KarinGottschalk.com
My portfolio online, and more.
Magazine Articles
Every so often, when I feel the need to, I put on my journalist’s hat and do interviews and write commissioned magazine articles about subjects I am interested in.
I have interviewed a number of famous photographers based in Europe and the United States as well as from Australia – these articles have proved to be of real value to young and not-so-young photographers. Most of them were published in the now-defunct once famous Australian magazine of arts and culture – Black+White – which I conceived, cofounded and was European Contributing Editor for.
The articles in this page are stories of business success, as well as biographical tales of brilliantly creative artists – photography is a multi-billion dollar enterprise and most of these photographers create the still and moving images for the multi-trillion dollar advertising industry around the world. Without their work, this world would be a much poorer and less colourful place.
Here are just some of my past interviewees:
Albert Watson, Alvin Booth, Anderson & Low, Andrew Douglas, Brad Branson, Brian Griffin, Bruce Weber, Daniela Federici, David Bailey, David Burnett, David Hamilton, David Hiscock, Don McCullin, Duane Michals, Fabrizio Ferri, Geof Kern, Greg Gorman, Guzman, Helmut Newton, Jan Michael, Jan Saudek, Javier Vallhonrat, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Joyce Baronio, Joyce Tenneson, Larry Fink, Leigh Bowery, Malcolm Pasley, Mario Testino, Martin Parr, Olaf Martens, Patrick Demarchelier, Peter Lindbergh, Richard Avedon, Robert Farber, Robert Mapplethorpe, Spencer Tunick, Stephane Sednaoui, The Douglas Brothers, and many more.
To download these PDFs, simply click on the blue underlined text links.
One Eye on the Prize: Albert Watson & "Cyclops"
Albert Watson
One Eye on the Prize: Albert Watson & Cyclops
Albert Watson may not admit to being either a maniac or a genius but he will agree he is an obsessive when it comes to his photography.
Until the publication of his first book, Cyclops, he was certainly little known except amongst the global network of print media junkies who have been following his work through magazines like Rolling Stone, Details, Arena, The Face, Interview, Vibe, most of the Vogues, and five star advertising clients like Levi’s for more than twenty years. …
Anderson & Low
A Bridge Somewhere in Battersea
You see them in their ones and twos, the wideboys, shuffling across the Battersea Bridge of a winter’s midnight, donkey jacket collars turned up against the smoggy London cold, bristly shaven heads glinting orange sodium lamplight off razor-cut peroxide blonde, Power Station relic-ing in the background. …
Andrew Douglas
Star athletes are not unlike pop stars in how difficult it is to get them to commit to and then turn up for a photographic shoot. You can spend weeks in negotiation with their minders, their management, their sponsors, even their mums, only to have them suddenly disappear to Acapulco on a whim the day before the shoot. …
Brian Griffin
Brian Griffin & The Industrial Revolution
It can happen, although not often, that the creator of a new way in art, subsequently imitated by countless others, can be almost completely forgotten until rediscovered after their career has effectively ended.
Brian Griffin is one such photographer, and although he has rarely been heard of outside Britain and France, his work has been essential in shaping the photographic imagery of our time. …
Bruce Weber: Fashion's Best Friend
Bruce Weber
Bruce Weber has become such a popular and well known photographer over the past 12 years, that copies of his first book, Bruce Weber, now sell for eight times what they did when first published. That book came out three years into the 1980s, at the point in each decade when it is reckoned that its direction has largely taken shape.
As the succeeding years showed, the vision that Weber outlined in that book came to influence the aspirations of the period through two of its most important ongoing advertising campaigns, for Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. …
Daniela Federici
Daniela Federici’s photography first came to my attention by means of a now defunct Melbourne-based magazine, Tempo Libero, near the turn of the decade.
It was a time when little of any real excitement was going on in local fashion photography, and her glamour-laden imagery with its obvious debt to Italian Neo-realist cinema of the 1950s and 1960s was a real breath of fresh air. …
David Bailey
The British is Here! The British is Here!
David Bailey still fascinates, whether as a photographer or as the near-mythological media figure mention of his name evokes. I found vivid testimony to this while looking for copies of his 20 or so books in the local art reference library – all bar one had been stolen.
The missing books featured nude and clothed photographs of some of this century’s most desirable women (often linked romantically to Bailey), including Jean Shrimpton, Catherine Deneuve, Marie Helvin, Penelope Tree and his beautiful current wife, Catherine Bailey. …
David Burnett
Little Feet, a Cambodian refugee tenderly holding her child, was the image that led to photojournalist David Burnett receiving cover story attention in the specialist press and a slew of awards. That photograph is representative of Burnett’s personal style and personality – likeable, able to blend into the background, subtle, human, modest.
Burnett once said in an interview that ‘my photographs are usually pretty quiet. I hope they have a subtlety or some second level to them that makes more than just a passing glance worthwhile.’ …
David Hamilton
Sun, Sand & Girls, Girls, Girls
David Hamilton is a committed believer in the good life. Not only does he live it up in the south of France, surrounded by an Edenic landscape, endless flowers, fine paintings, good food and shy young maidens, but he photographs them in a way that is timeless.
When he travels, as he does often, it is to other places offering the same pleasures in profusion – Venice, Hawaii, the shores of the Pacific, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. Thousand share the dream Hamilton lives, and judging from the popularity of his exhibitions, books and posters, and the annual Le Monde readers’ poll, he easily rates as the most recognised of photographers in the world. …
Don McCullin: Living with the Present
Don McCullin
The media often tries to turn into secular saints those it sends off to report on the sufferings of others. None more so than Don McCullin who, during the years he photographed wars, poverty, and famine for The Sunday Times in London, became as well-known as the images he made, and whose own woundings were reported as they happened.
Even now, long after he has retired from war photography, newspaper interviewers dwell on McCullin’s past and his recurring nightmares, showing in a left-handed way how they believe he still suffers on our behalf. …
Duane Michals
Asking Questions Without Answers
Duane Michals is that rarest of beings in the world of photography now, a true original. And in common with the other few remaining originals, he was born in the early years of the Depression, when the crumbling of a way of life caused many to question given patterns of thought.
However, he came of age in the decade of conformism in the cause of comfort, the Fifties, when a serious photographer faced only one choice, of whether to imitate Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Robert Frank. …
Fabrizio Ferri
When considering the multi-talented Fabrizio Ferri, it is wise to bear in mind his origins. Although he now lives in Milan and New York and the tiny volcanic island south of Sicily called Pantelleria, Ferri is a Roman born and bred.
Family and heritage count for much with the Romans; motherhood also, and that is not just another Motherhood statement. Their primary art form is the art of living, a medium wisely adopted by any nation whose empire has long since crumbled. As the Romans themselves demonstrated during the Fascist regime, any nation that momentarily forgets its true calling to revive some romantic notion of resurgent empire is bound to bite the dust yet again. …
Geof Kern: A Few Degrees Northwest of Normal
Geof Kern
A Few Degrees Northwest of Normal
Geof Kern lives in two worlds, that of the Real, where gravity impales us onto the planetary pinboard and condemns us to the mundane roles of consumer and provider, parent and partner; and that of the Ideal, where visions assume solid form, gravity loosens its grip and we float, free to fly in pursuit of dreams.
Kern himself walks the streets of the Dallas suburb that is his home while his mind soars through a world more real than those gritty pavements, his own world, a virtual world, the World of Kern. …
Greg Gorman
Greg Gorman & The Hollywood Body Electric
In the land where celebrity has become an art form unto itself, photographer Greg Gorman reigns supreme. But while he has two books under his belt and several exhibitions constantly touring the globe, you don’t have to haunt bookstores and art galleries to see his work. You are exposed to it every day via movie posters, cd covers and magazine articles on Hollywood movie stars.
Gorman’s advertising photography changed the nature of the medium forever. Most notably his L.A. Eyeworks campaign broke new ground when it depicted sunglasses-clad celebrities lit in his signature ultra-hard style, granting the product an aura of mystery and glamour. …
Guzman: Courtly Gentleman of the Old World
Guzman
Courtly Gentleman of the Old World
A man stands on an iron-girdered bridge, leaning over paint-chipped grey railings to watch rusty-hulled tramp steamers ply their trade up and down the crystal-glittering back-lit waters of the East River of New York, their horns parping like the songs of a whale pod.
He worries a battered brown fedora with his right hand, peak and bill clasped between thumb, fore and index fingers the nails of which are stained yellow nearing black from years of dipping them in Amidol photo paper developer. …
Javier Vallhonrat
The Life of the Senses, The Life of the Mind
Spanish photographer Javier Vallhonrat applies an intellectual rigour to his personal work that may come as a surprise to those more familiar with his innovative, sensuous fashion stories for the European Vogues.
Starting in the early 80s, he was the herald and major influence for a generation who learnt that the natural hue of a garment didn’t have to dictate its colour in a photograph. He relied on low-tech spotlights and gels to shape a vision of style that answered only to the emotional demands of the image. Then, in spite of other photographers’ acclaim, Vallhonrat left fashion photography to concentrate on his own photography projects, and directing commercials. …
Jean-Baptiste Mondino
In France, Jean-Baptiste Mondino is a star, a title hard-earned in that nation of philosopher-politicians and existentialist fashion designers. As a photographer, he helped shape our memories of the 1980s through his work for British style bibles The Face and i.D., and his videoclips created a genre that is often described as ‘Mondinoesque’ – sexy, chic, stylish, irreverent.
In reaction to the media hype about him in the European press, Mondino has proven an elusive interviewee in the past, but recently I spoke to him in his new Paris headquarters, Bandits Productions. Mondino was in a reflective mood, still mulling over his decision to decline promises of even greater fame and fortune in the States for the preservation of his artistic soul and integrity back in Europe. He was quietly pleased at his escape from the L.A. big bucks men, and elated at the opportunity to reinvent himself once more, a new Mondino for a new decade. …
Larry Fink
It is true that photographers working here in monochrome have seldom basked in the high visibility their American cousins have always been used to. No local equivalents spring to mind when you think of such giants of grey tone as Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, but they had the benefit of luminous Western skies and the native talent for self promotion. The English are far more reticent, and that comes from their weather and culture. Malcolm Pasley is a photographer who learned from both traditions, came to his artistic awakening in the United States and recently returned to Britain to make it a reality.
The American liberal arts college system, with its emphasis on real practitioners who teach while also being free to take time off on their own work, is a major factor. Fink teaches at Bard College in the vicinity of legendary steel towns Allentown and Bethlehem in the state of Philadelphia, the blue collar rust belt brought to the big screen by The Deerhunter and to photographic notoriety by Walker Evans during his wanderings across the American landscape during the Depression for the federal government’s Resettlement Administration, whose documentary projects through the 30s formed the way we think of that era. …
Malcolm Pasley
There has been a lot of talk lately in London about how the art of fine black and white printing is suffering a slow death by neglect from manufacturers far more interested in the amateur mass market for colour, and of how the schools are losing sight of craftsmanship for the sake of turning out yet more fashion photographer wannabes.
It is true that photographers working here in monochrome have seldom basked in the high visibility their American cousins have always been used to. No local equivalents spring to mind when you think of such giants of grey tone as Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, but they had the benefit of luminous Western skies and the native talent for self promotion. The English are far more reticent, and that comes from their weather and culture. Malcolm Pasley is a photographer who learned from both traditions, came to his artistic awakening in the United States and recently returned to Britain to make it a reality. …
Mario Testino: The Very Model of a Modern Fashion Photographer
Mario Testino
The Very Model of a Modern Fashion Photographer
I had arranged to meet Mario Testino in Paris on the first day of the fashion shows, his very last free day for months. Fashion is a fickle mistress to say the least, and Testino was making the most of a wave of popularity that sees him booked up far ahead on advertising and editorial shoots all over the world, for the most lusted-after clients.
One reason for his busyness is that Testino is the very model of a modern fashion photographer, combining a post-modernist sensitivity to rapid shifts in the cultural paradigm with a classical talent for pulling off ambitious location shoots withthe minimum of fuss. The days when the teams from Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar would jump on the next plane to Macchu Piccu with hardly any hesitation are long gone – Testino by contrast is one of the few photographers whom you can assume is always to be found on location rather than in the studio. …
Martin Parr
There is a belief held by some within the photographic community of the northern hemisphere that a self-aware society, encouraged in that self-awareness by documentary photography, is better equipped to deal with its own shortcomings. Or at the very least, it must admit their existence as proven by the camera even if not forced to rectify them.
That truism may help explain why documentary photography is still alive and well in Europe and to a lesser degree in the United Kingdom. It also explains why such a unique photographer as Martin Parr is doing rather well here. Success has brought him more than his fair share of controversy too, as much to do with the photographs themselves as the wide exposure publication in magazines, books, TV programs, critical articles and exhibitions in unconventional venues bestows on them. …
Patrick Demarchelier
As the Eurostar train sped across the plains of Picardie towards Paris, I contemplated the facts of culture and personal biography that led to Frenchman Patrick Demarchelier becoming one of the great contemporary fashion photographers.
After growing up in the northern seaside town of Le Havre, moving to Paris to work in photolabs and as an assistant, Demarchelier began his dream run at British Vogue in the early ’80s when it was commanded by the likes of Liz Tilberis and Anna Wintour, talent-spotters of the finest water who went on to helm Harpers Bazaar and American Vogue in the early 90s. …
Peter Lindbergh
Peter Lindbergh has always been damn near impossible to get in touch with, not because he wants to be alone but more for the fact that he is so much in demand for editorial and advertising shoots, and just recently for awards presentations and the openings of his own photography shows, that he is booked up months ahead.
It is not the money either. I tried to offer Lindbergh the first ad in a lucrative and creatively open campaign for a Swiss watch manufacturer earlier this year, and he could not fit it in until well after the first picture was due to run. So the problem remains: How do you portray the supreme fashion portraitist without actually getting to him in the flesh? …
Richard Avedon: Flower in the Desert
Richard Avedon
I first encountered Richard Avedon’s photography in a tiny bookshop in the middle of nowhere, deep in the uttermost west. I had started in photography having neither seen books of photographs nor shows of them, and stumbling across Avedon’s book Portraits had a profound effect. It was as if I had discovered an alien flower in the middle of the desert.
This was at a time when the only live photographers I knew were hopelessly in love with their Hasselblads, Strobe flash packs, Land Rovers and huge studios with all-white ‘psyche walls’ as they misnamed them more accurately than they realised. Their talk was always of the technology, never the photographs, though each secretly harboured a copy of Cowboy Kate and spoke of Sam Haskins with a reverence more appropriate to God. …
Robert Farber
Few contemporary photographers have managed to achieve the popular recognition of style and imagery that Robert Farber has. He has published a number of best-selling books and posters, stages regular gallery shows blessed with a multitude of red stickers, lists nine agents of various types in his biographical data sheet, and is now the owner of an immensely successful web site.
Fewer still the photographers who can balance multiple careers within the spheres of fine art, advertising and directing. Even less who do so within a bi-coastal existence, living in both New York and Los Angeles. …
Spencer Tunick
Popular music is usually the prisoner of the circumstances of its production, a song forever recalling a certain time and events in the lives of its listeners. Occasionally a hit tune manages to transcend that fate to stand in for the ideals of a whole generation.
So Spencer Tunick believes when he plays tracks by his current faves before a shoot: Nirvana, The Beastie Boys and Pavement. The social consciousness of the twenty-somethings’ music is what inspires Tunick’s photographs of nudes in the streets of the cities of the world, and the attendant risks of arrest and imprisonment. …
Stephane Sednaoui: Energetically Waxing Philosophic
Stephane Sednaoui
Energetically Waxing Philosophic
William Klein’s irreverent icon- smashing path through the fashion business in the 50s and 60s made stellar careers in fashion photography possible for the unlikeliest of candidates. Helmut Newton, Jeanloup Sieff, Guy Bourdin and even David Bailey followed in his wake and continued to shoot fashion images that challenged the conventions of their time.
But first Klein created a stir in another part of town. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s star was still in the ascendant when Klein burst onto the documentary photography scene simultaneously to Robert Frank. It seemed at the time that Klein’s in your face street shooting style was just too abrasive to inspire the kind of following Frank’s personalised poetics and Cartier-Bresson’s athletic wit generated. Fashion photographer Stephane Sednaoui proves that assessment wrong – he cites Klein as his biggest influence. …
Tania Hirschberg
As Britain comes to terms with its inclusion in the European Union, it’s drawing to its bosom artists from traditions rarely known there, and the nation is all the richer for it.
Tania Hirschberg comes by way of Austria, maintains a dual residency in the provinces of both countries, and applies to the landscapes of Anglo-Saxon Britain a sensibility for home and land shaped by Germanic nature myths ancient even before the rupture between the old emigrant Saxons, Angles and Frisians, and the homebodies they bid good-bye to all those centuries ago. …
The Douglas Brothers
Since Hill and Adamson in the early days of the medium, the photographic double act has been relatively uncommon. The duo is far more frequently found in other art forms, as with Gilbert & Sullivan, Rogers & Astaire, Lewis & Martin. Creative sibling pairs have proven to be even rarer, rivalry outstripping co-operation in the intrafamilial stakes.
In our own time, the Douglas Brothers have shown how working together can be the liberating process collaboration too often fails to be. Their filial closeness has made them into two pairs of eyes with one vision, one set of ideals – to invest their photographs with emotion and passion, rejecting an over-reliance on technology that can get in the way of pure photography. …
William Klein: An Iconoclast Recalls
William Klein
William Klein is a photographer’s photographer, still better known amongst photographers than photography’s public audience, one whose innovations changed both documentary and fashion photography as we know it.
Klein’s first book, Life Is Good & Good For You In New York! William Klein Trance Witness Revels, is up there in the photo book galaxy with Robert Frank’s The Americans, both reviled by critics and embraced by photographers on their first appearance in the late 1950s, both continuing to inspire throughout the subsequent decades. …