14.01.10
New York Based Portrait Photographer Andrew Eccles Interviewed
It’s been a tough year for a lot of the major name celebrity photographers in the US. They may seem to many as the untouchables – getting the commissions everybody wants for fees that UK photographers could only dream of, all to shoot A-list celebrities. But, as Andrew Eccles states, at the beginning of 2009, work for many just stopped.
He describes it as a kind of ‘Perfect Storm’ where everything collided. There was an LA writers’ strike and magazines closed, while film companies reduced budgets and stopped the production of movies and TV shows. “There was a spending freeze, and so there were very few photo shoots,” he says. It’s at times like these that experience counts, and the fact that Eccles not only made it through this year, but is now seeing his workload increase to a point where he is once again complaining about the amount of work he has on, is proof as to how respected he is in the industry.
He started out his career assisting Annie Leibovitz, from 1983 to 1986, having seen her working in a studio and realising that she was shooting the kind of conceptual work he had always wanted to shoot. He just hadn’t seen those kind of images before and didn’t know who Leibovitz was. “It was like a lightbulb going on. I thought: ‘Yes, this is it, this is what I want to do.’ It wasn’t so much taking pictures as making them; taking an idea and creating it.” Eccles believes that Leibovitz was creating a style that everyone then began to emulate to some extent. “The idea of the conceptual portrait was relatively new, and I feel that it was ingrained in me early on; it’s still there with me and I feel that 50% of the clients out there still want that approach.”
Eccles feels that the industry has changed greatly since those days, but not necessarily in a positive way. “The market now is flooded with photographers, and image makers are everywhere, which means that any particular image seems to have less weight, even Leibovitz’s – which always stood out.”
Talking about Leibovitz’s current problems, he says he’s not surprised by the financial difficulty she finds herself in (she put up as collateral, not only several houses, but the rights to all of her photographs). He feels that after years of not having anybody to say no to her demands, “the whole thing caught up with her, and it doubled in size when she did her recent town house project in Manhattan, which was meant to be a downsizing project for her to save money!”.
Having established himself as a portrait photographer in the US and also working in the UK for Tatler magazine, he was given a contract to shoot for the newly-launched Maxim magazine in the States. He retained the contract despite the editor-in-chief being changed on three different occasions; shooting many successful covers and features over a number of years.
But, as Eccles discovered exactly what kind of photographer they wanted him to be, he politely informed them that he was the wrong kind of photographer for them. “I suggested that they should be working with Antoine Verglas, he specialises in getting people to take their tops off.” (see our October issue for an interview with Verglas). Despite the advent of Photoshop, making his kind of work more achievable, he still tries to do everything ‘in-camera’. Eccles says: “Photoshop, production and retouching is partially responsible for the homogenisation of photography today and the general crappiness of images that are overworked and overdone. I came from the school [of thought] where the idea was to get it right in one shot for film, and I still like to think that way.”
Over his career, Eccles has developed an impressive client and subject list, but he has avoided the big celebrity monograph – so far. Instead his first and only book and travelling exhibition was devoted to and inspired by the American choreographer and dancer Alvin Ailey, and his dance theatre. “Dance has always been my favourite subject matter,” says Eccles. “I shot a portrait of Alvin in 1989 for an airline magazine, which began a creative association between us until his recent death. “For their [the dance theatre] recent 50th anniversary, I was invited to do a book of photographs of them with complete and utter creative freedom. There are only so many composition variations you can come up with using the Mamiya format with different lenses – my usual set-up – so I decided to also use a digital 35mm, which gave me incredible freedom, while also allowing me to shoot and shoot and shoot in low light situations.”
For this book, Eccles’ experimentations with formats and approach – outside of his usual commercial restraints – encouraged him to feed some of what he had learned from that into his commissioned work. “I’ve been shooting a couple of actors in California recently, where I shot with the Mamiya and Canon, which I will be doing a lot more of in the future,” he says. As with all US-based photographers, it doesn’t take long before The Red Camera crops up in our conversation. Eccles worked with it recently and says that “more images in the future will be moving and there will be less interest in the still image. We will be shooting content for online and extracting the still image from that footage”.
It’s a debate that is yet to fully take hold in the UK, but it’s definitely one that is at the forefront of every photographer’s career progression in the States at the moment. This has been a year of reflection for Andrew Eccles, and it may well be one that sees his work develop quite dramatically, as he responds to his clients’ demands for moving images as well as for stills, to the American financial climate and to the fact he is based in New York when most of his work is in LA.
Whatever way he decides to progress his work, you can be sure he will stay true to those ingrained sensibilities picked up from the young Annie Leibovitz.
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