Ep 025: Chris Buck
A SHOT: To start, can you describe the photo that we’re going to talk about?
CHRIS BUCK: To describe it, I’m gonna give you the actual context of the assignment. This was an assignment for what was a new magazine at the time called Blaze. I think it was an off-shoot of Vibe, maybe meant to be more, I don’t know what, street. I don’t know what they would have called it at the time. They contacted me to do an assignment with Jay Z. It was a cover story, and they had an idea where they want to photograph him in and around the Marcy projects where he grew up. The shoot was done in the fall of 1998, so he was already a star, already had a few records out. He was already a star, but he wasn’t the kind of superstar legend he is now. So they had me come up with a bunch of ideas of what I would like to do. The premise was, “What would Jay Z be doing if he wasn’t a rap star? What would he be doing with his time? What might his day look like?”
So the picture we’re talking about today — there’s a bunch of them I did for this project — but the specific one we’re talking about was one of my favorite ones to execute, which is Jay Z watching TV in the courtyard in the middle of the Marcy projects. So we have an old-style TV with an antennae with foil on the antennae, like, trying to get a better signal, and it’s sitting on a kind of guard rail, I guess, between two parts of the housing projects. And then there’s an extension cord running through the front of the frame, kind of toward camera. It’s a vertical shot. Often times when people put it on Instagram, they crop it to a horizontal or square, but it is a vertical shot. It’s actually shot 4x5. The project was shot as a 4x5 series. It was actually shot black and white. But we did a few color frames for fun. So it’s Jay Z profile. His feet are kind of up on the guard rail, wearing some Nikes. He’s got a little cooler beside him, like, one of those cheap disposable white coolers made of styrofoam, I guess. And he’s watching the TV.
How do you get ideas for something like this? When you first have the assignment and start thinking about it, where does an idea like this come from?
When I have an assignment like this, I do research first. So in the ’90s, the Internet, it existed, but it wasn’t very robust, so I would have maybe gone out and bought some magazines that featured interviews with him, or maybe there might have been a makeshift biography, and I would have read it. As I’m reading it, I’m making notes of ideas. Maybe I would have spoken to the writer of the piece. Or you know, obviously the magazine had direction too because it was initially their idea.
These days I just get a note pad, and I write out, say, four to five pages of single-spaced ideas. And they’re as crazy as possible. You know, it’s a whole range, from crazy and un-shootable to really low-key and conservative because I don’t know the way things are gonna go. Eventually I transfer them into a notebook, which I would have done at this time because I do have the notebook still, and the notebook, in this case, kind of has a shot list with the times. It looks like we did a half day, like, an afternoon with him. So it would say, “At 2 o’clock — TV in courtyard. 3:30 — bodega shopping” — that kind of thing. In the case of any shoot with a celebrity, the more crazy ideas or ones that are maybe more elaborate in terms of propping or wardrobe, you have to pass by their people because you can’t really pretend like you thought of it on the way there when you have them, say, dress in an Elizabethan costume or something. But the more low-key ones, either me and the magazine will talk about, or I’ll just keep it to myself and bring it out on the day of.
I should say at this point, at that time I was doing some shoots with 4x5. Most of the shots on the day were 4x5. There are a few frames that are Hasselblad square format, obviously all film because it’s in the ’90s. I eventually got rid of the 4x5 camera because I found it just didn’t work with the way I work — my flow — which, can I talk about that just for a bit?
Yeah, for sure, and also if you could describe for someone who’d be unfamiliar with 4x5, what is it that you’re working with?
Sure, so usually I’d be shooting with either a 35mm, which was, like, a Canon camera, which was roll film, 36 frames. I probably had stopped using that at this point. Maybe in the mid-’90s I stopped shooting 35mm. But I was shooting square Hasselblad and Mamiya 67, which is a rectangle. That’s what’s called medium format, either 12 or 10 frames to a roll. But 4x5 and 8x10 are what would be called large format, and it is a single frame shot at a time that you would slip into the back of the camera. You’d have the bellows and then the lens, and you’d have to open the back and slip it in. This is one of the reasons it caused me trouble is that the subjects now know I’ve loaded a frame, and we’re all waiting now for me to execute that frame. And for me… And I keep saying “for me” because large format works really well with some people, so I’m not saying it’s not a good format for portraits or any photography. I’m just saying, for me, I tend to get my best work when there’s a rhythm of we’re kind of shooting a few frames and things come to life. Things happen. We all kind of suspend disbelief a little bit and get into the zone, whereas I’ve found that shooting single frames, whether it’s me or the subject or both, there tends to be a waiting game. You load the frame. Then everyone waits for me to shoot it. I get self-conscious. It just doesn’t lead to great pictures for me. So I eventually sold the camera.
I’m curious why you were shooting with 4x5 at that time.
I really admire some photographers who shot 8x10 and 4x5, like Sally Mann and Judith Joy Ross. Both of them had this way of making work that felt ethereal and magical yet also quite challenging and difficult. It felt very modern to me as well. They didn’t feel like they were nostalgic. They weren’t making pictures that were supposed to look like Mathew Brady or old-timey. They were meant to be very contemporary, very real and almost — aggressive isn’t the right word — but provocative. And I wanted to get some sense of that. Especially Judith Joy Ross’ portrait work was really quite powerful because there’s something about the spacial relationship that’s different when you move to the different formats. A lens that is a long lens on a 35mm — say, 120[mm] or 100[mm] — is actually a normal lens on a 4x5, so the spacial relationship is totally different in the way you’re dealing with your subject. I fell in love with that, and I wanted to bring that to my work.
When you’re working like that, how much then does the shoot become about the actual process of taking the picture? Like, does it shift your focus toward enjoying or engaging with the actual camera that you’re using?
I never enjoy taking pictures. I don’t like doing photo shoots. I like having the pictures. So there’s little joy in actually making the work. I don’t really understand the whole thing of having a great experience. If anything, if I’m having fun on a shoot, I get very concerned that I’m now disconnected from the process of making the pictures. Everything I do on set is about getting the best pictures possible. I wanna walk away with just one or two great pictures, and I don’t always do it. That’s why I’m stressed and freaking out that I’m not gonna get the shot. So every shoot is really about looking to walk away with something that is both grounded and magical. That’s the goal, every time. I’m doing everything I can to get to that goal. Like, yes, process matters, but it’s process that either leads to effective work or not.
Do you think you always knew that about yourself, that you didn’t enjoy actually taking pictures? I like the way that you said that, that you don’t enjoy taking pictures; you like having the pictures.
Yeah, I think I did. It’s funny. Looking back at my early days and my thinking… Obviously I can’t put myself entirely there, but I was there at the time, and my best recollection is that I chose my career path because I wanted to be successful, not because I loved photography. I loved music and movies and pop culture, and photography was something that I could do relatively easily and do well. I knew I had a knack for it. I was always strong with visual art — painting and drawing and things like that. When I was in elementary school, it was one of the subjects I easily did well, whereas other students struggled to even do okay. So I knew I had a natural talent for it, and it was something that was nurtured by my mother. As a kid, once you realize I’m good a something other kids aren’t, you wanna do more of it so you can distinguish yourself. So photography was something that was relatively easy for me, and then I worked to become very good at it. And I was interested in popular culture, so photographing popular-culture figures was a way to combine my interests and my talent and, of course, the third element being there was enough of a market for photography that I thought I could do something that felt unique to me and a little more personal and weird, and I could still get enough work to make a living.
So with this photo, how would you describe your presence behind the camera here? How are you interacting with him? What direction are you giving?
I tend to not be super verbal. I remember the cliche when I was a kid of seeing movies and photographers being like, “Lovely! Lovely! You look great!” And that’s just not what I do. It’s just not my thing. I think I’ve maybe gotten better about that because subjects would tell me they thought I was really unhappy or I didn’t like them, these kind of things. I tend to be very focused on there’s a lot of technical things to do and trying to get the shot to work visually. In general, I do talk with subjects, but I’m also, as I said, everything I do is toward getting the best image possible. So when you’re dealing with a celebrity, you have to be careful how you talk to them. Everything I do on set is to get the best picture. I know I keep saying that, but it does connect all the dots. And in dealing with a celebrity, I will learn about them, and I will talk with them, but I don’t do a lot of it because I don’t want them to get too comfortable. When I say, “I want you to do X,” I want them just to do it. I don’t want them to say no or to argue or to ask for more… I want them to trust me and feel comfortable but not also feel like I’m a fan or I’m acquiescing to them. I like to communicate to them that this is my shoot. You’re my guest of honor, but it’s still my shoot. Whether that’s an ad shoot or a conceptual shoot or a celebrity shoot, ultimately I want to communicate that I’m in charge, and when I say, “Hey, it would be great if we did X,” I want them just to say, “Cool!” or “Great!” as opposed to, “Wait, let’s pause and talk about this more.”
I was reading some interviews with you, and I read you say that you’re less concerned with making a subject look good and more concerned with making a subject look interesting. Where do you think we can see that here?
He’s small in the frame, right? So when you think of a classic, flattering, showcase portrait, it’s like they’re big. Their face is very prominent. They’re looking to camera. They’re looking heroic. And I don’t think there are any of these things here. I don’t think he looks bad. He looks good. He looks cool. The reason why people connect to this picture, I think, is because even though they might know intellectually that it was made when he was already a celebrity, it looks like Jay Z before he became Jay Z. It looks like Shawn Carter at home.
You’ve said that you’re drawn toward images that feel vulnerable or uncomfortable. Do you think that shows in this image? And how difficult is it for you to reach that point with someone like Jay Z, who might be very image conscious?
I don’t really think about what they want. One thing I learned early on that helped me was I stopped trying to guess what they wanted and were thinking or whatever. A huge part of my making my images vulnerable and bringing out that humanity in the pictures was I made them about me rather than about them. Because if I make it about them, then I’m presuming what they want or think or feel. Making them about me, even if it’s of someone else, allows me then to impose my emotional landscape onto them. And that is so much easier to do because I know me at least somewhat. I can make the picture about how I feel, what I might do in this situation. So that’s a lot easier to do. Obviously people can just say, “Eh, I wouldn’t do that,” which happens all the time, right? People say, “I just wouldn’t do that.” And that’s fine. But that’s a huge part of what I’m doing any time I’m giving direction is I’m trying to bring something out about myself, and often times when I do it well, it feels like it’s an accurate portrait of the subject, right?
Sure. What about you is in this image then?
Well, this is one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this picture. I don’t show this picture. It’s not on my Web site. It wasn’t in my retrospective book four years ago because I don’t think it’s particularly successful. I don’t think it’s particularly successful because it’s doesn’t have a lot of me. I think a part of that is the 4x5 thing. It was just a difficult, complicated process that is not conductive to my flow. But also it’s more about him. It’s very Jay Z and not very Chris Buck. Ultimately I think my best pictures are, I wouldn’t say an even mix, but it’s closer to an even mix. I think it’s so much more him than it is me that it’s not a documentary picture, but it almost feels like it is. And I think that’s not… I don’t think it’s really where I’m strong.
Have you thought about how you would have approached this differently?
Well, I wouldn’t shoot it 4x5 because I think that a huge part of what makes portraiture great is surprise found moments, and it’s hard to get those when you’re shooting large format, at least for me. The power of photography is so much in the edit in the sense that I’m gonna shoot hundreds of frames and I’m going to show you four of them. And those four are gonna be the ones that I think speak to the story I’m trying to tell. But it’s hard to get to those four when you’re shooting large format.
For sure. It was an interesting moment when I was reading an interview with Wolfgang Tillmans last night. I just picked up a book of collected interviews with him, and it was echoing something that you were talking about in interviews that you’ve done about presenting people feeling vulnerable or uncomfortable or uneasy, as your book was called. He was saying that he doesn’t like his subjects to feel at ease because then you can’t take an intense photo. And after that, the interviewer replied by saying that an uneasy portrait is a reminder of mortality. That might be thinking about it too deeply, but is any of that idea at work in what you would be trying to create with something like this?
I think it comes back to the self-portrait aspect of making portraiture. I’m uneasy in my body, so I want to bring that out in other people. That hits a sweet spot for me. When the subject is uncomfortable either in expression with their face or with their body language, I get really excited, and I start shooting the frames faster or saying, “Hold still,” or whatever. Which gets complicated when someone is very composed. When I shot with Leonard Cohen, his mannerism off camera and on camera were 180 degree different. Off camera, he slouched, and he had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He looked like Humphrey Bogart or something, wearing a suit and kind of hunched over and talking out of the side of his mouth, almost raw, you know? But then as soon as the camera came out, he straightened out, and his suit fit perfectly now, and I was like, “Fuck, how am I going to get to anything?” At one point he did something where he kind of crossed over his hands, and they looked like fins. I was just like, “Hold it!” I switched to a different film and had him hold still. I’m sure every morsel of his body was saying, “This is not good. I really should move and reset myself.” But he didn’t thankfully. And I got a shot that had at least some balance of the awkward and the controlled that, in his best work, he really has that. Leonard Cohen at his best is quite wild. So I really wanted to capture at least a hint of that.
To some extent you’re fighting against the fact that everyone’s grown up with a full lifetime of pictures of themselves and how they know that they look in a photo or being surrounded by magazines and movies and how people look cool or how they perceive people to look cool.
Yes, but I do think that… I had a disastrous portrait shoot a few years ago, disastrous in that the subject just would not cooperate even in the most basic way. So it got me thinking: What do I expect? What is the baseline? What is a portrait shoot even at all? And a metaphor that crossed my mind was: Having a real portrait made is like going to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist. If you can sort out your problems and figure out what was eating at you, you’d just stay at home and look out the window and think. No one wants to go to a therapist’s office and go there for months and be digging through different things and go down these paths that don’t really end up anywhere. You wouldn’t do that if you could just do it on your own. And I think it’s the same thing with a portrait. If we all made our own pictures of ourselves, it would just be a bunch of selfies where we look fantastic, which is fine. There’s a place for that. But that’s not portraiture. Portraiture is you bring yourself, and you make yourself a little open and vulnerable, and you do the dance with the photographer. It’s a little bit of a seduction to go somewhere kind of vulnerable and a little bit awkward but maybe somewhere thrilling and exciting that will end up being something that’s quite beautiful and telling as well.
I don’t know if you heard from [Jay Z] whether he liked these photos or not, but do you ever find with your subjects that they find it difficult to say that they like it, just because of the place that you brought them to?
I don’t usually get a lot of feedback. But I’m not really looking for it either. I photographed Philip Seymour Hoffman a few times, and the second time I saw him, he made a point of saying, “That session we did is one of my favorites” — the earlier one. And that was great because we did a lot of weird stuff. He was relatively early in his career, and I was really brazen about “Let’s do this. Let’s do that.” And he said no to lots of stuff, but he said yes to lots of stuff too, and we got a lot of fun weird pictures. And I think he really enjoyed it. People who are at that level of success, especially in a creative field, they’re successful because they take risks. Risk is a huge part of their magic and what makes them really great at what they do, so I think they’re kind of okay. I think it’s often times their people who want them to be more careful, whereas they’re like, “Yeah, let’s do it. Oh, you have a crazy idea? What is it? Okay, why not? Let’s try.”
Your celebrity work, I’d say, has a bit of a constructed nature to it, whereas many photographers might take a photo that looks like the action might have been the subject’s idea or they’re just casually hanging out, I think your work always shows your hand in guiding them toward what you want them to be doing. This [photo], as you said, might feel a bit more documentary, but in the context of this shoot, we know Jay Z hasn’t just sat here. You’ve told him to sit here for your camera. What do you like about that distinction in a photo, and to what extent do you look to maintain the strength of that construction?
It’s hard for me to see my own work. I’ll say when I look at people’s work who I admire, what I find is that when I see two or three pictures, I tend to think, “That’s an interesting subject,” and “That photographer really captured that beautifully.” I think maybe August Sander or Irving Penn — there’s a nice mix of what feels authentic and what feels like, not constructed, but there’s a sense of composition, and there’s a sense of visual harmony and that kind of thing. But if you see a dozen pictures by Penn, say, in the portrait genre, in one genre, you’re like, “Oh, what I’m seeing is Penn as much as I’m seeing the subject, maybe even more.” At first you think, “Wow, Christian Dior looks like a really interesting person” or John Osborne, but then when you see a dozen pictures by Penn from that period, you’re like, “Oh, this is the vision of the artist. This photographer has a vision that’s united. He’s pulling out things in people and making portraits, so maybe Penn’s the interesting person.” So that’s what I hope to do in my work, that there’s enough subtlety that it’s not like that thing where some photographers have a very overt lighting style or they always shoot at a certain angle. People have a certain signature look, like you think of Martin Schoeller with his lighting and the way he frames faces. It’s a signature look. You see that, and you’re like, “That’s a Martin Schoeller picture.” And that’s not really the way I like to approach things. I think there’s certainly value to that. And his pictures are much more about him, in that sense. It’s about the Martin Schoeller look, whereas I like to have the balance of I hope that if you see three or four pictures of mine, you’re like, “Those look like some interesting people.” But if you see a dozen or two dozen, you’re like, “Oh, there’s a through-line here that’s actually Chris Buck.” That’s my goal.
Let’s talk a bit about the composition of this image. What decisions have you made here?
I think the biggest thing is I’m playing with the spacial aspect of having… It’s basically a horizontal shot that I’m shooting vertically, so I’ve got this big negative space that the only thing really going on content-wise is an orange extension cord, which is the only brightly colored thing in the picture too.
Can we talk about why we chose this picture? Because I think it’s important and I think that, I dunno, it’s kind of the reason why I wanted to do it about this because I do think the things that are interesting about it in a way are almost larger questions and are kind of separate from my practice. Or maybe they aren’t. And I want to explore it, and that’s why I want to talk about it.
So when I did my book a couple years ago, I included a different picture from this session in the book. It’s a picture of him in a fried-chicken joint, and he’s dressed like an employee. He even has a name tag with one of his nicknames on it. And he’s kind of making a funny face. And it doesn’t really look like my work either, but it’s just him looking very playful and relaxed in a way that you don’t usually see him, so I put that in that book. But this [photo we’re talking about] is a picture that kept coming up. I don’t know where it was that people found it. Maybe it was… At some point, I did put it on my Instagram, but I think it was out there beforehand, and maybe it’s my top five most liked picture on Instagram. There’s been multiple homages to it by young people doing them kicking back on a lawn chair either behind their home or next to a cool car or this kind of thing. So it kind of got me fascinated by it. Like, what was going on with this picture that people responded to. There’s the obvious aspect, but I do wonder if there’s other things going on too that maybe it is working in ways that I was not acknowledging. But you chose it as well. What do you think?
Well, I think there’s a couple reasons why I found this photo particularly interesting. One being that there’s two elements that are essentially important to this photo, which are Jay Z and the television. Jay Z is watching TV. Those are the two things you’re supposed to be showing in this. But those two things are almost hidden in this image. Jay Z is not facing toward the camera. His body position is away from you. And the TV is almost camouflaged into the building. So it really makes you kind of sit with it and figure out what’s happening here. Having a photo that stops you in and of itself is something that I would value today. And the other thing is just I think that the way that it’s been composed and the way that you’ve weighted certain elements of it, it goes completely against the trends of photography right now. I think a lot of it comes from the way that Instagram is valued in the fact that images are very center weighted, toward camera. That’s what plays best when you scroll through something, whereas this, the dominant element of it is kind of just the cord that’s coming toward the camera. So it’s disorienting in that way to me, which is why I liked it.
It’s funny. The TV thing is an interesting point. I guess I could have put the TV more further back and then turned it toward him so that you could see the screen so it’d pop more, but then he’d have to turn his head away from the camera more to look at the TV. Also as soon as there’s a screen, then you’re looking at the screen, like, what’s on the TV. Thinking now, if I made this picture again, I still would not have… I like the idea of an old small TV, but I wouldn’t face it to camera unless I wanted to make a point of what’s on the screen. But then that would upstage whoever the figure is, no matter who it is. And I guess that could be fine if you wanted to make a picture like that, but that’s not a picture I want to make.
Because I remember this shoot being in black and white, I think one of the reasons it made me drawn to it is it’s in color. It’s almost like the Wizard of Oz thing of the movie starts off in black and white, and then when you step into Oz, it’s in color. It was a surprise to me to go back to this 20 years later and find, “Oh, wow, I shot a couple frames of color. That’s cool.” So it kind of takes me back in a way that the black and white feels older, whereas the color kind of puts you in the moment. It takes you back in time. And the clothing and stuff is obviously of the time. One person did an homage to it specifically about what shoes he’s wearing. One of the comments was commenting on these specific high-tops, like, someone actually made shoes that are a revamp of that, which is amazing.
I think that the reasons why I’m draw to it are certainly more photo nerdy than what would make people like it as it being your most liked photo on Instagram or something like that. For that reason, I think it’s just, you wouldn’t see him in this context anymore. It’s such a foreign context to have someone who has reached the level that he has with their guard down like this so entirely.
Totally.
But at the same time, he was photographed for the New York Times on a couch, very casual, and he was assuming the same type of position. It just wasn’t… Like, this photo shoot in itself seems like it was more positioned as an event photo shoot. Like, we’re gonna do this, and it’s gonna be a landmark in his career, and I think any time you have something like that, discovering images of it that weren’t widely seen or weren’t widely circulated, it’s just gonna feel very special.
It falls into that rare category of, you know, I’ve done thousands of shoots and a handful of them as a fluke of history become much more important than they would have seemed at the time. I photographed Donald Trump 10 years before he ran for president or became president. I made a really interesting picture of him at that time that literally the meaning of it changed when he became president. I never would have guessed it. I mean, thank god I took it seriously. And I guess I’d had experiences early on enough where I did a shoot with someone — I can’t give you an example — but I’m pretty sure I photographed someone in my first few years of my shooting who became more important later, and I was like, “Why did I not take that more seriously?” I could have had a really interesting picture of this person who had a moment a couple years later. So I learned treat every shoot like this person could be huge in 10 years. It’s only a handful of times it’s really paid off, but when it does, it pays off handsomely. And this was one of those times where, I think you’re right, because it was kind of buried, it took on even more life. And the fact that it plays into the fantasy of a well-structured picture of Jay Z quote before he’s Jay Z… It kind of creates this myth that nicely aligns with that. The fact that he wasn’t just shot at a project but actually the projects he grew up in — which I recognized at the time as being a really cool opportunity, and I was pleased he was open to doing that — it speaks to his character that he thought it was interesting and amusing to do that. The pictures are meant to be kind of playful and funny, you know, having him work at a chicken joint, and one of the shots was his car being towed. It was all playful. It wasn’t meant to be esoteric.
Getting back into composition, with this setup, with this set being designed like this with the quarter waters and the cooler and the chair, what made you want to put him in the frame like he is? What made you want to give the cord so much real estate in this image?
If there’s a joke in there somewhere, I’m gonna put it in. And the fact that the extension cord was a bright orange, I couldn’t resist. I looked back at my notes from the time. I did say a couple things about it that were kind of interesting. Can I read it to you?
Yeah, for sure.
”I was worried the pictures would be cheesy, an Annie Leibovitz style with lots of detail, production and lighting. I didn’t wanna make those kind of pictures. I didn’t really want that. I wanted to make something that was a little quieter, more natural looking. One of the ways to do that was to shoot in black and white, and that would be interesting but also could lend something to it, too, shot in 4x5. And that’s what we did. And the magazine was really cool about it. Imagine me and my assistants dragging around a 4x5 camera trying to do five shots in a half day with a hip-hop star in the projects. There wasn’t a lot of guessing going on.”
So that’s what I wrote at the time because I used to do a kind of behind the scenes of my shoots, but the important detail in there that I want to point out was that I didn’t want to overload it with a lot of stuff. When you think about what Annie does, there’s a lot of propping and wardrobe that are reinforcing the idea, so I wanted to leave it a little more open-ended, even though our concept was quite clear and quite specific. Where would Jay Z be if he didn’t become Jay Z? What would Shawn Carter be doing if he didn’t become a hip-hop star? But I didn’t wanna make it too gag-y. That was the temptation, to overload it with props or people or wardrobe that would make it too comical, too gag-y, and so whatever documentary aspects that are in here that I think really make it work now is really because of that restraint. You know, we have a few props. We have the cooler and the drinks and the TV with the extension cord, but the wardrobe is relatively low-key and authentic. Even the do-rag doesn’t feel too hammy. We shot in that environment, but it’s not like I was really making a super dynamic… Like, if you’ve ever been to housing projects, it looks like a housing project. But I’m not making it feel like The Marcy Projects! There’s not a big dramatic element to it. It’s just we’re in that space. That’s the background, but it’s kind of like here’s this guy watching TV, chillin’ in the afternoon. That’s kind of the only narrative really. It’s that restraint that makes it work.
How important do you think the people in the background are to this photo?
They’re important for two reason. One is it makes it look like a real space. It does reinforce the narrative of… We didn’t, like, cordon it off or whatever. But also we didn’t bring them in. They’re just people who live there or are visiting someone. They’re just people in the background. It’s not like they were extras who we paid $20 to stand in the background. I imagine at some point he said hello to people and was friendly and signed a couple autographs or something. I imagine that happened because he was a big star, and he was obviously a local hero, but they were just people who live there. It does help it because it makes it feel like that’s what it would be like, right? Like, there’s no entourage. It’s not him playing cards with his friends or whatever. I think that helps. It’s not a celebration of living in the projects, which I’m sure there’s genuine camaraderie among people of the same age and friends and all that, but that’s not what it is. It’s more… In a way, I like it because it’s almost lonely looking. He’s looking for social connection. That’s why he’s out in the courtyard. But he’s not. He’s watching TV, which is a solitary act.
Yeah, I think that when I think about it more, the figures in the background add an element of welcoming-ness and an element of safety to this. I think it would be very easy to go into a scene like this and from a certain photographer’s eye, it would be like, “Oh, let’s make it look as gritty as possible,” or “Let’s get as many people in there to get all this fashion,” and then it becomes very voyeuristic. And then it becomes problematic to some extent because it’s like you’ve gone into this space and photographed it and then left that space.
And that’s not where I’m from. I didn’t grow up in the projects, so for me to be making a big statement on it, it’s not where I’m comfortable. It’s not that I would never do it. I’m not making a political statement. I’m just saying it’s not why I was there. It’s not what I was doing, and I’m not a fashion photographer, so it’s not my instinct thankfully anyways. But having people in the background definitely helps. Some frames work better than others because there’s some people walking through or milling about, and it does add a texture and content that does improve it, for sure, 100 percent.
I know you said that you shot this story mostly in black and white and this was one of the couple color frames. How would you describe your approach to color?
One thing I’ve noticed about my work, when I see it in a portfolio or on my Web site, is I tend to organize my space either to be very busy or to be very tidy and clean. Either it’s there’s lot of stuff, or there’s almost no stuff. I think I’m probably similar with color. I’m either going for a strong mix of colors, or I’m going for something very pared back. Even in terms of clothing, I tend to dress people in either black or a simple color palette, gray, black, white, whatever, so it frames the face. Or I’m going for an outfit that really makes a statement and is a big part of either the visual, like an outlandish costume, or part of the narrative. Like, in this case the blue track suit helps to sell where he is and who he is and what the time period is.
You’ve already been self-critical fo yourself for this, but is there anything about this image that you wish you would have done better?
I certainly would have shot it Mamiya 67. If I could go back in time, that’s how I would do it. It would be nice if there was more going on with him and his expression. It’s a little bit blank for my taste. I think that’s one of the reasons I felt it didn’t really work. Jay Z’s tough that way. I think he’s kind of an introvert, so even though he’s a great performer, when he’s not performing, he doesn’t give you a lot. I don’t mean that as a criticism. I’m just saying it’s a challenge as a photographer. And it’s certainly my responsibility to bring out whatever I need in a photo. Unless someone’s overtly difficult, it’s all on me. I do like the way his legs are formed. I think it’s one of the more interesting things about the picture, the way his legs are separated, but yeah, I wish there was more going on with the face because, if you look at it, he kind of looks like he’s angry or dissatisfied. And that’s not really the feel I wanted. I wanted more just bored and watching TV. I don’t know how you make that look interesting. People watching TV is not exactly the ideal scenario, but I guess that’s why doing it outside was fun. The juxtaposition of watching TV outside is kind of the gag, right? Not that people never do it, but it’s not something that one would typically do because it’s sort of hard to see the screen with all the daylight and obviously all the practical aspects of having to plug in, unless you have a portable TV. I mean, we could have gotten a portable TV, which did exist at the time, but I wanted one of those traditional TVs that would sit in your kitchen or someone’s bedroom, like a small TV, kind of like your second TV. I wanted it to feel like that.
I was wondering if we could talk a bit about how this image sits within the photo landscape of today, just because an amazing thing that’s happened recently is more diverse voices have started being amplified, nurtured and welcomed into editorial and commercial channels. And today an assignment like this would come up and a photo editor would need to certainly think twice about having a white male photographer shoot this. A good photo editor would absolutely be thinking what does it mean that a white photographer is the one who’s taking Jay Z back to the projects, whereas I think maybe even just two years ago, those conversations wouldn’t be part of the conversation. Is that something you’ve reflected on at all?
Yeah, for sure. I will say actually the photo editor in this case was a black woman. So that’s who hired me. I don’t know what that means, but that’s who my client was, and she was a great client. I worked with her on a couple other jobs as well at another magazine. Janene Outlaw, which you can’t have a better name than Outlaw. I mean, I dunno, it’s hard for me to say. I guess, like you, I agree that I think it’s a great thing. I wanna see work by different kinds of people and see what they would bring out into the world. I wanna see their work. I’m excited as an audience. In terms of assigning I think the literal aspect of “We have a black subject therefore we need a black photographer,” as a correction I think it’s fine. But long term, I don’t think it really works. You follow the logic of it: If you’re gonna photograph a Republican politician, are you gonna only hire Republican photographers to photograph them? On some level, and this is something I’ve always embraced, is that as photographers, we are journalists, and as journalists we are critics, and our job isn’t just to celebrate. It’s also to evaluate and critique, so having people who are closely aligned with the subject is one approach that’s valid. But not the only one.
I think everyone thinks about their work differently now, especially in the conversations that have happened in the past several years. Do you think there would be any elements of your approach that you might have taken more of a beat to consider something a little bit closer? I wouldn't say that… There’s nothing about this image that would be problematic, but do you think you would have more concerns about taking a job like this?
Absolutely not. I’m a commercial photographer. I get assignments, and I take them on. Hip-hop isn’t my favorite kind of music, but right from the beginning of my career when I got hip-hop assignments pretty early on, I recognized it as being an important part of popular music. Also, too, I’m from Canada. I’m not American, so I perceive black culture as being American culture. To me, there wasn’t a divide. To me, it was just part of American culture and a part that I found interesting. So in doing an assignment like this, I didn’t really separate it in my mind from… Like, to me it just was America, and I was excited to do it.
I mean, I’m aware of the fact that I’m not black, and as I said, I’d be aware that if I’m gonna shoot in the projects when I didn’t grow up in the projects — it’s not my culture — that I’m aware of that. I think I try to be sensitive to it. But one friend of mine, who is black, we got to talking about this stuff because of all these conversations happening, and he said, “Chris Buck, you’re all right because you photograph everyone the same way.” And I was like, “What do you mean?” And he said, “You don’t photograph black people different than you photograph white people, and that’s okay.” And I thought that was an interesting take, and I think I certainly try to do that. My interest in having awkward body positions and stuff, I try to do with black people as I do with white people, but I’m pretty sure that I also have some restraint and some awareness that there’s things I’m not getting. There’s certain things I don’t understand, or that’s not a culture I know well and I’m not from. So I do have a hesitation. If anything, I worry that I’m not bringing the full Chris Buck experience to subjects who are black or other ethnicities that I don’t belong to. And if anything, I should be probably putting that filter on less and just connect to the people as humans rather than as a white Canadian man.
In the past, you have described your photography as aggressive and emphasized the taking of a photograph rather than the making of a photograph. Now this was from an interview in 2014, and I feel that the discussion around photography has somewhat shifted since then toward emphasizing maybe a more gentle approach. But do you still find for yourself that this method of working holds true?
Thank you for reframing that loaded question [laughs]. I do think of it as aggressive, especially with celebrities, because I think there’s such a glad-handing aspect of culture. Not all culture but a lot of it is about flattering and glamorizing and moving forward that image that they put forth already. That’s not what I do and what I’m interested in. So to some extent, the aggressive thing is sort of just a psychological thing. Like, when I mention this to my assistants or clients or even subjects, they’re like, “I don’t find you aggressive at all. I find you quite relaxed and communicative,” so it’s more trying to overcome whatever nice Canadian-ness that I have of getting along and being polite.
One of my favorite things is when subjects are kind of nasty to me because then it’s like, “All right, now the restraints are off and I can just do what I need to do today and not worry about you liking me because you don’t like me already, and you clearly don’t care about even being decent, so fuck you. Let’s make a great picture.” What the subjects want is, as you said earlier, the subjects want a picture where they look young and thin and beautiful and cool. And that’s not interesting. That’s not interesting for me or my client or for the audience. And that’s what I’m there for. I’m there to make an interesting picture for the audience. And that’s not what the subjects are really… I mean, they can be coaxed to come to that place, but they’re not arriving with that as their default. My attitude about being quote aggressive is really a mindset toward focusing on the work and not on glad-handing subjects and their publicists.
And at the same time, I clearly see compassion in your work. Your ideas are simple. You’re never doing too much. It never comes across as exploitive. And you do tend to celebrate the subject without glamorizing them, as you’re saying. How much do you feel a responsibility to the people that you’re photographing?
I think on the front end, I don’t feel any responsibility, but when I do the edit, I really do. This is something I kind of mentioned, but when I’m photographing regular folks who aren’t celebrities, my approach is much more gentle, and I kind of wish it wasn’t. I think I’d probably make better work in that space if I didn’t. I think that holding back is not good for the work. But I do feel like they’re not professional show-people or whatever, so especially when they see me photographing celebrities, and then I come in and photograph them, they’re often kind of like, “Wow, Chris Buck’s making my picture. He’s gonna make me into… I’ll be famous adjacent.” So they can be a little unfiltered in a way that celebrities tend to have a… You know, they at least make me jump through a few hoops before they do the weird thing. Whereas the real people will often be like, “Yeah, you want me naked? Sure, here you go.” And it’s like, “Wow, okay.” So then I’m like, “Okay, if I’m gonna have them naked, maybe I should at least show them in their best light.”
I did a book that came out last year called Gentlemen’s Club and of course it’s all regular people. It’s partners of strippers. And it the partners and the couples, and I realized in doing the edit for the book that I was often choosing pictures that were less interesting but felt more authentic to who the people were. I felt a responsibility perhaps because I interviewed them as well, so I really did have a chance to get a sense of what is their voice, what is their narrative, that now that I knew that I really had no choice. I had to choose images that aligned with that narrative, as least as I understood it, and not just choose the wackiest picture that I could put in the book. So some of my favorite pictures are ones that got cut because they’re kind of more about me than about the subject.
So then at the same time, how much do you feel a responsibility to then maybe the people who will see the photos, not necessarily the people who are in the photos?
Ideally I think of my work as being for a future audience. And this might be less so now than it was when I was younger, like maybe in the ’90s, where I felt like the work I was making wasn’t really aligned with the culture, that I was making work that hopefully was ahead of its time. That’s how I optimistically thought of it, that I was making work that would look better in the future, that would look more interesting and nuanced and the things I was trying to put in the work that people didn’t necessarily think were that worthwhile would become more powerful over time. And now in some sense it’s that kind of thing, I think, if you do it right, you eventually merge with the culture and then maybe you go off on your own, and now maybe you’re running parallel to the culture. I never really wanted to be perfectly aligned with it, but I’m probably more aligned with the culture now in terms of the work I make today than I was then. But I’m trying to make work for my ideal audience and not for the actual public. One of my little mottos, mantras, whatever, is: “My goal is to be great, not popular.” And of course, the ideal is both, but if I have to choose when I’m feeling a sense of confusion or lack of direction, I go back to: What’s a choice that’s going to make this great and not necessarily get a lot of likes on Instagram or whatever is the metric for popular?
So in ’98 when you were making this image and the other images you were making, did you have an idea in your mind that something like this would be existing now, like this is an image of Jay Z or an image of Steve Martin that people are gonna see it then, but the real test of this image is how they’re gonna see it 20 years from now?
That was my entire approach. My entire approach was this will be cool in the future. That was my north star. When I hear my peers or younger people kvetch about the publication not choosing the best picture, I’m just like, “It doesn’t matter.” Put the one you like on your Web site or on your Instagram or when you publish a book, you’ll put the picture you like. There’s a picture I did of Chris Farley that became very famous, and that picture didn’t run in the magazine. People don’t even know the picture that ran in the magazine. They literally have no idea. The pictures that ran in the magazine are now forgotten.
I was just thinking about that one because it’s that feeling when you take a photo of I might not appreciate it in this moment that I took it but at some point in the future I will not be able to believe that I got Chris Farley to do this, or I got Steve Martin to do this.
I’m not sure I think that at the time. After my shoots I tend to look through them and see what could have been or what was wrong, or it’s not quite there yet. It’s only in retrospect… My poor agent is always like, “This is awesome! This is great! Let’s push that out there.” And I’m like, “Eh, I dunno. Give me six months.”
At the time, what do you think you’d learned as a photographer that gave you the instinct to to take this photo?
Well, certainly not being intimidated by people or places. You know, the fact that I would go into Marcy projects in Brooklyn. I’d probably never been there before. I’ve been there since, I think, but I hadn’t been there before, and it’s not a place where I’m familiar or comfortable. But I’m comfortable talking to anyone anywhere and being okay with it. And I think that’s huge. That’s in terms of a cultural thing. It’s acknowledging that I am not of this place or I am not a native of this place or this space, but that’s okay, and I don’t pretend… I think my not pretending that I am, it’s something that I learned in the punk rock alternative world of Toronto that I was a big part of before I moved to New York, where I was this very straight-laced Catholic school boy who would dress nicer. I didn’t drink or smoke. I’m sure I looked very absurdly sheltered to the people in this hardcore and anarchist crowd that I moved through, who I was perfectly comfortable dealing with them because I was uncomfortable in my skin in certain ways that I’ve talked about, but I was also comfortable knowing that I wasn’t like them, and that was okay. I was drawn to them. I was drawn to that culture, but I almost purposely embraced my awkward white boy Catholic thing as a way of saying "I’m not pretending to be something I’m not. And people tend to accept you when you do that.
I think that doing that on these photo shoots, there’s certain things I’m good at and other things I’m less good at. In terms of the photography, I bring in assistants who know what they’re doing, and they help me with that stuff. And the other stuff I tend to know what I want, and the stuff I don’t know about, I don’t pretend I know, and people tend to respond well to that. I think that’s a huge part of why I get along well with celebrities. I don’t blow smoke up their ass. I don’t say, “I’m gonna make you look great.” I might say, “This is gonna be cool.” I sell it for what it is.
But another aspect I did want to mention is that I learned early on from bands coming through Toronto that I was big fans of that I had to stop wanting to be friends with them or be connected to them in any way more than just being the photographer they’re gonna deal with for an hour or two. When I want to connect with people and be buddies with them, it did not go well. I’m shooting with people like Sonic Youth and the Butthole Surfers and Motörhead, and they don’t respond well to an overanxious 20-year-old Chris Buck who wants to befriend them. That did not go over well. I learned that lesson hard. And dealing with people like Jay Z was easy after dealing with Nick Cave. It was a harsh world to cut my teeth through, the kind of post-punk world of the ’80s.
At the same time, too, it takes a photographer a while to develop that feeling of “I’m the authority on this photo shoot.” When you approach something like this with that mindset of, like, “I’m not your buddy. I’m the director here,” people respond to that.
One hundred percent. It’s a funny thing. To me it comes into play more on advertising shoots where there will be two or three layers of hierarchy above me on set, and yet I’m still the captain. I was explaining to my daughter. She’s 11. Kids become more interested in these kind of power relationships and stuff. What I said to her was, “Look, I think of it as, they might own the boat, but I’m still the captain of the boat. So they can tell me where they want the boat to go. They’re gonna tell me what dock to go to. But I’m still gonna call the shot as what route we’re gonna take to get there.”
Interviewed on January 23, 2022.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)