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In one sense, the photographers featured on the following pages are just like many of the readers of American Photo: Most are devoted, talented, avid amateurs. Some have even taken their appreciation for the art of photography to the next level, shooting as professionals, publishing books filled with their own images, and showing their work at art galleries.
In another sense, of course, these photographers are nothing like the rest of us. They are actors, actresses, and filmmakers -- celebrities who are famous for work that has nothing to do with the pictures they take. And yet photography is part of their everyday lives. Indeed, they inhabit a world that is based on imagery -- of both the moving and the still variety. They make their livings in front of the camera. It is through images that the public knows them.
Given all that, it makes perfect sense that they would want to pick up cameras themselves, to point them where they want to. Jeff Bridges turns the tables artistically when he brings his Widelux panoramic camera onto movie sets to take pictures of his costars; when the movie is finished, he often presents the entire film crew with books of his images. He now also features his work at the Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, California. Viggo Mortensen's passion for photography has led him to launch his own book-publishing company.
In addition to his film work, director Brett Ratner now shoots stills for Jordache and Jimmy Choo ad campaigns. The fact that Adrien Brody loves still photography shouldn't really be a surprise, since his mother, Sylvia Plachy, is a well-known photographer.
For all of the actors and filmmakers on the following pages, photography is more than a hobby. It is a means to an end. Being behind the camera allows each of these much-photographed people to regain a measure of control over their lives, to assert their creativity. In that sense, once again, they are very much like the rest of us.
When it comes to Viggo Mortensen, costar Elijah Wood was right in deeming him a "Renaissance man." Besides acting, Mortensen can add poetry, music, painting, publishing, and -- most importantly -- photography to his list of talents. In 2002, Mortensen and his brother founded Perceval Press, an independent publishing company that has worked with photographers and writers, large and small. Perceval publishes Mortensen's abundant artistic exploits, often a mix of his photography and prose. Miyelo, which he published after working on Hidalgo, included ethereal, panoramic photos of the Lakota Native Americans and documentation about their tragic history. For Mortensen, photography and art are "a way of being in your life and paying attention -- participating in life by recording it, commenting on it, offering your own notions and responses." Although Mortensen's books always sell out and demand several reprints, Perceval still prints them in small runs; thus most people got their first glimpse of Mortensen's photography in the extra features on the DVD for The Lord of the Rings. Mortensen spent the 15 months of the film's production in New Zealand photographing the cast and crew both on and off set. He plastered his trailer with the photos, creating a sort of all-encompassing collage that (in true Mortensen fashion) recorded that specific time and place in his life. Many of these images, in addition to several of his paintings, were exhibited at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, California, and can now be found in his book Signlanguage.
-Lindsay Sakraida
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
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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