The Chris Buck

Without Apostrophe

Apostrophe has long been a warm and welcoming home for me, but after nearly eight years it is time to part ways. My time with them has been happy and fruitful, and I always felt good about having them “represent” me, with all that entails. They are honest, hard-working, and empathetic, with a fantastic team that’s incomparable in the industry.

While with Apostrophe I’ve shot some of my favorite assignments, including ads for Google Sonos, Coca-Cola, Uber, Kia, SAP, Old Spice, Progressive, Oscar Mayer, the Oprah Magazine Race Flip series, and portraits of Tom Hanks, and President Barack Obama. 

Much appreciation to the epic Kelly Montez for a fantastic run, and a special thank you to my longtime rep Kate Davis (it is her unique talent and instincts that I will miss the most).

Top Image: The Apostrophe Cake (of course), from the 15th Anniversary celebration. Photo by Tiffany Sage.

New York is a Friendly Town (On New Opportunities)

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and one of the themes that he keeps coming back to is that the year in which you’re born has a significant influence on your likelihood of success. He says that talent and hard work are key, but when the cultural and economic factors are in your favor there is a better chance of high achievement.

This moment may well be a great time to be a young person, say in your mid-twenties. The Covid-19 pandemic has people scared, and cautious, and this could be creating an unusual opportunity for the young and the bold. The virus affects those that are older, and conversely, less so those that are young. Hence, we could see a lot of otherwise driven people in their forties and older pull back, making space for those less risk-averse.

I’ve heard a number of my middle-aged friends talk with confidence that working from home is the way of the future - and they’re very much on-board. I suspect that they are right, but in a limited way. It strikes me that companies that are determined to innovate, or perhaps grab a larger share of their industry, are not going to sit back and keep doing Zoom calls once a vaccine is available.

From the late 1960s until now there has been an ever-growing workforce, with a giant baby boomer generation, women entering a wider range of professions, and maturation of the global marketplace. But now, with this pause, and many North American’s stepping back, a unique vacuum in the job and career space is opening up. Now is the time for the driven and the daring to step forward and reach for the brass ring.

And hey, I hear that New York rents are negotiable for the first time in forty years.

Intersex Awareness Day 2020

On April 17th, 1997 I arrived on the Harvard campus in Cambridge Massachusetts to photograph Alex Myers. I was excited about the prospect of making portraits of intersexuals for Newsweek, but not quite sure how I would do so.

The sitters had been through traumatic childhoods, born with both sexes, their gender was assigned to them by doctors as newborns, usually in a fashion that was, frankly, the most medically convenient. But each seemed to deal with it differently. Alex (the top photo) was almost Zen, recognizing their challenges, but taking each day as it came. 

Max (the second picture) had recently decided to identify as male, and was open and curious about my viewpoint on masculinity. We talked about role models and I was happy to say that I still sought strong positive male figures to emulate. 

Riki Anne (third image) was the angry activist. Wearing a “Transexual Menace” t-shirt and welding a cleaver, the goal was to shock and provoke. 

Perfectly Frank (Ranking Sinatra’s 25 Best)

My goal is to present Frank Sinatra’s best recordings; the tracks I’d might play to argue for the man’s value and importance to someone unfamiliar with his music. 

He had a long career, making recordings from 1939 to 1994, but the majority of my favorite recordings were made during the Capitol years, 1953-1962. I have not made choices to reflect important benchmarks in his career, nor his best-selling or most popular songs, only on my subjective take on his most successful recordings.

When Scott Woods interviewed me in 1996 he asked about my obsession with Frank Sinatra, here is part of what I said:

I was drawn to him as a personality first, in the way that he's a very charismatic and exuberant, fun person, but also he could be very mean-spirited and kind of boorish. As I started to get into his music, he became an icon of the perfect artist, not that everything he did was perfect, but at his best he was untouchable. He did his form of music better than anyone else ever has or I believe ever could. Even though he's behaved badly, he's also someone who has taken life in a hard way...people can see his vulnerability, and they can see that he takes love and heartbreak very personally and is affected by it in a way that you don't see in most performers. I think that's one of the things that made him a big star.

Although I include a range of song styles I’m most impressed by the mid-tempo tracks. The ballads can lean into the sentimental emotion of the songs, and the upbeat ones can bowl you over in their boldness, but the mid-tempo records are either transparently successful or not, with no place to hide. This is a space where Frank Sinatra succeeds like few others.

25. Best Is Yet To Come (Reprise 1964)

24. Nice ‘N’ Easy (Capitol 1960)

23. Come Dance With Me (Capitol 1959)

22. Me And My Shadow [with Sammy Davis Jr] (Reprise 1962)

21. My Funny Valentine (Capitol 1953)

20. The Coffee Song (Reprise 1960)

19. You Make Me Feel So Young [Live] (Reprise 1966)

18. You Go To My Head (Capitol 1960)

17. Brazil (Capitol 1958)

16. Witchcraft (Capitol 1957)

15. Change Partners [with Antônio Carlos Jobim] (Reprise 1967)

14. Send In The Clowns (Reprise 1973)

13. Dancing In The Dark (Capitol 1959)

12. I Get A Kick Out Of You (Capitol 1954)

11. In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning (Capitol 1955)

10. What’s New? (Capitol 1955)

9. Night And Day (Reprise 1962)

8. One For My Baby (And One More For The Road) (Capitol 1954)

7. Baubles, Bangles and Beads (Capitol 1959)

6. It’s Nice To Go Trav’ling (Capitol 1958)

5. (Love Is) The Tender Trap (Capitol 1956)

4. Come Fly With Me (Capitol 1958)

3. I’ve Got You Under My Skin (Capitol 1956)

2. I Wish I Were In Love Again (Capitol 1957)

1. I’ve Got The World On A String (Capitol 1953)

Charles Webb & Fred (and Ann)

When the author of The Graduate recently passed away bloggist Ann Althouse wrote a number of thoughtful pieces about Charles Webb, focusing on him and his wife’s lifestyle choices. She was curious about their genuinely unusual relationship to money, referencing the New York Times obituary by John Leland:

Shedding their possessions became a full-time mission. They gave away a California bungalow, the first of three houses they would jettison, saying that owning things oppressed them. Mr. Webb declined his inheritance from his father’s family but was unable to decline the money from his mother’s; so they gave that away, along with artwork by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg...

But Althouse was even more interested in his ambivalence towards travel, as they largely mirror hers. She quotes Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate:

Now I don’t know what brought this up but I have no intention of hopping around the world ogling natives and peasants or whatever you had in mind.

Adding her own take, “I thought the translation of the bourgeois view of travel into ‘hopping around the world ogling natives and peasants’ was very nice. The character never knows what he wants to do (other than marry Elaine), but other people keep wanting him to do things, and you get the message that he's more advanced just having eliminated all their bad ideas from his life. Traveling is just one of them.”

Corporate Season 3 BTS

I got to do something with Comedy Central that rarely happens on commercial assignments: shoot extra material driven by my ideas. 

A Kid From Coney Island (Stephon Marbury)

My wife and I watched the endearing "A Kid From Coney Island" on Netflix and it inspired me to pull out some fun pieces from my 1995 sitting with Stephon Marbury.

Stephon was playing with Georgia Tech at the time and was an easy and enthusiastic photo subject, trying many different setups. 

Notes on Covid Era Sessions (BTS)

Nothing has made me happier in the last few months than to get a photo assignment, no matter how modest, or logistically complicated. I’m just happy to have a camera pointed at someone who isn’t in my family (despite their being lovely models).

Safety regiments are of course front of mind. For the photo team, we traveled separately, brought our own food and drink, and wore masks and gloves the whole time. That said, distancing was only lightly observed. I suppose that it was a combination of the practical need to get things done in an efficient manner, combined with being fully decked out in protective gear, that made the crew feel comfortable standing close to each other. 

It’s now taken for granted that detailed conversations regarding on-set protocols will happen with the crew, but I’ve learned that it’s also key to have that talk with the subjects too. One sitter decided, just before the meet time, that they were not going to remove their mask for the portrait, despite the fact that we we were shooting distanced, and outside. Another didn’t wear a mask, and nor did their team, between set ups during an all-day indoor session.

My takeaway is that the safety decisions are most effective when made upfront. Questions like transportation, who will be on set, who not? Where you shoot, and with what goals? Once on set we are in the mindset of doing what is best for the pictures, and are trained to put aside other concerns to get the best work - and of course that's how we long ago built our reputations.

Top Image: Polly Rodriguez of Unbound for Guardian Weekend. She exhibited perfect Covid safety decorum, on top of being a fantastic photographic subject.

Middle Image: The photographer wearing the prop stylist hat, metaphorically.

Bottom Image: A park sitting with Diane Paulus for Boston Magazine.

100 Most Important People in Photography (1994)

In the mid-nineties I received a thank you note from Sally Mann, written on the back of an 8x10″ contact sheet of her image “Hangnail.” It arrived in a simple paper envelope, without a board to secure it, so the postal worker folded it in half to get it into the mail slot, putting a deep crease down the middle of the photograph. (Nevertheless, I treasured this gift, and eventually hung it on the wall, framed lovingly.)

Mann was thanking me for a print I’d sent to her a couple of years before, which I wrote about in detail on my blog previously. She had submitted the portrait to American Photo Magazine, as they looked to include her in their “100 Most Important People in Photography” piece. I bought the issue when it came out and recently came upon it in my storage space. It was a stunning time capsule of that period in the photo world.

The thing that strikes me most is who is missing, or low on the list; particularly photographers who we now associate with that period. Some photographers I think of as crucial to the nineties include Frank Ockenfels 3, Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tillmans, Peggy Sirota, and Terry Richardson. And even those who first made their mark in a previous decade, but whose influence continued to loomed large, like Nan Goldin (ranked at 88) and William Eggleston (not included).

I don’t mean this particularly as a criticism of the list, as it reflects the viewpoint of the time and this particular set of editors, but to suggest that those who are “important” and “powerful” now isn’t necessarily a reflection who and what will be relevant longterm.

Small Crew Sessions

I respect genuine mastery of strobe lighting and studio technique, but my role models as I was starting out were more low-fi. I looked to shooters like Mary Ellen Mark and Larry Fink, whose less-is-more approach spoke to me. Their best photographs were surreal but grounded in a world that I recognized. To me this is what photography does best, creating a convincing picture of a seemingly fantastic scene.

Hence, as I developed my shooting approach I aimed to do much with little. I would bring limited equipment, and as few support staff as I could get away with. 

As I got to shooting more advertising projects the productions grew, and the crew size accordingly. At first I found it daunting, but soon embraced it, and learned to enjoy my leadership role setting a positive tone for everyone on set. 

But I still often shoot with a small crew, whether it’s an editorial session with a limited budget, or images for a personal project. It’s not uncommon for us to have as little as four people on set, including myself and the subject.

Shooting for advertising will begin again soon, and producing with small crews will be one of the ways in which we can increase the safety on set. Crew members will likely wear gloves and masks, and perhaps even bring their own meals, but a central factor in minimizing risk will be to have less personnel. 

I’m proud of the large range of material that I’ve shot with small crews, hence I’ve made a special section on my website showcasing over five dozen sessions with minimal crew (7 or less). Each image is captioned with the number of people on set for that photograph. 

Top Image: Chris Corsano, shot for The Wire Magazine. (2 on set)

Second Image: Deborah Fellner, with her father, shot for a mercury poisoning story, Mother Jones Magazine. (5 on set)

Capturing Chaos, with Artist Maurizio Cattelan (Robb Report BTS)

My biggest fear in prepping for this session was that Maurizio would be adventurous and open and I wouldn’t be ready for it. And that’s exactly what happened.  A successful studio shoot can be assured by arriving at the space many hours before the subject, but because of a last-minute location change, due to the Covid-19 outbreak, we lost over half of our prep time. Our subject arrived a little early, so we utilized him for our test shots. But the inaudible starting gun had fired and Maurizio was off and running, we both refined our lighting and tried to document the subject’s manic activity at once. He moved from idea to idea rapidly, and when I would request that he repeat an action he took this as an inconvenience, almost an offense. Past experience has taught me that a fun day doesn’t necessarily translate into great photos – encapsulating the dynamism of a Maurizio Cattelan in a single frame is harder than it looks. Initially, I just worked to capture as much of the actively as possible, knowing that I could likely piece together something later in post. Then, with a momentary pause in the chaos, I took back control of the session, leading us to the fire escape out back between the old buildings of the Flatiron District. The small workspace restricted the amount of crew we could fit, and having reduced his audience, the performance became manageable, allowing me to capture much of it, and even direct it some.

Last of the Season Old Fashioned, w Sardines

My photo agent, Apostrophe, asked us to create, and document a favorite drink and snack to share during the Sheltering in Place period. 

My wife, Michelle Golden, and I prepped in the kitchen in the late afternoon and then shot in our side yard when the light was perfect. And, I can assure you that no props went to waste.

It's the late afternoon and time for an Old Fashioned, with sardines on a Triscuit cracker. The Drink: Bulleit Rye (2 ounces), with some sugar, a dash of rhubarb bitters (a nod to spring), an orange rind garnish, on the rocks.

Iconic Biography Page

If you do this long enough you end up with an array of archived materials from your career, some are valuable, most not so much. My previous website was complex, confusing, nearly impossible to navigate, so of course I loved it.

The splash page was a gallery of icons, each one representing a section of photos to visit: an airplane for “Overview,” a couch for the Presence project,  a finger print for “Isn’t,” etc. The bit of discovery involved was part of the value of the site, but I was informed by multiple photo reps (as I was shopping for a new one at the time) that making a difficult website would not win me favor with clients. 

One of the highlights of the Icon Site was the Biography page (represented by an illustration of a human heart). I commissioned my friend comic actor Brian Huskey to write it, and he did so brilliantly. He started with a bare-bones description of my career, then footnoted it ridiculously. (Click on the image here and you should be able to read the full text.)

Distilled Wisdom from Tim Ferriss

We moved to the suburbs outside New York two years ago and found myself with no commissions for months. We settled into this beautiful old house and I would spend my days looking out window at the tree-filled yard, it was misery in paradise.

Fear and boredom are the enemies when there is no work, so I got to reading. I picked up Tim Ferriss’s then recent book “Tribe of Mentors” at the library and devoured it, making notes of some of my favorite quotes along the way. I followed up with his previous (and similar) volume, “Tools of Titans.” Many of the notes are more well-word phrasings of things I already understood, others wisely flipped what I thought that I knew.

I ended up with thirteen pages of notes, then selected my favorites and put them onto one document, shrunk it and slipped it into my wallet. I carry it with me, a mini-manifesto to approaching life and work. 

“The difference between winning and losing is often not quitting.” - Walt Disney “If you work for the awards, you don’t do good work. But if you do good work the awards will come.” - Richard Betts  “What you seek is seeking you.” - Rumi  “This too shall pass.” - ancient Persian saying  “Seek out mentors constantly and without shame/and mentor others.” - Peter Altica “Whomever you’re attracted to today possesses whatever qualities in yourself you’re ready to nurture”. - Kristen Ulmer  Real work and real satisfaction come from the opposite of what the web provides. They come from going deep into something. The book you’re writing, the album your making, the movie your producing, and staying there for a long, long time.” - Steven Pressfield “If you’re looking for work- life balance in your 20s or 30s you’re likely in the wrong career. If you’re doing something you love you don’t want work - life balance.” - Debbie Millman “Follow your intellectual curiosity over whoever is ‘hot’ right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well.” - Naval Ravikant “Don’t do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are.”                 “Avoid people who are powerful but not honest or good.” - Mike Maples Jr.   “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” - Jesse Williams quoting Adepero  “We are in an arms race against distractions. We’ve come to develop technology to protect us against our devices. We to have to protect our time.” - Neil Strauss (paraphrased)  “Life shirks or expands in proportion to one's courage.” - Anais Nin To do original work: “It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few others people believe.” “Most people have internalized that we’re reliant on external conditions to be perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time. So my son and I never missed a single storm, rain or snow, to go outside and romp in it . I want him to have an internal focus of control, not to be reliant on external conditions to be just so.” – paraphrase, from Josh Waitzkin “If you generate enough bad ideas a few good ones tend to show up.” - Seth Godin  “If you can’t come up with 5 good ideas try writing down 10 bad ideas instead. Your brain is trying to protect you from harm - this method can circumvent that mechanism.” - paraphrased - James Altucher  On Newspapers: “They find the things that scares people the most and write about it.” - James Altucher “Put the big rocks in the jar first, then the medium sized pebble, then the grains of sand - in that order. The minutiae fit around the big things, but the big things won't fit around the minutiae.”  - paraphrased, from Tim Ferris “Every time I left the house my dad would say ‘Remember who you are,’ at the time I was like,  ‘You’re so weird,’ now I see that this is so profound – Kaskade

American Photography 36 (E. Jean Carroll BTS)

I was pleased to receive the good news that two of my portraits from last year have been accepted into the prestigious American Photography annual. The one of Elinor Carucci I discussed on my blog here, this post will feature the E. Jean Carroll session.

The shoot was so bountiful that it was difficult to pick one final image. There was one risky decision that made it possible.

The assignment was for Guardian Weekend, out of the UK. They are one of my favorite clients, as they offer access to top subjects, and the photo staff are always generous and appreciative. They are good to me, and I work hard to honor that. 

My assistants and I arrived within a minute of journalist Ed Pilkington. He was scheduled to go first, giving us time to set up a seamless studio in her living room - perfect.

About an hour in they took a break from the interview, and the writer suggested that we do our pictures now, allowing him to then return for more Q&A after. Instead, I suggested that he take his time and go as long as he wanted, promising that we would be patient, and stay out of his way. It was only mid-afternoon, so even if they talked another two hours I’d still have plenty of light for portraits.

However, there was a risk. Jean had been welcoming and enthusiastic, hence my calculation was that her excitement would keep her with us as long as we were engaged, but she could tire out after a long interview, or could her mood could shift, cutting the session short.

I made an in-the-moment decision to move the photo session hours onwards. To me, the worst case scenario was that we’d get a couple of rushed set-ups with a spent sitter, but that didn’t seem much different than what was originally on the table: a quick one-hour shoot with the journalist standing around waiting for us.

As it went, it was fantastic. We did six meaningful set ups, running around her property as the light shifted in the late afternoon. Everyone was engaged and present, making for some rich and nuanced portraits.

“Hi Chris, it’s Linda Tripp” (BTS Story)

When you’re sent to photograph someone who has been vilified, it gets complicated, especially if you end up getting on well with them. I made this portrait of Linda Tripp for Newsweek in 1998. There was a “lamb sent to the slaughter” vibe to the shoot, and because of that I couldn’t resist making her look as attractive and likable as possible. 

Here is part of what I wrote about it at the time, “People ask me, ‘What is she like? [She] did a horrible thing, how could you have liked her?’ [I tell them] she’s a human being and she made a choice that made sense to her for whatever reason. And when you meet someone face to face who shows vulnerability, it’s hard to perceive them as evil.”

Covid FOMO

An unexpected emotion has been overcoming me: a fear of missing out. Not for concert tickets, a table at a new restaurant or even a backyard barbecue, I know that those things aren’t happening. 

As a creative person I sense an opportunity here, but day to day I keep my head down, and find distractions to keep myself from connecting with my feelings. My previous post suggested ways to keep oneself busy, focused and positive, and I do think that there is value to these pursuits, but one also must make space for introspection. 

I heard an interview with author George Saunders who talked about a letter he wrote to his students on the importance of writers making work to help explain this time. He said:

“We are (and especially you are) the generation that is going to have to help us make sense of this and recover afterward. What new forms might you invent, to fictionalize an event like this, where all of the drama is happening in private, essentially.

Fifty years from now, people won’t believe this ever happened (or will do the sort of eye roll we all do when someone tells us something about some crazy thing that happened in 1970.) What will convince that future kid is what you are able to write about this, and what you’re able to write about it will depend on how much sharp attention you are paying now, and what records you keep.”

As a creative person I want to take up this challenge. I don’t know exactly what will come of it; will it be any good, or meaningful to my contemporaries, let alone future audiences? To be clear, I don’t even know what I’ll do. I suppose that I’ll start taking pictures my (now small) life, and we’ll see where it leads me.