are published, it’s kind of what you dream of, so it’s very self-gratifying. But beyond that gratification, I don’t know that it’s necessarily of much benefit.”
Having lost the majority of his work in a fire back in 1997, Macpherson’s portfolio was effectively wiped out, and this loss no doubt had a massive impact on his attitude to his work. Having stored “about 90%” of his work in a London warehouse used by Lloyds of London, he, quite justifiably, felt his work was safe. “The warehouse was used to keep all of Lloyds’ insurance records going back to 1600, so I figured you couldn’t get safer than that.” But sadly, that wasn’t the case. He charts the initial feeling of devastation he felt in Two Million Miles, though he has an incredibly pragmatic attitude to the incident.“You feel like you’ve lost a life when you lose it like that. I had lost the first 15 years of my work, everything from the beginning, basically vanished.” His initial devastation soon subsided, however. “You realise that just because you capture little bits of time, doesn’t mean you own them forever. Photography is, in a weird way, all about the possession of time, the capturing of time. Just because you capture it you feel like you own it, but when it all disappears you realise, just like a dentist or a cobbler, your work is not absolute.”
Absolute, it may not be, but innovative and inspirational it certainly is. For many photographers, editors and writers, Macpherson’s name is synonymous with a sophisticated and confident approach to his subjects. Meanwhile, he’s off to spend the day on the beach with his dogs. “Don’t you just love not working in an office?” he asks me, a small giggle of joy bouncing through his words.
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