Greg Gorman is a celebrity and portrait photographer with numerous iconic images to his credit. He does not “shoot anything that can’t talk back” to him. In a career stretching over five decades, he has photographed Leonardo DiCaprio, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Andy Warhol, Michael Jordan, Robert De Niro, Barbara Streisand, Orson Wells, Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Al Pacino, Grace Jones, Mark Wahlberg, Brad Pitt, Marina Abramović, and many more.
A Photograph Should Not Answer All the Questions
Gorman does not want to reveal everything in his photographs. “When I first started shooting pictures,” says Gorman, “I used to put the lights right over the camera, and everything looked like an interchangeable postage stamp. Everything was lit. There was nothing left to the imagination. “I sometimes look at a photograph that strikes me or pictures that maybe don’t answer all the questions and leave me wanting to know more. So, I find that intriguing element, and that’s also what I do with many of my photographs that interplay between light and shadow. More mystery lurks in the shadows than it does in the highlights.”
Gorman (born 1949) has never been impressed with Ansel Adam’s Zone System, where 11 zones were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle gray, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail). “I never gave a s**t about the Zone System,” says the master, “Because I use black to frame my subjects, so the Zone System is right out the door. The Zone System doesn’t apply as much to my pictures. “I said I’m not looking for that Kodak moment. I’m looking for a certain style, a certain look in my pictures that becomes inherent in my work and in what people see in my photography. “[Similarly] I don’t play with the Zone System. I’ve never been too much by the book or specific rules and regulations. I just pretty much go for the throat. What I want to shoot in a person, and I see, is I want to play up in the highlights and play down in the shadows. So, it’s a different game for me.”
People Photography with a Passion
Gorman has always photographed people—no landscapes, no products, and no objects. “I don’t shoot anything that can’t talk back to me until recently. My latest book is not about people [Homage is photographs of his collection of African tribal art shot during COVID-19 when he could not bring people into the studio], but all my books [13 in total] have pretty much been about people.
“I always shot people. I mean, I’m a people person. I’m very gregarious, and I love people and the communication that goes on and goes down between myself and my subjects and the challenge of getting inside their heads to get the right picture.
“Working in the movie business, you come up against some tough characters from time to time, and breaking through that psyche and getting them to play for your team is a nice challenge. It’s one of the reasons I never really pursued fashion, where I would have people getting paid to do what I tell them. I have to challenge the people I’m shooting to get inside their heads and get that connected portrait.
“You have to be a psychologist to do what I do for a living—no question about it. I always share my vision with the people I shoot in front of the camera. I always would show them the Polaroids or [more recently] the digital captures so that we work together as a team, and that way, they think that you’re playing for their team.
“If I’m shooting them for a movie where they need them in character, I’ll talk about the character because I always read the script for the movies I worked on. I was pretty familiar with who they were and the persona in that movie, but I don’t like to do a lot of shticky directing, so when I’m shooting, it’s more about angle your head this way, bring your chin down, turn this way.
“If I want them to lighten up a little bit, I’ll tell them a joke or something, and then generally they’ll laugh big, and that’s never the picture. The smiling picture is when the big smile is kind of coming down.
“[With] Djimon Hounsou, I had him scream,” says the photographer and winemaker [under his own label, GKG Cellars, receiving high scores from the Wine Spectator]. “That picture was personal, not a commercial job.
“I get what I want through body language, lighting, and constant banter. I talk throughout the shoot and don’t overdo it, but I’ll talk until I get them to where I want it. And then I’ll have them kind of not move, to hold still, and I’ll shoot a little bit.
“I always have music playing in the background, so the studio has no big void. It depends on the artist because the artists I’m shooting usually have their specific tastes. I like to listen to kind of freeform jazz.”
Gorman finds digital shooting more rushed than in the film days. “Absolutely, absolutely, there’s no question about it,” emphasizes Gorman. “And it’s because people know that digital doesn’t take so much time. The digital era is excellent for many people and just as destructive because once the digital scene happened, people knew they could get the pictures instantaneously.
“So that was one thing, and the other thing was it was very difficult for a lot of photographers that had made their name on their work myself, Herb [Herb Ritts], Matthew [Matthew Rolston] and a lot of people. It got to the point that producers didn’t want to spend the money that we commanded, and they’d hire Joe Schmoe, who could do a cheap knockoff of Greg Gorman, and they really wouldn’t fu**ing worry about it because they could fix it in post.
“Those photographers didn’t have the personality, didn’t have the wherewithal to be able to deal with the talent, but the studios didn’t care because they were saving money and the picture looked like the celebrity, so that was good enough, and they could easily fix whatever wasn’t good in post compared to the old days with film, where it was much more difficult.”
Gorman found the workflow faster in the digital era by not having to load Polaroids on his Hasselblad and shooting proofs. In the film era, many commercial photographers shooting in medium or large format would shoot a Polaroid to check the lighting and look of the photograph or to show it to the art director/client before exposing the same on film. “Yeah, definitely, that’s faster,” he says. “I don’t know that it’s always better. The better side is if you got a good capture, you did great because I got a killer Polaroid many times and could never match it [on film afterward]. I’d kill myself trying to match [the expression on] a great Polaroid, and I would get close, but I would never get the same one.
“That was always a frustrating part of that, but also, you’re seeing the capture on the back of the camera, and it’s small compared to a Polaroid, so also you don’t know if you’ve got as good of the detail [yes, you can expand, but it is not convenient] of what you see on the back of the camera. The Canon Explorers of Light Saga
In the 2000s, Gorman moved to digital photography.