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| © Brett Ratner |
| Ratner's editorial portrait, of Edward Norton. Click photo for more images. |
A friendship with Helmut Newton was the stepping stone to this blockbuster director's second calling as a paid photographer.
Brett Ratner stumbled into professional photography by honoring one of its legends, Helmut Newton. Ratner -- the director of blockbusters such as Red Dragon and X-Men: The Last Stand -- was with the photographer the night before he passed away in 2004 and snapped a photo of him by chance with his Mamiya RZ67 Pro. When Vanity Fair was publishing a Newton retrospective, it featured one of Ratner's photos, which became his first published work. "There are hundreds of great portraits of Helmut, and out of all of them, they chose my picture," Ratner recounts. "At that moment, I thought to myself, I am a photographer." From this break proceeded a long line of serendipitous events for Ratner, including guest-editing VLife magazine, photographing Al Pacino, and snapping the cover of French Vogue. These led him to a fortuitous career as a photographer who shoots editorial as well as commercial ad campaigns such as Jimmy Choo. Ratner is particularly known for his portraits, which have included Edward Norton, Mariah Carey, and Kirk Douglas. As in his day job, Ratner the photographer has an affinity for directing his subjects and extracting a story from them. "I'm trying to capture the persona," Ratner says. "It's about the face. Each lens fits a different person based on a face. I'm trying to direct them in that moment, discovering who they are." It's this desire to capture what is true about the subject that led Ratner to install the now famous photo booth in his house (featured in his book Hilhaven Lodge: The Photo Booth Pictures). Though its entertainment value is clear, Ratner has a philosophical take on the photo booth, which demonstrates his goals as a photographer. "It's just you and the camera -- there's no inhibition," he explains. "It's a machine that people go into, and they transform. They let their true selves show. There's no airbrushing; it's the true essence of a person."
-Lindsay Sakraida
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| © Jeff Bridges |
| Bridges's Widelux images on the set of The Big Lebowski with Julianne Moore. Click photo for more images. |
Jeff Bridges
A panoramic approach is the bridge between his work on screen and behind the camera.
It's difficult to separate Jeff Bridges the photographer from Jeff Bridges the actor, since his experience in film has greatly influenced his photographic career. Bridges dabbled in photos when he was younger, but his interest wasn't revived until his role in the 1976 film King Kong. "I was playing a character [who] was a paleontologist, and he happened to carry a motor-driven Nikon with him wherever he went," Bridges says. "In preparation, I started taking pictures again." His wife took note of his newfound love and bought him a Widelux camera, which has a lens that pans the subject from one side to the other for an extra-wide angle of view and a stretched-out aspect ratio.
This panoramic style has become a Bridges trademark and indulges the actor's sense of playfulness. In grade school, a photographer showed Bridges and his classmates how a Widelux works, and "some kids figured if they ran very quickly, they could beat the moving lens and be in the picture twice," Bridges recalls. "They were right. Years later, I started using this technique to take pictures of actors creating the theatrical masks of tragedy and comedy. The result was someone frowning and smiling at himself, all on one negative." Bridges also began capturing candid moments on movie sets; while working on the 1984 film Starman he was invited to add his photos to those taken by the unit photographers as a gift for everyone on set. The practice became a tradition and culminated in his 2003 book, Pictures, a collection of his favorite set images. According to Bridges, this endless association between film and photography makes perfect sense -- if you use a Widelux. "The frame is a lot like the 1.85:1 ratio of a typical movie," he explains. "So it functions as sort of a bridge between still photography and moving pictures."
-Lindsay Sakraida
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