| From Photoworkshop.com Cover Story  CLICK HERE TO SEE A GALLERY OF DOUGLAS KIRKLAND'S IMAGESAll images © Douglas Kirkland I recently had the pleasure of visiting with Kirkland at his Los Angeles home to discuss his career as well as his new book, Freeze Frame: Five Decades of Photography by Douglas Kirkland (Glitterati Publishing), which offers a behind-the-scenes peek at the entertainment industry through images that span his 50-year career.
He has photographed a wide variety of subjects throughout the years, ranging from automobiles to portraiture, although he’s best known for his fashion and celebrity work, and has photographed such luminaries as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Pierre Cardin, Katherine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, Orson Welles, John Wayne, Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Angelina Jolie, Sophia Loren, and Marlene Deitrich, among many others. He has also worked on the sets of more than 100 motion pictures, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Out of Africa, Moulin Rouge and Titanic, to name just a few. Besides having a lifelong love of the camera, Kirkland has a refreshing zest for life.
“This book has had a very odd history,” Kirkland says of Freeze Frame. “It started with a show in Rome, which is briefly recounted in the book itself. A friend brought me to a gallery in Rome a year ago September, in a very fashionable area like Greenwich Village.” Although there had never been a film festival in Rome, the very first one took place that autumn. “I was asked to do a show at this new gallery to parallel the festival,” he explains. “At first I thought we couldn’t do it because we were very busy, but Francoise (his wife and business partner) said, ‘yes we can.’” To get images for the show, he adds, they went through their considerable photo archives and found many images that had never been published. The show was quite successful and led to doing Freeze Frame, the book, which spans 50 years of Kirkland’s wealth of images of celebrities on movie sets, behind the scenes, and on stage. He discusses the book’s cover, which was photographed on the set of Camelot. “The characters are all in costume donned in the heaviest of winter clothing, but it’s interesting to see the crew shooting inside, all wearing tee-shirts,” he comments. “There’s a lot about my life in here,” says Kirkland of the book and its rich history. “For most people, it parallels the memory of movies from certain periods.” As an example, he points out a photo inside the book of Peter Sellers in a car that Kirkland took while Sellers was on location for a movie in Rome. “It became a symbol of the show,” he says. “This was done on a Sunday. We jacked up the side of the car very quickly without permission, and it looks like it’s swerving. You can see that people are looking around and wondering what’s going on.” In this series of photographs (which he sketched out on paper beforehand), Kirkland captured Sellers playing the part of a Paparazzi, with numerous cameras dangling around his neck and snapping photos of his then-wife, Britt Eklund. “He was an amateur photographer and a wonderful man,” Kirkland points out. “That was the beginning of this book. We were in New York and showed these pictures inadvertently to our publisher, Marta. She saw this and said that she was interested in a book on the subject.” 125 images from Freeze Frame are currently being shown in an exhibit at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Grand Lobby in Beverly Hills through Sunday, April 20, 2008. The exhibit is free to the public, and is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. For more information, visit www.oscars.org, or call (310) 247-3600.
Kirkland was born in Toronto, Canada. “I became intensely interested in photography at the age of 14 when I lived in a small town called Fort Erie near Buffalo, New York,” he says. “I got a Speed Graphic, and went around town photographing everything from hockey games to babies and passport pictures, with flash bulbs.” Kirkland says that he can’t believe he’s been doing photography for 50 years now—“And I still do it nearly every day. The bottom line for me is that I love photography. Not just photographing stars, but all types of photography. Photography is my first love,” he declares. Kirkland once served as an assistant for Irving Penn in 1957 to ’58. On one occasion, Penn went on location with his other assistants, and being the youngest, Kirkland was left behind in the studio. “Eager to make a good impression, I noticed that the large picture windows in the studio were dirty, so I cleaned them,” he says. But his good intentions unfortunately backfired. As it turned out, having bright, clean windows interfered with the soft quality of light the dirt had given them, and Penn was a little unhappy to find them clean and sparkling. In 1958, Kirkland says he was shooting “everything under the sun—commercial, tabletop, portraits. Some people talk about their photographic specialties, but my specialty was everything; no limits.” He lived in New York for about a year and a half, and free-lanced during this time. “In 1960, I was extremely happy to be hired by Look magazine as I was turning 25,” he says, describing this experience as his dream job. “That’s where I grew up as a more mature photographer, working for the magazine. There was almost unlimited film when you went out on assignment, and you had to give your interpretation of what you found.” Kirkland’s first assignment for Look was to photograph men’s fashion at Cornell University. “They hired me to shoot color. I was the youngest photographer there at the time and the older photographers couldn’t shoot color reliably,” he says. “I represented the new generation coming in.”
The end of the story (“the beginning, really,” he says) is that Elizabeth Taylor responded by telling the young photographer to come by the following evening at 8:30 p.m. “When I photographed her, it was extremely successful,” he says. “That was my launch into photographing celebrities.” Since that time, he’s had the opportunity to take pictures of Taylor and other stars on movie sets, as publicity stills, and on numerous other occasions. Kirkland eventually became a contract photographer for Look and divided his time between shooting for this magazine and other important publications of the day, “with the exception of LIFE, which was their biggest competition.” he says. This was the Golden Age of photojournalism. During this time, he photographed 25 pages of cars, which led to shooting for all the automobile manufacturers for a while. Altogether, he was on the staff of the magazine for four years, and during that time they sent him to Europe to shoot fashion. Celebrities and fashion became Kirkland’s two principal subjects. Later, he went under contract with LIFE. “Look went out of business in 1971,” he says, “and I went to work for LIFE immediately afterward.” When this magazine was no longer published weekly, he continued to shoot for the monthly version of LIFE, and by this time, a lot of work started to come to him.
Accolades & Achievements Kirkland’s next book, which will be published in August 2008, features the fashions and photographs of legendary designer Coco Chanel. Over the years, his images have been featured in a number of books, including Light Years, Icons, Legends, Body Stories, An Evening With Marilyn and the best-selling James Cameron’s Titanic. Kirkland was also one of the producers and photographers of A Day in the Life of Canada. Understandably, he’s amassed a number of awards throughout the years, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Camera Operators (he is also an honorary member of the American Society of Cinematographers). He has also been honored by the Photographer’s Marketing Association (PMA) as Photographer of the Year, by the Lucie Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Entertainment Photography in 2003, by The Golden Eye of Russia in April 2006, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from CAPIC from his native Toronto, Canada in 2006. In fall 2007, he was the recipient of an Honorary Master of Fine Arts Degree from Brooks Institute in California for his deep commitment and dedication to photography. He shoots primarily with a Canon EOS 1DS Mark III and an EOS 5D digital SLR, and Canon EF lens systems. When shooting digitally, he uses Delkin eFilm memory cards. Kirkland is one of the original members of Canon’s prestigious Explorers of Light and is a member of Hewlett Packard’s Photo Influencers. He uses a Mamiya RZ 6x7 and Deardorff 8x10 when shooting film in larger formats, and his film of choice is Kodak Ektachrome 100, as well as Plus-X and Tri-X. All of his scans are made with the Imacon Flextight 848 scanner, and his exhibition prints are created with the HP Designjet Z3100.
When he gives lectures, Kirkland says that attendees often ask, “How does one become a photographer like you?” He says that the following is very important to success: • Have a commitment and love of photography. • Don’t be afraid to work hard. • Have a passion and love of people. “When someone comes in for a portrait session, it takes two. It’s not only about me taking the picture.” • Deliver what you say you will. “You want to help people.” • Be curious about the latest techniques and learn to use them. “I was one of the first to use digital photography in the early ‘90s, and I celebrated it from day one.” “I consider myself very lucky,” he concludes, “and I don’t want to waste the opportunities that I’ve been given.” To learn more about Douglas Kirkland, visit www.douglaskirkland.com. CLICK HERE TO SEE A GALLERY OF DOUGLAS KIRKLAND'S IMAGES© Copyright 2002 by Photoworkshop.com |
