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The Imagined Spaces of Melvin Sokolsky
By Lynne Eodice | Cover Archives |
Oct 1, 2008
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 CLICK HERE TO VIEW A GALLERY OF SOKOLSKY IMAGES
All images © Melvin Sokolsky
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| Betsey |
Melvin
Sokolsky is one of the most creative advertising and commercial
photographers of our time. He was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower
East Side, and as a youth living in this neighborhood during the prewar
era, he enjoyed reading books and visiting museums. This inspired him
and he began imagining elaborate sets and images even before he had a
camera to capture them.
A Separate Reality
“Every
summer, my father used to take a picture of us,” he says. “We would go
out to a place called Spring Valley. He had a box camera, and took
pictures of me, my brother and my mother.” Those pictures went into an
album every year, and Sokolsky remembers, “At age 14, something
occurred to me. The pictures from year to year somehow looked
different.” He realized that something was happening between the
manufacturing of the film and the processing at the drugstore that was
making the images look different. “There was a marked difference
between those taken when I was six until the time I was 12.” He
concluded that the manufacturer was constantly changing the film, which
he called “The emulsion of the day,” and this opened up many ideas for
him. Most important on the agenda was to develop a personal
palette and vision. Sokolsky had no formal training in
photography, but was spurred on by his creative eye and the passion he
developed for the medium. He began experimenting with photography in a
determined and personal manner.
“The invention of the camera
created a passionate love affair between man and machine,” he asserts.
“The camera gave birth to a muse that has no equal.” In contrast to
those who believe the camera only records the truth, Sokolsky remarks,
“I think the camera only lies. The camera records the truth of the
person who aims it and decides what to photograph.” He points out that
a picture taken with a wide-angle lens is very different than one taken
with a telephoto lens. “Which lens is telling the truth?” Sokolsky
recalls that as a teenager looking at the family photo albums, “It was
obvious that black-and-white and color photographs didn’t look like the
truth in any way. And it was the fact that photographs looked quite
different to me than reality is what attracted me to want to become a
photographer. Taking photographs gave me the opportunity to share my
personal vision.”
He acknowledges that photography is a very
subjective medium. “Photographs and paintings are opinions,” he notes.
“Music, in an odd way, has an opinion factor, but has certain standards
that are not opinions. Someone singing off key is recognized by
everyone that is listening.” He says that photography and art are
opinions “based on the sophistication of the person who is looking at
them.”
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| Bicycle Street, part of the "Bubble" series |
Images of His Own Creation
When Sokolsky was only 21, Henry Wolf, Harper’s Bazaar’s
Art Director, invited him to join the magazine’s photographic staff. He
was also given a great deal of artistic freedom. “This was the most
important time in my life,” he says. “When I got to Bazaar,
Wolf told me I could do whatever I want. He said, ‘I didn’t hire you
for my ideas, I hired you for your ideas.’” Because he was so young,
Sokolsky says that he didn’t understand what was being handed to him at
the time. However, he challenged the more traditional images that were
popular in the advertising and editorial worlds of the day. Sokolsky
was friendly with his contemporaries, Art Kane and Richard Avedon,
although he remained very competitive with them.
Perhaps the
most notable of Sokolsky’s innovative fashion editorials was his 1963
“Bubble Series” campaign, in which he depicted fashion models floating
above urban scenes and landscapes. He credits artist Hieronymus Bosch
for these images, having been inspired by his painting, “The Garden of
Earthly Delights,” which features a nude couple in a bubble. He says
that throughout the years, art directors didn’t tell him what to
do—(“Do you think that the Bubble pictures idea could come from an art
director giving an assignment to a photographer in 1963?”) This
editorial and other very inspired fashion campaigns caught the eye of
advertising creatives, and Sokolsky soon became known for his
adventurous editorial work and celebrity portraits. He has never
confined himself to just one style, and has been deemed by The Digital Journalist as being the most successful advertising photographer of the ‘60s.
Revealing the Inner Being
In
the sixties and seventies, Creative directors would say, "Go see
Melvin, he’s the nicest guy you’ll meet, and he’s very easy to work
with. When we moved on to the ‘80s, the creative community viewed
me as difficult, because they translated my resistance to compromise as
being difficult.” Art directors came to him with drawings and asked him
to execute them photographically. “During my commercial life, I have
enjoyed doing this,” he states. “I’ve done so many of my own pictures,
that I’m always curious to know what motivates other people. I live
inside my own mind and don’t usually share my ideas with people.
Executing other peoples ideas gave me insight into their thinking.”
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| "Flying" image photographed for Dior |
Sokolsky
likens a photography session to a “dance” between the subject and
photographer. “What you can get in that dance is an affinity or a lack
of affinity that will express itself in terms of the body language and
expression of that person.” The photographer he respects most at this
level is Irving Penn. “When you look at the gesture of the people in an
Irving Penn portrait—to me—they transcend everything that every other
portrait photographer has done. In essence, when you look at those
portraits, they are the person that is being photographed.” He says
that he’s become so fine-tuned that he can take a picture of a person
and capture a metaphor of their being. Nonetheless, “What I’m really
interested in is discovering what I don’t know.”
Can’t Stop Progress
During
the 1970s, Sokolsky also became interested in film, which brought him
to Los Angeles. He shot television commercials from the early ‘70s
through the ‘90s, and has won 25 Clio awards as Director/Camera Man.
“You name the product, I’ve done it. I thought of doing commercials as
a training ground for doing a major film, but the problem was that I
ran into a different kind of timeframe and resistance from the people
who give you money to do films.” He says that people used to come to
him for his ideas. “Now, they want you to do the script from a
commercial perspective. It didn’t take much time to realize
that unless I had the money to do the film, it wasn’t going to be the
film that I had envisioned.” He says, however, that if he hadn’t been
such a perfectionist, he would have enjoyed having the experience of
making a film. “Experience is what makes you grow,” Sokolsky observes.
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| Simone, Muir Woods |
“When
digital photography first came out,” Sokolsky says, “many people hated
it because it threatened their base of knowledge and their nostalgic
attachment to things.” It also required a steep learning curve. “People
are afraid of change,” he asserts, “but change cannot be stopped.” Back
at the turn of the century, daguerreotypes were the standard, he points
out. “They were called ‘keepers.’ They were emulsions coated on glass
that had a very refined unique look.” But after a while, when people
started dying because of the mercury content, changes were imminent.
“The new films were resisted because the had to be printed on paper
instead of a singular picture on glass. Critics called photography
‘pictorialism’ because images were now on a paper substrate which
showed the texture of the paper,” he says. “This goes back to my
thought that everything visual is just an opinion.”
As one who
was always inventive, Sokolsky says that he was very open-minded when
digital imaging came along. “My ideas and content are more important
than the tools,” he says. “Cameras can’t come up with ideas or make
imaging decisions. The tools have become better, there’s no question
about it. But at this point in my life, I use tools that best suit the
reason I’m taking the picture.” He says that one day, he may use an
8x10 camera because of the lens perspective. The next day, he may go
back to the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, depending on what he’s trying to do.
Transcending the Medium
“What
I’m lured by is the idea of creating imagined spaces,” he says. “This
is what occurs between my mind’s eye and the lens of the camera.
Photographing and exploring this imagined space is how I communicate
and what interests me in photography.” Sokolsky doesn’t consider
himself a fashion photographer. “Don’t get me wrong,” he explains. “I
love fashion because of the way it reveals a time-line of our history.
But I’m most interested in the meaning and ideas that define my
photographs.” He also proposes the idea that “whether an image is taken
by Henri Cartier Bresson, Richard Avedon or myself, would it not be
true that all people wearing clothes in pictures can be defined as
fashion photographs?”
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| Lip Streaks |
He
says that fashion is not just an image in a fashion magazine that
someone has written about. As an illustration of this, he points out an
image taken by Henri Cartier Bresson in which a man wears a Humberg
hat, and there’s a sign in the background about Humberg hats. “What
people are really trying to say is that there’s a formality to the way
we perceive fashion pictures,” Sokolsky says. “Basically we’ve all been
trained like Pavlovian dogs to categorize, and this gives you the
ability and power to be a judge.” He also says that nudes are fashion
photographs in that, proportion, hairstyle, makeup and gesture, reveal
the time and place in which the photo was taken.
“If a picture
transcends fashion; transcends the dress they’re wearing or how the
person is posing,” Sokolsky comments, “It becomes iconic in some way.
It makes you think about the world around you.” He says that in many
images taken today, he sees a lot of tools and retouching, rather than
some substantial photography. “If you go back and look at the
history of any art, say Van Gogh,” he points out, “you see a texture of
painting that does not look like Van de Wyden, Renoir or Hieronymus
Bosch. Each one of these painters has a unique palette.” On the other
hand, he says that photographers often copy photographs and proudly
call it homage; inferring the copy is better than the original.” The
Internet unfortunately makes it easy for people to steal images.
The School of Life
Sokolsky
has conducted a number of workshops and seminars over the years. “In my
classes I show students why I chose a light, what the reason was, how I
put a sitting together, and how I build a set.” Sokolsky builds all of
his own sets to portray his own unique vision. “Look at a Leonardo di
Vinci portrait,” he says. “You may see vertical and horizontal
divisions behind the subject to divide the space to make for a more
interesting composition. I design images that not only please my
aesthetic but also enhance the idea.” He says that a real
workshop should be one where a student becomes a photographer’s
apprentice. “If all the people in the workshop were apprentices for six
months, they could learn more than they would in four years of school.”
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| Balloons |
Now
in his seventies, Sokolsky continues to shoot fashion photography and
other editorial assignments, and is every bit as inventive and creative
as ever. He currently has a gallery showing at Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148
N. La Brea, Los Angeles, CA 90036 through November 11, 2008. He has
also just put together a new 450-page book entitled Archive,
which will be available in January 2009. The Fahey/Klein Gallery will
also have copies for sale. “This book will be a photographic and
written archive of my life,” he says. “And it will be beautifully
printed at a level that’s quite unique.” The photographs in this book
will document Sokolsky's career from the beginning to the present. “One
of the last images in the book is of Slash in the group, Guns &
Roses that I shot about a week ago,” he points out. “This book will be
the history of Melvin.”
When asked about advice for beginning
photographers, he replies, “You have to take pictures the way you fall
in love. With love, somehow you can’t get that person out of your mind.
It’s how human nature works. We’re wired to look at things we like and
that move us.”
To learn more about Melvin Sokolsky, visit www.sokolsky.com.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW A GALLERY OF SOKOLSKY IMAGES
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Last Updated: Jul 10th, 2010 - 16:19:44
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