text:
Antonin Kratochvil On His Imaging Style
You should never use camera to make your pictures.
You use yourself, your experience, to make the pictures with the camera.
Not the other way around.
— Antonin Kratochvil
You should never use camera to make your pictures.
You use yourself, your experience, to make the pictures with the camera.
Not the other way around.
— Antonin Kratochvil
We're launching a new list today based off our popular Agent List: theagentlist.com which has nearly 700 agents worldwide categorized by location and genre. This time we're going for a smaller segment of the industry: Architectural Photographers. And we're hoping anyone who shoots architecture and/or interiors will go here: http://architectphotographers.com and sign up so we don't have to put all the listings in by ourselves (any who specialize in renderings too). Brittain Stone is managing the list again and will look at each submission to verify that you do have a gallery on your website dedicated to architectural photography. He will also add the genre tags based on his assessment of the style you shoot.
Once we have a healthy list we're going to market it to the architect clients who've become a part of my website business. They've expressed interest in more resources for finding photographers and we figured we could provide that service with a nice curated list and expert advice. If you have any questions send Brittain an email (under the help section of the site). Should be beneficial for everyone.
Honest and entertaining talk given by Peter Yang at the Photoshelter event this fall. 26 minutes of your time well spent.
I noticed two photographer documentaries making the cut for the Academy Awards (shortlisted… so not quite there) and Sundance:
Shortlisted for the Academy Awards:
Chasing Ice (Directed and Produced by JEFF ORLOWSKI)
In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth's changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk.
Premiering at Sundance:
Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (Director: Sebastian Junger)
Shortly after the release of his documentary "Restrepo," the photographer Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya. His colleague Sebastian Junger traces Hetherington's work across the world's battlefields to reveal how he transcended the boundaries of image-making to become a luminary in his profession.
This is a fantastic success story of a personal project that turned into a web series for PBS and it has some hallmarks I notice all the time in successful personal projects:
Here's David to tell us what happened:
A few years ago I quit a staff photographer position that was a pretty good job but wasn't quite what I really wanted to do creatively. When I left, I decided I needed a new body of work that both represented my personal interests and my work as a photographer. I'm a big fan of creative ideas and as a side project I'd written a semi-popular blog about my own invention ideas (mostly silly rather than practical). With that in mind, I decided my new body of work would explore who other inventors are, and see what separates people like me — who get creative ideas for inventions but don't actually pursue them — from people who actually do something with those ideas.
When I started, I didn't know any inventors. So I went to local inventor support meetups (where successful inventors help aspiring inventors), talked about my project, and asked for volunteers. After I shot a few inventors this way, and it became clear the project had legs, I realized I'd need to travel so it doesn't just turn into "Inventors of the Tri-State Area". So when I was shooting jobs out of town, I'd reach out in advance to inventor groups in those areas and get their help coordinating area inventors who might be interested. Then I'd tack an extra day or two onto a trip I was already taking and shoot for this project.
For the first half dozen inventors, I was only shooting stills. But around that time I met Brian Storm of MediaStorm, and he said "You really should be shooting video of these people" and it was like a lightbulb went off. I hadn't yet incorporated video into my repertoire, and had only imagined the project being a book, but video was such an obvious way to go. So I added that component with the idea that the video would be great for promoting the project, and for including in an iPad version of the book. Plus, it would be a great way for me to learn to shoot and edit video.
As the project grew, I made connections in the inventing community, and was introduced to more prominent inventors, and began traveling just for these shoots. And once I had a few recognizable names in the project, it became easier to cold call other notable inventors and persuade them to participate. Now that it's a serious body of work, I've had incredible cooperation from places I wouldn't have dreamed about approaching earlier. Just a couple weeks ago I photographed a military inventor on a Navy battleship, which is the most complicated location I've arranged for a self-produced shoot, and I couldn't have pulled that off a few years ago.
I've done forty-something of these shoots so far. They range from people who just tinker in their garage all the way up to Nobel Prize and National Medal of Technology winners. Their inventions include the Post-it Note, the cell phone, the first video game system, first digital camera, the computer mouse, the Segway, and more humble inventions like a better sewing needle, wheelchair brake, an ice fishing vehicle, etc.
As I've worked on the project, I occasionally released a few of the videos on Vimeo. I posted them on both my photography blog and the "ideas" blog, which reaches a much different audience. I got great feedback, but a few of the videos really took off. Two of them each reached six-figure views within 24 hours, and were featured on prominent websites. I've talked about the project on various blogs, on public radio, and Wired ran this interview with me.
Someone at PBS Digital Studios found my videos on Vimeo while researching new talent and felt it would be a good fit for their network. They approached me about turning it into a series for their YouTube channel. After a bit of surprisingly pleasant negotiation, we reached a deal to produce 20 episodes to be released every other Tuesday. Some of those episodes will be existing videos I'd previously put online, but the majority will be new, culled from inventors I've already shot but not released, and some I've not yet shot.
This is a good example of a nice aspect of this particular project: while self-producing a project of this scope has been expensive, it has also managed to generate at least a little money along the way. Since a lot of my subjects are occasionally written about editorially, I've licensed photos and footage from the project to The History Channel, Time Magazine, science magazines, museums, and text books.
I think the very best thing about this project, though, is that I get to meet and talk to all these incredible people (many of whom are older and won't be around for much longer). Being able to sit down and talk with Steve Sasson, inventor of the digital camera, and geek out over the tools of my trade, was a great moment. I talked to Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway but also the portable insulin pump and so much more, about the roles of art versus science in education (his father was comic book illustrator Jack Kamen). And I asked chemical engineer Esther Takeuchi, who has more patents than any other woman, why she has no female students in her University classes, and we had a great conversation about that. Even the unknown and struggling inventors are smart people with incredible stories to tell.
See more of Davids work here: http://www.davidfriedmanphoto.com
This four-part documentary series from executive producers Michael Mann and David Frankham follows combat photographers Eros Hoagland in Juarez and Rio de Janeiro, Veronique de Viguerie in South Sudan, and Michael Christopher Brown in Libya.
Read more here: http://www.fastcocreate.com
I caught up with Ben Lowy in August. He's a busy man, juggling family and personal projects with a super-charged career. In the last year alone, he was in Libya, on Jon Stewart, won the photojournalist of the year award from the ICP, and had his book, "Iraq Perspectives" published by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. This is Part 2 of my interview, part 1 is (here).
Jonathan Blaustein: We met in 2009, a little bit before you were king of the world. You were probably prince, but not yet king.
Ben Lowy: Whatever. I'm not king of the world.
JB: All right, I'm exaggerating a little. You get the point. You don't have to be humble, you're being interviewed.
JB:You said to me, "I'm about to have my first kid, and I need to transition my career. I'm done with the war stuff because I'm going to have a family, and I need to figure out a way to be based more in New York."
BL: As with any type of specialized job, where people excel to be part of a niche, a lot of it is ego. I couldn't, and I still can't put my ego aside. I worked really hard to be this war photographer. That started when I was 23, where my first assignment was the Iraq War. I was really ambitious.
JB: Did I read that you took Saul Schwarz's place on your first job? Is that right? As a 23 year old kid?
BL: Yeah. There are no hard feelings between us about that. But I couldn't give it up. Even now, when I see my friends who are in Syria, I feel a twinge. Not just because I want to cover that story. It's what your contemporaries are doing. There's a certain keeping up with the Joneses of every industry. That's the only way you keep going, is to have somewhat of an ego.
Photography, regardless if it's photojournalism, or some sort of esoteric contemporary art, you're putting a bit of your soul in it. That soul is what makes you take a picture at that instant. It's what makes you compose, to wait for things to happen. For serendipity.
Every photograph is a product of the photographer's experiences in their entire life. It's everything that comes together that makes them want to take that picture at that instant. Otherwise, we would all be robots.
When I had kids, I fought the idea that I have to give this up. Am I being an irresponsible parent to go back and do this? And I think what was really hard, especially after my second son, Kaleb, was my wife went into labor an hour after Tim Hetherington's memorial. And Kaleb was born on May 25th, which was the day Robert Capa died.
Two months later, Tripoli was falling, and I wanted to go back. My wife had a big problem with me doing that. So I promised her, look at Joachim Ladefoged's book on Albanians. It's an amazing book, and there are no violent situations in there. So I can go back and cover Libya without getting into any violence. And she was like, "Sure."
And then I went, and me, Ron Haviv, and Yuri Korzyev shared a car together. Of course, those dudes are just looking for violence. I ended up grabbing this picture of this guy getting his head blown off like 5 feet in front of me. Literally, he got his head blown off in front of me.
It was in a stairwell of an apartment building. I watched as the blood started cascading down the stairs. I took several pictures of it. And then, I was standing next to Ron, and we were like, "We need to get the fuck out of here," because the rebels had just left. As we were running out of the building, someone chucked a grenade over our head. Ron has a video of this, as we were running down the stairs.
I sat on those pictures for weeks. And I didn't move them. The minute I moved them, my wife was going to know. Actually that's what happened. Within an hour of transferring them, my wife had seen them on the Getty site, and she was furious.
She said, "It's basically like you cheated on me."
JB: Wow. You cheated on her with War.
BL: Yeah. She was almost going to leave me. When I left Libya last year, I went to Afghanistan for an assignment, and I was there for about 6 weeks. My American phone bill must have been $5000, because I was constantly on the phone with my wife, begging her not to leave me.
One of the things that I had to recognize, which was really hard, was that I'm selfish. I had to man up and acknowledge that, for this job to work. Even yesterday, when I walk out of the door to come here, my son was crying. Standing by the door, crying. And I just took my camera bag, and I left.
I'm sure that happens to everyone with children, but to do this job, to be on the road, and then to risk your life when you have a child waiting for you is selfish. Is it any different than being a soldier or a police officer? No one has to do these jobs. We choose to do them because we feel like we bring something to the table.
A soldier protects his country, a police officer protects his community, and as a journalist, I'm trying to educate my community. We all make these sacrifices of our home, our friendships, or our family. There has to be an awareness that to do this, I was being a little selfish. Or a lot selfish. To put myself in danger, to say, "I might die and my kids might grow up without a parent because I want to take these pictures."
Why do we as photographers always go straight to the worst parts? The first pictures any student takes are of homeless dudes. It's easy, it's grimy. We're taught that it's the epitome of photography, the off-center, because the normal photo of Billy on Main Street holding a balloon is not enough. He has to be holding a grenade like Diane Arbus.
JB: It's the drama. It's innate human nature, to look at or hear or read something that takes you out of your head. The drama of someone's tragedy is what drives people to want to look at the pictures that you make.
I was looking at your most recent work on your website, "The Fall of Tripoli." First of all, the work is so present. It seems like you're growing, which I'm sure was your goal. I could almost smell the pictures. There were a lot of photographs of char, and burning. They bring you into the moment, and I was almost having phantom smells.
That's interesting to me, because photography is clearly a visual medium. Beyond the smells, even sounds were popping in my head, like wailing sirens.
What sensory impressions do you have from your time there? Is it sounds, or smells, or what?
BL: Smell is amazing. Cordite, and explosions, and burning have really unique smells that you don't smell in the West. The smell of death is really intense. It's one of those things where if you smell it, even if you're uninitiated, you will know that something is dead. The smell is that strong, that pungent, and biologically, you will recognize it.
When you're on the front lines, you can smell burning gunpowder, the dust in the wind. There is something very visceral about that.
Sound is very difficult. We are ruined by Jerry Bruckheimer movies. We are ruined by Hollywood. When you see an explosion in a movie, you hear it. But in real life, you see it way before you hear it. The speed of light and the speed of sound are two different things. It's very disconcerting. Not how we expect it to work out.
The closest thing is like a David Mamet movie. There's no soundtrack. Have you seen "Haywire?" It's by…
JB: Stephen Soderbergh? No, I haven't seen it.
BL: If you look at "Haywire," all the fight scenes have no soundtrack. And the gunfire was real. It was real sounds.
JB: Is that the one that featured the female MMA star?
BL: Yeah. Gunfire doesn't sound like what it does in the movies. Silencers don't work like you think they do. Explosions are…you only learn this stuff from being in the field. I guess it's weird that I know that.
There's no way to accurately portray what it's like being there. We're trying to do it in the most efficient way possible. But there's no way to record smell. Yet. And I'm not sure that would really jive with the crowd who eats their breakfast and watches the news in the morning.
JB: Do you think it's interesting that I thought your pictures were implying it?
BL: I do. But I have to say that's not something that I was consciously trying to do.
JB: Your new work is some of your best work. You know, my training is in Art. That's the way I make my work, how I express myself. And with these images, the sense of presence, of someone actually being there, combined with some formal compositions, there was a bit of transformation.
I look at a lot of pictures, as you can imagine, and looking at that particular batch, it wasn't so much the thrill of the chase…
BL: I'm just maturing as a photographer. Earlier in my career, I was making images because I thought I had to make them. Or because this was what an image was supposed to be like. Now I'm making images purely based upon my experiences. This is something visceral to me, so I'm photographing it.
That's where you're getting more information, because I'm reacting to those sounds and those smells, and now, my eye has matured enough where I'm able to construct an image that implies all these things.
JB: Yeah.
BL: I'm there more in these images than in the past.
JB: That's what I'm getting out of it. How do you gauge your improvement as a photographer?
BL: To be honest, I feel like I hit this plateau in the last few years. There was a point in 2007-8 where I was constantly working. I had a client at the time who really championed me, kept me busy. Because I was working so much, it was like I was practicing so much. I was able to really grow.
In the last two years, because of the downturn in the economy, it's been very hard, and there hasn't been a lot of work. And then, having kids, I haven't been doing anything on spec, because I'm not allowed to raid the diaper fund. It's been a little hard to grow my eye.
That being said, I'm definitely seeing the world more in a way that I want to see it, rather than the way I thought I should see it. I think when we all start, we look at the photographers that we enjoy, and we try to construct images based on those archetypes.
How many students have recreated that eyes cut off on the bottom of the frame picture that we've seen 1000 times? Or the foreground crazy out of focus head, and then something in the background, for easy layering? These are tropes of compositional photography that we use as crutches, and once you get through them, and you understand the language of photography, as you grow, you move past those. And you start creating your own tropes.
JB: OK. In the beginning of the interview, you mentioned that with your busy life, you don't have time to do go see any shows or anything. Outside of looking at your colleagues' photography, what do you look to for inspiration? How do you feed your brain?
BL: That's a problem. There hasn't been a lot of that of late. I read a lot.
JB: Anything interesting lately?
BL: I'm just finishing up my last Haruki Murakami book.
JB: The master.
BL: I wish I could photograph like that. I wish I could take his literary vision and photograph it.
JB: You and everybody else, dude.
I caught up with Ben Lowy in August. He's a busy man, juggling family and personal projects with a super-charged career. In the last year alone, he was in Libya, on Jon Stewart, won the photojournalist of the year award from the ICP, and had his book, "Iraq Perspectives" published by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.
Jonathan Blaustein: Forgive me if I'm a bit slow today, but we're about to have a kid, so my mind is frazzled.
Ben Lowy: I absolutely love being a Dad. I love having two kids. They're both in the tantrum stage right now.
JB: Because you bunched them up, right?
BL: Yeah, the oldest one's about to turn three. And the youngest one is about 15 months.
JB: Oh my goodness.
BL: Yeah, they're right together there. I love it. The thing is, I have no social life. By the time we put them to bed, at 7:30 or 8pm, we don't want to go out or do anything. We'd have to do it separately anyway.
Whatever free time we have is either with the kids, or working on the evaporating work environment of photography. You're holding on by this much. There's no time to go to museums, or go to a movie. There's nothing coming in to inspire you.
JB: That was one of my questions for later on, so we can touch back in on that. It might be really interesting to talk about it in depth, because I'm a big believer that input is really necessary to make us grow.
Let's start with the obvious. You're in Denver right now. What are you working on?
BL: I am shooting a UFC fight. A cage fight.
JB: When you said Denver, I assumed you were there for the aftermath of the latest psychopathic episode.
BL: I think that was covered right away. And the follow up is just the memorial. I think the American news cycle has moved away from things like that. There's so much content on the wire services, and people who are out there. It's sort of like the death of spot news.
JB: So they hire Ben Lowy for the action, not the reaction.
BL: I've been here twice, and neither time was for Aurora. I was here last week to shoot Broncos practice for Peyton Manning.
JB: You got to hang out with Peyton?
BL: No, no. I was working for ESPN, and the Broncos blew off ESPN. I got 20 minutes on the training field. That's how high brow they think they are.
JB: You know why? Because John Elway is John Elway. He doesn't even need ESPN.
BL: (Pause) C'est la vie.
JB: That was a big pause. Clearly, my amateur response was not quite it. There are more details there, and you're not saying them.
BL: I wish there was more to it. You know, I've been shooting cage fighting on and off for the last 5 years.
JB: I didn't know that. Is that a personal project for you?
BL: Yeah. I had really bad PTSD after a bomb in Iraq in 2007. And I had no one to talk to about it. My wife was going through her own battles with depression at the time, and was hospitalized. I don't know if you saw the project she had done on it.
JB: No.
BL: She was in the hospital, and I really didn't have anyone to talk to. I was starting to feel really guilty about surviving. And then also taking care of my wife. I started, at night, going around the city of New York picking fights. Because I wanted to get beaten up because I felt so guilty.
JB: I wanted to talk to you about how you protect and deal with your psyche. Before I could ask, you started talking about it in ways that are pretty extreme.
BL: I'm an open book. I've got nothing to hide. I was pretty fucked up by things that happened in 2007. And I felt really guilty about surviving.
JB: A bomb attack?
BL: A bomb attack. When I came back, I had no way to process it. I tried to work through it, but it just kept getting worse. I used to be a man of infinite patience, and found myself losing it. Little mundane things. Like if I dropped a glass while washing dishes, it would send me on a rant, and I'd end up punching the walls of my apartment. I was so angry.
A lot of it was feeling guilty for surviving, and feeling angry for being out of control. One of the leftover effects, after going through therapy, is that I can't drink or do drugs. I just can't do it. And it's not because of a moral choice.
This bombing happened. This series of IED's, that destroyed five of the ten car convoy. The last car I got in, I was sitting behind the driver, and was watching how he was driving. Turning the steering wheel here and there. He could have driven over any IED. I had no control over whether I lived or died. My life was in that guy's hands.
JB: So we're talking about a convoy of multiple humvees, five of which exploded, and everyone died, and you survived.
BL: A lot of people died, and were injured. Yeah.
JB: And you were there by choice.
BL: Yeah. Yeah. I had just gotten out of a vehicle that I didn't want to be in. I wanted to be a bit further up to the front, where I thought I'd be able to make better pictures. The vehicle I'd just gotten out of was actually destroyed. Five minutes after I'd gotten out.
JB: For your photography, your method of expression, you're putting yourself in situations that 99% of our readership are not going to understand. Myself included. But I don't necessarily want to ask you why you do that, because that stuff has been covered. Do you ever get tired of trying to explain yourself?
BL: (Pause) You know, right now, I'm staying in a hotel. I'll sit at breakfast with a bunch of other businesspeople. We'll all be schmoozing, and I'll tell them what I do. They'll say, "You were in Iraq?" and I'm like, "Yeah," and they'll say, "What was that like?"
JB: That's what people are going to say.
BL: That question is annoying after a while, but at the same time, how can you blame someone for asking that? You want people to be genuinely interested. You want them to look at your pictures and read the stories.
The one thing I would never ask a soldier is what it's like to kill someone. That's a very private thing. Everyone asks me what it's like to photograph dead babies, or to see people being killed. It's a very hard question to answer, because we're all sensitive and empathetic in our own way to different things.
I always knew I was going to be a war photographer, when I first got into photography. I picked up a copy of "Inferno" by Nachtwey, and I thought, this is what I'm doing. I don't know what it is inside me that let's me operate. I feel a certain contentedness in doing this work.
Not all combat photographers or photojournalists are close friends. Definitely there's animosity and rancor and jealousy and envy between a lot of us. It's a very competitive field. But when you're in the field, and you're under fire… I don't know if you read Sebastian Junger's book on War?
JB: No.
BL: He talked about the brotherhood of soldiers. Regardless of where you're from, when you're under fire, there's an intense brotherhood. Definitely with photographers, when you're in the field, and you're working, there is an intense comradeship. Is that a word?
JB: Dude, it's the 21st Century. You can make a word just by saying it. Ready? Blart. To blart means…
BL: We're blarting right now.
JB: Right.
BL: But there's an intense comradeship. You're part of this organic group, covering something very dangerous.
JB: To be honest, I am less interested in asking you why you do it, and more interested in the effect upon you, which is where you started.
BL: I was picking fights, and ended up joining a fight club. Then a friend of mine introduced me to cage fighting. I started fighting in it myself, but I'm not much of an athlete, and was getting my ass kicked. Which is what I wanted.
Then, I just started photographing it, and it's been a catharsis for me. Not really the professional level, where it's more of a sport. But the amateur level, where it's more of anger. More of an explosive pride and frustration that builds inside the fighters' hearts. Being around that helped me tremendously.
JB: It sounds like it puts together two different incredibly powerful aspects of your life. One is the anger and aggression that you're talking about feeling, and the other is raw, primal nature of what they're doing, which is gotta be what's driving you to make a living the way you are.
You're a very bright guy. You know there are a lot of things you could do. It's not just that you're capable of doing what you are, but it must be answering some sort of compulsion, no? There are a lot of things you could do, and yet you keep going back.
BL: I know. Much to my wife's annoyance.
Part 2 tomorrow
Kevin Bacon and Bob Gruen talk music photography, shoot backs, cameras, John Lennon and more on Episode 4 of Capture.
A fresh and informative look at the art of photography and the stories behind the images. In each episode, renowned celebrity lensman Mark Seliger invites a fellow photographer and celebrity photography-buff into his NYC studio to share the story behind their images and discuss their common passion.
Jake Chessum is a photographer you will find near the top of all photo editor lists and that's why I'm so excited he will be joining me Fri, Oct 26, 2012 from 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM for a panel discussion on "Making a Career in Editorial Photography" at the Photo Plus Expo in NYC. I had the opportunity recently to sit down with him at his studio and discuss his career.
APE: Let's start at the beginning. When did you first get interested in photography?
Jake Chessum: I was 17 years old and I went to see an exhibition by the British photographer John French. I clearly remember going home and saying to my mum, "I want to a photographer." I had been taking my own pictures for about a year before that, but this was the first time I clearly remember deciding on a career.
But before that, my dad worked for this company that would hire photographers and he used to work with this guy, Chris Morris. This guy always seemed glamorous. He had a sports car and he lived in Holland Park, which is super fancy West London.
Because of this my dad had access to photography. He'd always had an old Pentax 35mm camera when we went on family holidays, and he would shoot black and white and come home with enlarged 16 by 20 contact sheets and massive fiber based prints of all our holiday snaps and our personal photos. This was from when I was about 6 or 7 years old onwards.
APE: You're kidding. He would make enlarged contact sheets? Why would he do that?
Jake: He enjoyed taking pictures, and because he could. He worked for Wates, which was a home building company and they had a photography budget to shoot an internal magazine, and pictures of the new developments.
APE: So, he'd take in the vacation film as well?
Jake: They were really good photographs. And it was mostly black and white. That's what probably sparked it. I liked to see prints and see photography.
At the time I was at an all boys private school in Croydon where art wasn't considered a career path, but when I was 16 I moved to another school where art education was taken more seriously. There were a couple of art teachers there who were really enthusiastic and really encouraging and made it seem like it was a real proposition to make a career out of it. They'd been to art school in Central London.
APE: So, you decided to go to art school in London?
Jake: There was an art school in our town but it was rubbish so we all realized that we didn't want to go there, so had to put a terrible portfolio in or concoct an excuse why you had to go to one of the London art schools.
APE: How does that work? I don't understand. Do you automatically get to go to school?
Jake: No your portfolio had to be accepted.
APE: So you would give the local school a crap portfolio?
Jake: That is what the smart people did but I went by the rules. I put in a good portfolio and got in but then I wrote to the local council and explained that they didn't have a good textile department and I wanted to be a textile designer and this school was not going to give me the opportunities. Miraculously they believed me, as it was a lie. So I was able to attend The Central School of Art and Design (now Central St. Martins) for my Foundation Course.
APE: Did you know that you had a talent for photography? Was it evident then?
Jake: I guess. A decent part of my portfolio was photography. I did this project where I went day and night taking photographs on Chelsea Bridge, and I showed this work to my tutor and she told me, it's very difficult to define what makes a good photograph, but you know what it is, you can do it. And I thought wow, really? [laughs]
That was '86 and I remember I started buying The Face and Vogue when I was 16, because I was really into magazine design. So, when it came to choosing a degree, I'd looked at photography courses, but they were all kind of ridiculous, because to make it a valid educational qualification, they had to give it this kind of bogus scientific basis or some kind of quantifiable, gradable quality.
It was all based on technique and technical stuff, and I knew I wasn't particularly interested in that side of it. I was more interested in the images, making the images. I didn't really care to be graded on black-and-white printing or that aspect of it. So, I thought the next best thing was the graphic design course at St. Martin's which had a photography unit, so that's what I went for.
APE: So, you went into graphic design.
Jake: Yes, I did a graphic design degree kind of knowing that I wanted to do photography. But the great thing about St. Martin's at that time was it was kind of a free-for-all, do you know what I mean? After the first year I was really unhappy because I was following the course, trying to do the projects and failing miserably. But by the second year a couple of friends and I worked out that if we just went down to the basement darkroom and printed, no one would bother us.
APE: [laughs]
Jake: I mean, it was very vague. They would set a project, and you would either do it or not, and I decided not to [laughs].
APE: But, if you didn't do the project didn't you fail?
Jake: You didn't really get into trouble. I don't know how I didn't get into trouble, really. But everything was judged on the end of year show, and I always had a lot of work to show. At my second year show I put up photographs and some type designs. One of my fellow students, Graham Wood (now of Tomato) told me he thought I should ditch the typography and stick to photography. Good advice.
But it was definitely laissez-faire. And I remember people thought that I didn't do any work all year, but it was because they never saw me because I was in the darkroom all year. I was just standing in the darkroom after taking pictures of whatever on the street, or portraits. I cast a few people in the school that I'd seen around just to try and just get together a portfolio. I also did tests with models as St. Martin's was in Covent Garden where all the model agencies were.
APE: So school gave you an opportunity to just take pictures?
Jake: It was an amazing time. Now I'll get calls from people once in awhile saying "What should I do, Should I stay in college or should I get a job?" It's difficult to advise them to do what I did, because college was free then. I left college in London with a debt of 800 pounds. It's nothing. So for me…
APE: And three years of taking pictures…
Jake: Yeah, three years of freedom and it was free. It was paid for by the government.
APE: Amazing. That still happens?
Jake: No, now I think you have to pay 9,000 pounds a year. But even that's nothing compared to here in America.
APE: Do they produce a lot of photographers, is your country just swarming with photographers?
Jake: No, no, and again, it was so long ago, this is 1990 and there were a lot of magazines, like the Face, Arena, ID and Blitz. They had no budget and they attracted up and coming people who were willing to work for pictures because they gave you creative freedom.
APE: Right.
Jake: It was a great era. There we so many photographers starting out at that time who are still really successful: Craig McDean, Richard Burbridge, Glen Luchford, David Sims, Juergen Teller, the late Corrine Day. It was an amazing era to be a young photographer shooting in London. It really was a very creative period.
APE: Tell me about your first job?
Jake: I put together a degree show in June of 1990 but I had worked for a few people before that because St. Martin's was in the center of London and there were a lot of people who had studied there and had good jobs so they would come back and throw a couple of bones to the kids at school.
So I did a few shoots for short-lived magazines. Actually, the day the degree show opened, Phil Bicker gave me my first "real" job for The Face, which was to take a train to Macclesfield, which is a kind of grim, northern town and take a picture of a young rapper. I had to get up there as early as possible, shoot the picture and come back to London for the opening of the degree show. I went on my own with a borrowed Pentax 6×7, a 90mm lens, a 135mm lens, a homemade reflector and a few rolls of tri-x.
And The Face actually wrote a piece about me. They did a double-page spread about six graduates from London art schools and they featured me. Which at the time I was completely blase about. Which is funny because now I'd be super-psyched
APE: So, that was your first job. You graduated from school, got a job and got written up.
Jake: And then I'd go and see people with my portfolio, and I got a few calls from that for jobs. And basically, for the first two years I was green as hell. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know how to run a business, we never had any lessons on running a business, invoicing, nothing.
APE: You just spent all your time in the darkroom.
Jake: Yes, so suddenly you're like, shit, what do I do? But the amazing thing was, suddenly someone's saying, oh, can you do this job, it's 400 pounds a day. That's still decent money, do you know what I mean?
APE: That was a ton of money for you at the time.
Jake: Then I scored my first ad job off the back of my show, which is bizarre. I got a job for Neutrogena shooting four ads.
APE: Why would they pick somebody who just graduated?
Jake: God bless them, I've got no idea. I mean, I think they wanted to use a young photographer. They'd got in a load of books and they got me to do it, and paid me 1500 pounds a day.
APE: Was your work that good back then? If you looked at it now, would you think, OK, there's some good stuff in there?
Jake: Yes, there are some good pictures. But I didn't know what I was doing…
APE: As far as running a business…
Jake: Yes, exactly. And running a set, dealing with hair and make up artists, stylists, clients…
APE: You just knew the picture part.
Jake: I'd done a bunch of nudes and portraits of friends, and they were all natural light. But, Jesus. [laughs] I wouldn't have hired me. I was 23 and green as hell, but I was very enthusiastic.
APE: That was big money.
Jake: Yes, it was 1500 pounds a day for four days at a time when I'd never earned anything. But the funny thing was, they kept saying, we want to do really natural girls, we don't want these supermodels. So, we did the casting and we cast a 16 year old Kate Moss.
APE: [laughs] No way. That was your first ad job? Kate Moss. Ok, I think there's some stars aligned for you.
Jake: Yes, maybe.
APE: Something's going on.
Jake: She was so amazing, she was so charismatic and beautiful. And I remember the casting, because I'd met her like, three or four times. She lived in Croydon where I lived, so I'd bump into her on the train once in a while, although I'm absolutely certain she has no recollection of this. I remember talking to her on the tube platform at Victoria Station one day, I bumped into her and she said, "I'm sick of this, I'm going to give up, I'm getting nowhere," which is deeply ironic.
So, at the casting, she came in and saw me and said hello and came over and kissed me on the cheek. And the art director's like, "Who's that girl, how do you know that girl? She's amazing, how do you know her?" She was obviously something pretty amazing.
So I did that and I was a living at home so I had no rent to pay and I think in my first year I made 25,000 quid, so for the first year out of college, that's not bad 20 years ago.
APE: What's that in US dollars?
Jake: $40,000.00
Another big break was in December of 1990. I got a call from Dylan Jones who was the editor of Arena. He said, "Do you want to shoot Gary Oldman?" I was like "yeah" until I found out it was at a restaurant and it was lunch with Gary Oldman. He would be sitting there eating his lunch being interviewed.
I said, "Oh, all right, yeah, yeah." It's tough. At a restaurant. I didn't know how to use light or anything. I had no system. So I turned up at this job to meet Gary at the restaurant.
I was first there, and when he walked in I introduced myself: "Hey Gary, I'm Jake. I'm here to take your picture." He said, "What do you mean? They didn't tell me there was a photographer. I was like, "Oh, OK." I said, "OK, I totally understand. Can I just tell you something? I just left college three months ago. This is one of my first jobs, and I know that they told me they want to put you on the cover, but they don't have a cover shoot. Will you do a cover shoot with me?" He said, "Yeah, call me next week. Come to my flat and we'll do it. I'll give you half an hour."
APE: You talked him into it?
Jake: Yeah. I met him in Chelsea. It was a shitty day. I took my friend, not an assistant and we put a piece of white cardboard up on a children's playground in Chelsea. No groomer, no stylist, shot a head shot of Gary Oldman, and they put it on the cover. [laughs]
APE: Amazing.
Jake: That was a huge deal for me, first of all that I talked him into it, second that he was an actor who I thought was fantastic. I loved "Sid and Nancy" and "Prick Up Your Ears" and it was the cover of Arena. The main magazines I wanted to work for at the time were Face and Arena.
APE: That's great. You never assisted anyone?
Jake: I did one day with Kevin Davies. He said to me, "Why do you want to do this? You are already shooting." I remember, I assisted him on a test and I had to go to do a job in the afternoon so I had to leave to shoot Gabriel Byrne [laughs]. But he was cool about it.
APE: One day of assisting your entire career?
Jake: Yeah, that was it. I went to see another photographer who was well known and I remember, I said, can I assist you? He said, "Fuck off, you're a rival now." Those are his exact words to me.
APE: [laughs]
Jake: I'd done one job so I didn't consider myself a rival. I thought he was amazing.
APE: You've probably met a lot of assistants and young aspiring photographers who go to school here. It's completely different.
Jake: I dread to think what it's like now to try and start. It must be so hard.
APE: Do you feel like back then the industry was tighter?
Jake: London was kind of small. I think there were a group of magazines that were looking at younger photographers and I think the fact that there weren't that many photo studios and everybody used to shoot at Click Studios meant there was a sort of camaraderie.
I remember hanging out in the office at Click and Glen Luchford was there and he said, "I sent in one print." and I was like "What do you mean one print?" I would send in the whole shoot. I had no idea that you should send in an edit. I was completely clueless. I thought, "What are you talking about? That's ridiculous. How arrogant to suppose that you know more than the art director". But of course he was right.
APE: So you just picked up little pieces here and there. How to run your business and how to do an edit?
Jake: Yeah, it was a very gradual process. I think in those first few years I was very fortunate that I got to shoot a lot of people who were about to become very famous. Quentin Tarantino, Beck, kd lang, Tricky, for example. So I quite quickly had a celebrity book going. Being trusted to shoot big names, and getting publicist approval is a huge hurdle to jump for any new photographer. But there was also a time where I would shoot anything that was offered to me. I was shooting some terrible pictures, and taking terrible commissions. Because first of all, I didn't know how to say no. I didn't have a cell phone and there was no email. If they called you and you picked up the phone…
APE: You had to have an excuse if you didn't want to shoot.
Jake: Yeah, it was really hard to say no, plus the money was good. I was happy to be asked to do stuff. After a couple of years, I had a conversation with somebody at Arena. I think it was one of the fashion editors I worked with on a job. She's said, "Why are you doing all these shit jobs, because you're watering down what you're good at."
Then I got to know Grant Scott, who was a great mentor to me, and the Art Director at British Elle. I went into see him after I'd been working maybe two years. He said, "You're at the point now you've got to decide. Do you want to be a working photographer or a good photographer? A working photographer does what they're offered, a good photographer picks and chooses."
That was a real big moment for me, because I was only 25.
APE: Then you start turning down jobs?
Jake: Literally that week, I had accepted a job shooting some corny feature for a Women's magazine, about women who have affairs with their personal trainers or something. The guy called me to talk about the shoot and I said, "Look, I can't do that job for you." I had to make a decision and not do this shit anymore, and stick to it. So I said no to that. It was the end of 1992. The economy went to shit and literally I didn't work for six months. [laughs]
APE: Oh my God. Did you freak out?
Jake: Yeah, I was really freaked out.
APE: You were thinking that was horrible advice.
Jake: No, I thought it was good advice but I was still freaking out.
APE: You didn't know if you could make a career turning down bad jobs.
Jake: Yeah, yeah.
APE: So what happened? Six months, hardly any work?
Jake: I was making like three, four hundred a month.
APE: Still living at home?
Jake: Yeah, I was fortunate to be still living at home, thank God. Gradually it started to pick up again and I found new routes into different clients, being a bit more picky.
Then Lee Swillingham became art director at The Face and he started to call me fairly regularly to shoot portraits.
In late 93 he called and said, "Do you want to go to the worst area of Los Angeles to shoot Ice Cube?" "Yes." [laughs] I had been to America twice on holiday. Suddenly I was flying to LA to shoot Ice Cube. I went with the writer to South Central and we had a 20-minute shoot with Ice Cube on the street.
APE: How was it?
Jake: It was incredible. I'd never been to L.A. and we sat with him and he kind of started doing the hip-hop gangster poses. And I said, oh no, I don't really want to do that, can we do something a bit more…And he went, "you mean, a bit more reflective." I was like, yes, exactly. So, he sat on the curb and he just hung out.
APE: And you made great pictures.
Jake: Yes, they were good pictures, and then about three or four months later they asked me to shoot The Beastie Boys again in L.A., so I went out with a writer and we went to Mike D's house. And actually, that's one of the pictures [pointing to a picture on the studio wall] and that's the print that The Face ran. I think in that period I shot for The Face literally every month for about three years.
APE: You already have your style here. It's in that picture.
Jake: I guess it's a kind of very loose, not overly directed. You kind of work with them just to let their personality do the talking. And they were really funny guys. They were into it, just pissing around for an hour or two.
APE: So, you just kind of fell into that style?
Jake: I think, yes.
APE: It just happened, there was nothing planned about it?
Jake: In the beginning I would look at a book of photographs I liked the night before a shoot, going, what am I going to do, what am I going to do? But that didn't really work on the day, as all my preconceived ideas went out the window. So I just think, not consciously, that I would go in and suss out the location, then meet and chat to who I was shooting and see where it went. But I talk too much and I'd start talking and kind of see what happens; try and get into a situation where something might happen.
APE: You talk too much, that's part of your style.
Jake: That's funny you should say that, because my wife just said, oh, you're doing the interview today, don't ramble.
APE: [laughs]
Jake: You know, I just talk and talk and talk.
APE: Every single shoot?
Jake: Yes, if they respond. [laughs]
APE: What happens if they don't?
Jake: It's harder. I mean, you can work in silence, but it's easier if they respond or start talking back. But I remember reading a David Bailey quote where he said he maintained a constant stream of encouragement and I think I do try to do that.
APE: I've never been on set with you, but now your pictures make a lot more sense now that you say that. Is that nervous energy, the talking?
Jake: When I do a shoot, the hour before the shoot is the worst hour of my life. I don't want to be there. I want to go home. I'll do anything to be on the other side of it. So I think it's partly nervous energy.
Then suddenly you're confronted with for example Robert De Niro. He's walking into the room and you?ve got to do something to get the shot. I've shot him a couple of times. It's intimidating.
APE: He's not a talkative guy?
Jake: He's not a very talkative guy.
APE: You're just talking to him the whole time?
Jake: Talking at him. I'm trying to get something out of him. But what I've realized with he doesn't want to hear how great of an actor he is. He knows how fucking good of an actor he is like all these guys. You don't want to go in there — although it's difficult sometimes if you're a fan — and say, "Oh my god. I love you." But I think the bigger the star, the smaller the talk. Talk about the weather, or what movie you saw last night, or what you're doing for the holidays.
APE: You've done this for a long time but when you started, did you have some things in your head that you knew you were going to talk about? Or do you just read the newspaper and you know what's going on?
Jake: Sometimes it's just current affairs. If they talked to the editor or stylist beforehand, you just gauge what they were talking about and what their level of interest is, how talkative they are. Often I ask the PR, "What's a good thing to talk about? What does he not want to talk about?"
I don't overly research the people I'm shooting, but obviously I'll read and find out something.
It's funny. Since I've had kids, I talk endlessly about them. I'm boring. I'm the fucking worst dad bore. I love talking about other people's kids because it's a human thing. It's not about work.
APE: So if they have kids, you're talking about kids for hours?
Jake: And then if they want to talk about their kids, I love to hear about what their kids do and we can compare notes.
I say, "What have you got?" And they say, "I've got two girls."
"How old are they?"
"13 and 17."
I'm like, "Oh my god. I've got two girls. They're seven and ten." And they're like, "Oh geez. You're in trouble."
If they're willing to be personal, great. If they're not…
APE: Does that make better pictures or does it matter?
Jake: I don't think it really matters. I think it makes the session easier. I shot a big job last week for Sony, and I was editing with the client and he said to me that he noticed as the shoot went on, I just wear them down. You just keep going and talking until they drop and give in, which I had never analyzed as a reality.
APE: That always happens? Do you get your best pictures after you've worn them down? They don't happen at the beginning of the shoot? Is that pretty common with you?
Jake: Sometimes at the beginning of the shoot and sometimes it's five minutes from the end of the shoot. I haven't really looked at the flow. But sometimes the shoot is only minutes long, so there's not much time.
APE: That was just something that occurred to you recently?
Jake: It occurred to me that it was a possibility, but I hadn't really thought about it until this guy said it last week. Maybe it's true. I don't know.
APE: We've jumped ahead to your style which I really like. I want to talk more about it, but how do you get from London to here?
Jake: I started coming out here to work and then I had two friends who lived in the West Village. They're from England. They'd gone out to get jobs in New York and so I started coming out and staying with them to do appointments, to try and get work here with varying degrees of success because it was really hard as a foreigner. You come into this new market and you're all excited. "I'm going to get loads of work." And of course you go back to London and they forget about you immediately. This was in 1995. It was pre-Internet and pre-email.
I think the big break was when I had been coming and going for a year or two and then Matt Berman and John Kennedy Jr. started "George" magazine. Matt Berman was his creative director. He hired Bridget Cox, who was his photo director and then Matt and Bridget picked up every English magazine. They went through The Face, ID and Arena with a fine toothed comb and picked the photographers from England that they wanted to work with.
APE: Why would they pick only photographers in England?
Jake: I don't know. It was just a thing. I think they thought it would maybe bring in a sensibility and those magazines were at their peak. They used American photographers as well. Of course there are really good photographers here, but they decided to get a little school of London based photographers they'd fly out to shoot.
APE: They'd fly you into the States?
Jake: It was incredible. Before the magazine launched, Matt called me up and said, "Do you want to come out and shoot for us?" He flew me out. I stayed with friends. In fact, they may have put me in a hotel for the week. I hung out with Matt in his office and we'd shoot the shit, chat about photography, design, art. He's a great guy.
And then he sent me to Colorado to shoot a senator. I shot some portraits in New York and then I flew back to London. And then he'd fly me out again. I did Kofi Annan. Newt Gingrich with a lion. I did a bunch of people. They did these themed issues. I did like the ten top men in politics or something like that. They'd fly me all over the country and it was a real education.
So suddenly I was getting a ton of shoots here and I was getting a bit more exposure. And gradually over the period from the beginning of 1996 to 1999, I came here more and more until I was here for three or four months a year. I was picking up interesting portraits in London for magazines like W, and I got a great break when Kathy Ryan at The New York Times Magazine hired me to shoot a cover of Tom Hanks and Ben Affleck. I shot a series of covers for them from 1998 onwards. It was starting to get stupid because I was constantly away. I would literally get home, get a phone call and get back on an airplane. It wasn't making my personal life particularly easy.
My wife and I had been talking about moving to New York so in the middle of 1998 we thought, "Fuck it. We'll move to New York." She's a really talented designer and got a job working for The Gap. We got married on March 27, 1999. We went to Saint Lucia for a week for our honeymoon we flew back on the third of April and on the fourth of April, we moved to New York.
APE: Big life change.
Jake: We literally left everything.
APE: You felt you needed to move to New York to have a successful career?
Jake: I think my experience in being here and then going back and not getting any phone calls was like that Andy Warhol saying, "Success is a job in New York." And I thought that was where it was at and if I wanted to shoot big names for big clients that is where I needed to be. I wasn't a fashion photographer. I wasn't a product photographer or a car photographer and in England that's a big market. I wasn't particularly technical and a lot of the advertising imagery in the UK was very precise and that's not me. I thought there was a lot of personality based stuff for me to shoot here.
And it was financial. My first big job in New York was in the end of 1998. I got a big job for IBM where we shot here, in London and in Tokyo. It was just before we moved. I got that ad job which paid a lot.
APE: So you saw that most of your potential clients were here.
Jake: It was a leap of faith. It was partly financial, but partly opportunity. All the celebs are here. If you shot a celeb in London, it was in a hotel room for 20 minutes on a press junket.
One of the first jobs I did here after moving and I suddenly thought, "OK. This is working out." It was for Nancy Iacoi at "Premiere" who called me and asked me to shoot Johnny Depp for a cover, so we flew out to Frank Lloyd Wright House in LA. Now, that's a shoot. [laughs]
APE: That's an amazing shoot.
Jake: It's not 20 minutes tucked in somewhere. It was amazing to suddenly be here doing all that stuff.
APE: And you were shooting big time editorials, shooting for tons of magazines?
Jake: I was shooting for "The New York Times Magazine", "Premiere," "Newsweek," "Esquire," "Entertainment Weekly", "Details" a lot of editorial.
APE: I want to get into the promo stuff and the custom portfolio books because these are really interesting. Let's get into these books. When did you first start making the books?
Jake: '97 was the first one.
APE: Describe the process. Why did you start making them like this with the color photocopies?
Jake: When I started working for foreign magazines from London, it was pre-email, pre-Internet. You would FedEx off the edit, so I was cutting out these pictures realizing that as I didn't have two sets of contacts necessarily, that I would never see them again, and to have a record of what the hell I had sent them I made color copies and they were sitting around in a pile.
Then I said, "Hmm. I'll stick them in a book." So I started cutting them out and making these collages and arrangements which I think because I'd been to art school and done a lot of painting, drawing stuff that it was second nature to have a sketch book. It was kind of the first photographic manifestation of a sketchbook.
And within a few weeks, I started to get a thick little set of pictures. There were pages and pages of this stuff. I had always been frustrated with my portfolios because they were one or two prints from each sessions and it didn't really reflect the shoot.
APE: You wanted to show the whole take?
Jake: Yes because I was confident at this point. It was following off my conversation with Grant Scott who said, "Do you want to be a working photographer or a good photographer?" He showed me a shoot that one of the guys who worked he'd with, I can't remember who it was, had done with Antonio Banderas and this guy had everything. He had close ups, wide shots, back and white, color, different outfits.
And he said, "How long do you think they had to do this shoot?" I said, "It looks like all day." And he said, "No. They had two hours." He said, "You've got to cover more than one shot because what if you submit a color headshot and the magazine has already got 20 color headshots in this issue and they want a black and white wide shot? You've got to think about that."
And I had never considered it. I was too dumb. This was early on in my career. I was like, "Shit. He's absolutely right." So I started shooting around and trying really to explore and shoot how he told me to, for him particularly. So I had all these shots that never saw the light of day.
APE: And that is also a signature thing for you is how many setups you do.
Jake: I guess it became that way just trying to give a variety.
APE: And is part of that you just wearing them out? Or are you just trying to find something?
Jake: It's like, "I've got that. Let's do something different." I'm always thinking that there's a better shot here that I haven't seen yet.
APE: Back to the books.
Jake: I'd put these together and suddenly it became a tool. Not just for reviewing the work but for getting work. Art directors seemed to respond very well to it. They loved to see the variety, to see the outtakes, to feel it's something that's personal, which it is.
APE: It's very unusual. I don't think I know anyone who does it this way but again it just fits with your personality so well. And you did it out of necessity.
Jake: Yes. I had wound up the first one and then I think — "We need two of these," so I'd do two. It got to a point where I think on one round we did six of them. It took weeks. It's really labor intensive.
APE: And you've done one of these every year.
Jake: Yeah, pretty much.
APE: It's amazing. That's amazing just to have that record of your career.
Jake: It's a good review. It's good to look back just to try and find stuff. I've got a client that I am about to shoot for, and they're looking for pictures of night views of cities so I just went through them last night and pulled out a couple. It's good to review and find stuff.
APE: Night views of cities?
Jake: Yeah, it's for a vodka client.
APE: Oh, to go in with your other shots?
Jake: Yes, so that we don't have to shoot it because we've only got two days to shoot this thing.
APE: What about as far as promos and stuff? Did you just do the normal kind of promo cards?
Jake: Yeah, I did promo cards, although I think they're of somewhat limited value. But, you'd hope to go into someone's office and see one pinned up on the wall.
APE: [laughs]
Jake: It was brutal back then. It's so much easier now to get pictures out there because you either have a website, blog, or send them in an email and people are hopefully interested to get them.
APE: Right. Yeah, let's talk about that next, that evolution into The Daily Chessum. It makes a lot more sense to me now, meeting you and seeing and remembering the proliferation of images that you produce. Doing something daily, that makes a lot of sense now.
Jake: There are a hundred pages in each of these books. So that became an end in itself and a promotional tool that came out of nowhere and seemed to pay off. But then getting a website took a while and once you've got it up and running it's hard to update, it takes a real commitment. I was talking to my agent and she was saying "Maybe you should do a blog." I thought "Yeah, that's great, but no writing."
APE: [laughs]
Jake: I'm not disparaging any blogs where people write about their experiences, but I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to demystify the process. There's a lot of stuff out there that you shouldn't tell anybody. You know what I mean?
APE: Yeah. If you want to reach photo editors and art directors and art buyers, then you need to be showing pictures and not talking about the process.
Jake: Yeah as a consumer of some of those blogs, it's interesting to read that stuff because it creates a kind of kinship and it's good to know you're not the only one dealing with that crap. But yeah, I don't want to divulge that information. I just wanted to put pictures out there regularly to show what I was up to. It's easy to do, look at, immediate. It's my visual diary.
APE: It's just another promotional vehicle.
Jake: Yes, and I was really happy that Tumblr sent me a little email saying, oh, we love your blog, we want to put it on our spotlight page. Which overnight, I went from, 500 followers to like, 3,000, and then the next month it was 5,000, and up to 22,000 followers.
APE: I talked to you a year or longer ago about it, and you were saying "I don't know where this is going to go, but I feel like I need to participate."
Jake: Yes.
APE: And you said you're making a mistake not trying some of these new tools out.
Jake; True, and I'm not an innovator in that sense because I waited so long to jump on the blog bandwagon.
APE: No, but you took the time to see all the other blogs and make a decision, how you wanted yours to work.
Jake: Yes, and I thought, if you don't update, you lose traffic so, I thought every day I'd put up one image, because putting up more would be a sheer burden to come up with more good pictures. Do you know what I mean? I didn't want to dip into the archive too much. I wanted it to be something current. I want it to reflect what I was up to within that time frame. And obviously, it's a kind of a cheat, because when you know you're going to be busy, I queue up my 10 ahead or sometimes 20 ahead if I know I'm going to be crazed.
APE: And it'll do it automatically.
Jake: Yes, it updates once a day, every day.
APE: Right, that's perfect.
Jake: And then yesterday I got a bunch of PDFs of something that just came out, so I pushed everything back a few days and dropped those in to come in sooner.
APE: And, the other thing that you told me was with your shoots there's all these outtakes that don't make it in the magazine.
Jake: You have to be careful with that because you can diminish the value of the outtakes. Or upset a publicist. Clients want to pay for exclusives.
APE: Well, I think it's brilliant.
Jake: Thanks. But, yes, it's just a really cool way of making you work as well and making you take pictures. If you haven't shot a job for a couple of days and you need to post, then it's time to go out and shoot some pictures.
APE: I want to talk just really quick about the transition to digital. Obviously, you're not shooting very much film anymore.
Jake: No.
APE: But then you were saying how much you like digital.
Jake: Yes, I'm psyched about it.
APE: When did you finally embrace?
Jake: I haven't shot an ad job on film for five years. And I haven't seen a reason why I would have to. So in the last four years.
APE: Once you embraced it you felt like, "This is amazing."
Jake: It's like a revelation. I'd read yesterday some photographer who went fully digital in 2001. I went, "Fucking hell. That was pretty early to really go 100 percent digital."
APE: Some people don't love the film and the printing. They never got into that. Obviously all that time in the darkroom, you love that process.
Jake: Years of printing black and white and processing film. Seeing it, holding it up in the darkroom for the first time. There's a huge thrill. There always was in seeing the print come up, and actually going through the craft of washing it, drying it. All that stuff.
Letting that go took a while. But I think I went through a transitional period. I had a darkroom in London, but I never had one here, and as I got busier I let it go. I was also shooting a lot of color and I never printed my own color. Plus the printers I used were better at it than I was. But I'll admit I was one of those sanctimonious douchebags back in the day who was like, "Oh my God, they never print. How can you call yourself a photographer? How disgusting." When I had the kids, I didn't want to spend a night in the darkroom. I wanted to go home.
APE: What was the revelation once you really got into it?
Jake: I had let control go to an extent with the printing and retouching when I was all film. But when I started shooting digital I felt I claimed it back. Getting the images to where I wanted them, even something as simple as making something black and white, felt like giving me a creative outlet within the medium that I kind of lost track of. I'd let that go for a bit and it was a revelation to get it back. Do you know what I mean?
APE: Yeah. I think that completes the circle. Thanks for your time.
Jake: No problem.
This is the first in a series of interviews I'm conducting to promote my seminar at the 2012 Photo Plus Expo titled "Making a Career in Editorial Photography". I've got 3 editorial photographers at the top of their game who I'm going to interview on stage about their careers and marketing methods. If you're going to PPE, join Chris Buck, Jake Chessum, Martin Schoeller and me on Friday, October 26th from 1:30 to 3:30 pm.
Chris is somewhat of a regular around here, I really enjoy checking in with him, because he's always honest with his answers. He's got a new book out called Presence (get yours here), so I asked him all about creating it and finding a publisher. I know you will enjoy his insight into the process.
Rob: I remember from our previous interview that you place a lot of importance on personal projects and the promotional value you get from them. Can you talk about that and how you go about finding those projects?
Chris Buck: First, I'm trying to think of something that will be original, that's a big part of it.
Rob: I was going to ask, does originality trump everything for you?
Chris: When I think of something interesting, I automatically assume that it's been done already. This is a struggle for a photographer at any stage in their career – you want things that feel fresh and new, and not something that's just a rehashing of what's been done before.
But, one has to realize, nothing is entirely new, everything has a predecessor to it.
Rob: I gave up even writing about who copied who, because everything can be traced back further than the photographer who thinks they are the original.
Chris: I've attended lectures where well-regarded photographers talked about other photographers stealing their ideas and the whole time I'm thinking, "Seriously? You're a legend. Get over it."
Rob: A lot of the promotional and personal work that I see is photographers trying to put their own stamp on an idea that exists. I think it's interesting that you are searching for an original idea completely.
Chris: That's one thing I've realized when doing this and thinking about what I want to do next. Most photographers will find something interesting in the world and then construct a body of work around that. That's not what I want to be doing and it's not where I'm likely to make a unique stamp.
I'm going to do better by in my own quiet way, constructing something, or maybe constructing my own curious connection between things. I think that's where my strength is.
A lot of the ideas I come up with, I've not done, because they're not visual enough. They might be clever and funny, but they're not visual.
Rob: Interesting, I hadn't thought about it that way before. Before we get into this current project, how much does the end product play into it? You don't just do this to entertain yourself. This is a business. This is part of the marketing. This is part of the business of Chris Buck photography, right?
Chris: Absolutely, but It's hard to think about that until after I do it. There's a certain level of faith that if I do interesting work and I put it out there, then work will come back my way.
Rob: Ok, let's talk about this project. I want to know the germination of the idea, where it came to you. When did you realize that it was going to work, and that you needed to pursue this, and that you needed to talk all these celebrities during shoots into participating in your project? What was the beginning?
Chris: I was brainstorming ideas with my agent at the time (Julian Richards), and I had an idea that was very theoretical. It was just the idea of phoning it in. I liked the idea of literally not being on the set and giving instructions to an assistant, or whoever, as to what to do, what to tell the subject, and then whatever we got was the picture.
I liked it in theory, but I realized that the actual work itself would be wildly different based on who actually was on-set and did the execution, and also then, in most cases, it probably wouldn't be very interesting.
And, just on a personal, selfish level, too, I wanted to control it. I didn't want it to be entirely random, like a scientific experiment where the visuals wouldn't have been that important.
So, I switched it. Rather than having me not there I decided to have the subject not there.
Initially, it was going to be a set where I just shot someone and they left. This is the room where I just shot George Clooney, or something. Then I realized it was a bit too esoteric, so I put the subject back in, which anchored it nicely.
Rob: Is this all happening in your head, or is this happening…?
Chris: This is hashing it out with Julian. Then the decision becomes, how much of them do we see?
Do we see an elbow and a top of a head? Are we seeing them peeking or something, and how much? Maybe not enough to recognize them, but enough to indicate where they are. But, I actually realized that I liked the cleanness of not seeing them at all. I also thought it was both funnier and a bit of a playful "F You," to the audience.
Rob: [laughs] Oh God. I love that. We're getting back to that, keep going.
Chris: I initially thought of it as a promotional piece, just 15 images in a little booklet, each one would be titled with the person's name. It would be funny and kind of throwaway, and that would be the end of it.
The first one I shot was William Shatner, with these bales of hay. It was so rich with color and texture that I was like, "wow, even if a fraction of them are this interesting, this could actually have legs and become a full book."
Rob: Tell me about the first shoot, though. The first time you told William Shatner what you were doing, and what you needed to do.
Chris: I'm pretty fearless about stuff like this, so, I just asked. Let's put it this way, in my previous shoot with Shatner, I had him being arrested by two LA cops. So, asking him to hide in a scene was peanuts in comparison.
Rob: I remember from our previous interview, didn't you ask him some other crazy things to do?
Chris: Yeah, I asked him to do a lot of crazy stuff and he just said, "No, I will not do that."
Rob: So in comparison to what you normally ask celebrities to do, this is tame.
Chris: Right. Well, for one thing, they're not even going to be visible. So it doesn't matter how they look or what they're doing. They can be crouching or standing, or whatever it is. It doesn't matter , as we don't see them.
Rob: Were some of the people reluctant? Thought it was stupid?
Chris: Well, a few of them kind of felt like, "If I'm not going to be in there, why waste my time with this?" But if they bothered to put up an argument, they ended up doing it. Because it mattered to me, and they just went with it. Whoopi Goldberg looked through my entire mock-up and she spent a good 10, 15 minutes on it and then wouldn't do it.
I don't really know what she was thinking. But she didn't want to be part of it. Maybe she felt like she had worked hard to be visible and was not into being portrayed without being visible.
Rob: Then did some people get really into it and understand the whole concept?
Chris: Oh, some people totally got into it, and got really excited. Rainn Wilson I shot for New York magazine, and then afterwards I had him pose for the series. When he walked out of his hiding spot, he said, "We do a little business, we do a little art."
Rob: So you finished the project. Tell me about approaching a publisher.
Chris: Well, I shot it in five years, and about three-and-a-half years into it, I began to look for a publisher. Remember, I contacted you early on asking you for some help and you have that list of publishers on your blog, which was one of my resources.
Basically, I made a list and started going down it. At first, I was approaching just one at a time, but pretty soon I was approaching three, four at a time. I'd go through a stack of mock-ups, and then I would stop and think, OK, what's working, what's not working? Then I'd make a new version of the mock-up.
In the end I made three different mock-ups, and was always improving on it. The last one I made with a designer and I hired someone to be my representative just for approaching the publisher (Alan Rapp).
Rob: Wow.
Chris: Well, that's because I had gone to seminars on how to do a photo book.
Rob: You went to seminars?
Chris: I'd gone to seminars over the years and it was made clear that one was expected to present the proposed book as a finished product – sequencing, layout, foreword or introduction, and cover design – everything.
One of the problems I think that I had with the publishers was it's essentially an art book from someone who's not an art photographer. They didn't quite know where to put it. It's a pop culture photographer making a fine art book, but they couldn't sell it on my name as an art photographer.
Rob: Oh, I can see the pitch for sure. "A celebrity book?" "Yes." "There's no celebrities in it?" "Pass" [laughs]
Chris: Well, they're in it. You just can't see them.
Rob: Right. So, back to the process, because a lot of my readers will be interested in the book publishing part.
Chris: Basically, here's the approach I took. I can put it very simply. I had never published a book before, so I didn't really know that world. I knew editorial, and I knew advertising. I looked through my Facebook and through my general contacts, and I reached out to anyone I knew who had any connection to people who had been published
It was absolutely humbling and eye opening. It was such a good process for me. Not that I was arrogant, but I had a certain place in the editorial and advertising world and I had no place in the world of publishing.
Rob: Was that hard for you, to go back to square one after having your very successful career?
Chris: Well, the hard part is that while I'm well regarded in my field and have done well, a lot of people treated me really shabbily. Not responding at all or being rude.
Rob: Oh, my.
Chris: I found it surprising. You would expect people would at least think, "Maybe, I'll cross paths with this person at some point in the future, I guess I should at least be polite."
Rob: Absolutely. But, no that wasn't the case?
Chris: Some people were, but many people weren't. I found that amazing.
Rob: Right. Is that just publishing, they're overwhelmed? They see so many projects that are horrible…
Chris: I don't know. I think that these different areas are more separate from each other than we realize. Because my next step after that was trying to get a gallery, and that was the same thing just starting over from scratch. Again, contacting anyone I know who had ever had exhibitions in galleries at all. It's contacting former assistants who are now as successful as me or more so.
Chris: Again, really humbling.
Rob: So back to the publishing. You had three mock-ups. You had an agent specifically for the book. You had gone through a series of publishers and then you finally found one who got the whole thing and was interested in you and the project. You just ran into them?
Chris: No, I did not run into them. What happened was I met with Darius Himes and Mary Virginia Swanson. They had just done a book called "Publish Your Photography Book". I met with them as professional consultants and that's what actually led to the introduction to Kehrer.
Rob: Can you tell me anything about the process of publishing the book? It's a beautiful book.
Chris: Thank you. For people who are interested in doing a book, in terms of the actual execution of making it, I'd say the one thing that was a revelation to me in terms of the actual quality of the book itself, is that I made match prints for every visual for the book.
Now maybe that's a norm, but when I was actually on press in Germany and the technician is working the machine he is standing there holding the match prints I made in New York. And, he did an amazing job of matching them. I went back and rescanned all the images from the original negatives and transparencies and worked on each file for hours at home. Then took them to Picturehouse.
B.J. DeLorenzo, who made the match prints there, would actually alter my files to make the match print look good he'd do what he had to do. Then those final files that made the match prints were the ones that went to the publisher.
Rob: Awesome.
Chris: The fact is I'm 99 percent happy with how the images look in the book because of the amount of care and time we put into making files I was happy with and then making match prints that matched those files.
Rob: So, how many did you print?
Chris: 1000 pieces.
Rob: Ok, that's not very much.
Chris: It's a small run. If people are serious about getting the book, they should get it sooner rather than later because it will sell out.
Rob: I want to go back to something that you said about the pictures being an "F-you" to the reader. How much of this project is in the outrageousness, the absurdity of taking pictures of celebrities where you can't see them?
Chris: Well, it's meant to be full on ridiculous and full on serious at the same time. I think that this ultimately comes across. I never even joke that the celebrity might not be in there. I take it very seriously. I spent five years shooting, two years looking for a publisher, and then a year and a half releasing the book.
Rob: Yeah, that's no joke.
What about the fact that you've worked so hard and so long on a project that some people will think is the stupidest thing they've ever seen? [laughs]
Chris: I guess so. I like that.
Rob: Good, because I'm referencing the comments on article about the book on the "Huffington Post".
Chris: Oh, God.
Rob: Do you enjoy that many people don't get it?
Chris: Honestly, when I read through the comments, it actually is upsetting.
Rob: Really?
Chris: On a theoretical level, I like the idea that people think it's a waste of their time or whatever. A lot of people obviously don't understand what it is. One of the comments supporting me said something like, "This is a guy who's been shooting celebrities for 20 years. You have to see the work in that context."
I thought that was a nice way of framing it. But I don't know. I mean, yes, at some level, it is fun that people dismiss it.
Rob: Well, it's back to the "F-you."
Chris: It's never enjoyable to hear that people think you're an idiot.
Rob: No. No. But there's a little bit of "F-you" in the whole project, as you've said.
Chris: I suppose that I'm getting it back at me.
Rob: I think it's an awesome project, and I do think it fits your personality so well. Obviously, as a promotional vehicle, it's beyond the promo cards and the little booklets. It's a full-on book that I assume you'll be using it as a promotion as well as a part of your body of work.
Chris: Absolutely…but I do wonder. As I started Presence I was thinking, "OK, this is for creative directors and art directors in advertising who are top of the top, super creative, super imaginative, thinking outside the box. I want to show them I can really do work that's outside the box.
Chris: Then I look at the finished thing. "What work on Earth would this ever lead to?"
Chris: In the long run I think it's a really good thing only because I think it's funny and it's cool and it's going to have a nice life to it.
Rob: Yeah, it's memorable. It has great personality. It's a standalone piece.
Chris: Even the relationship between the pictures and the names is actually relatively subtle. In a way people will complain and say, "I can see how the Jack Nicklaus one makes sense or the David Byrne one, but the rest of them…There's no connection."
I think that some people miss the point. When you look through the work you make your own connections. If you take it seriously and spend some time with it you can't help but do that. That kind of subtlety will make the book interesting still in 10, 20 years.
Rob: After you launch this project is it just on to the next one? Have you already started the next one? You've got five years.
Chris: I've got other things going on, but I got a great piece of advice I got from someone who I reached out to in the book world who's a curator and done a number of compilation books. She said, "One thing you have to do that a lot of artists don't like is you need to stick with it. You worked hard to do this book. The book's now done. Don't just walk away because you're bored with it"
I've taken that directive seriously. My New York book launch is going to be at the International Center of Photography, which took a lot of finagling and patience to pull off. I'm doing a book launch in Toronto in Canada, and doing a book signing in L.A., and I'm doing some workshops, and putting myself out there
I've seen friends do books where, the book comes out and does well, they get good buzz, but there are all kinds of other things they don't do. They're basically relying on inertia or word of mouth for their book to get played. I find that kind of shocking that someone is going to spend all that time and energy to make a book and then not put everything they can behind it.
Rob: Right. I mean, self-promotion is really difficult for artists and photographers.
Chris: It is. Maybe they feel like it's below them to be doing that. I don't know.
Rob: So, does anybody besides you and the assistant and obviously the celebrity know where they are on set and will you ever reveal that?
Chris: I will not reveal it. I don't talk about where people are hiding. Obviously, my assistants and staff know where people were hiding. If they want to talk about it I don't really care, but I'm not going to say.
I feel like the witness statement is enough. In fact, I purposely did not have the celebrities sign them. I wanted it to be someone who was observing. I felt like if the celebrities were signing for themselves then it's almost too much proof.
Rob: So you're taking it to the grave?
Chris: Absolutely.
Relive the glory days though Bruce Dale's career at Geographic.
I love a list of photographers like this. Not because I think there could ever be a definitive list of 100 photographers that most people agree on, but because everyone should have their own list. And everyone should spend time studying the masters. All of my favorite working photographers have the influence of the masters in their pictures.
For anyone who loves serious photography, we live in an incredible time. A quick google search on any of these greats will give you plenty of material to study.
1. Richard Avedon American 1923-2004
2. W. Eugene Smith American 1918-1978
3. Helmut Newton German 1920-2004
4. Irving Penn American 1917- 2009
5. Guy Bourdin French 1928-1991
6. Henri Cartier-Bresson French 1908-2004
7. Diane Arbus American 1923-1971
8.Elliott Erwitt French 1928-
9. Walker Evans American 1903-1975
10. Martin Parr British 1952-
11. Juergen Teller German 1964-
12. Nick Knight British 1958-
13. David Bailey British 1938-
14. Cindy Sherman American 1954-
15. Andreas Gursky German 1955-
16. Edward Weston American 1886-1958
17. Garry Winogrand American 1928-1984
18. Bruce Weber American 1946-
19. Man Ray American 1890-1976
20. Paolo Roversi Italian 1947-
21. Herb Ritts American 1952-2002
22. Annie Leibovitz American 1949-
23. Ansel Adams American 1902-1984
24. David LaChapelle American 1963-
25. William Klein American 1928-
26. Bill Brandt German 1904-1983
27. Ralph Gibson American 1939-
28. Stephen Shore American 1947-
29. Robert Frank Swiss 1924-
30. Andre Kertesz Hungarian 1894-1985
31. Chuck Close American 1940-
32. Robert Mapplethorpe American 1946-1989
33. Steven Meisel American 1954-
34. Peter Lindbergh German 1944-
35. August Sander German 1876-1964
36. Nan Goldin American 1953-
37. Weegee Austrian 1899-1968
38. Don McCullin British 1935-
39. Slim Aarons American 1916-2006
40. William Eggleston American 1939-
41. Joel-Peter WitkinAmerican 1939-
42. Anton Corbijn Dutch 1955-
43. Brassai French 1899-1984
44. Erwin Blumenfeld German 1897-1969
45.Duane Michals American 1932-
46. Mario Testino Peruvian 1954-
47. Mary Ellen Mark American 1940-
48. Larry Clark American 1943-
49. Mert & Marcus Turkish and British 1971-
50. Corinne Day British 1965-
The rest can be found here: http://www.professionalphotographer.co.uk
Enjoying this series. Here's the next episode.


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Matches found in Motorcycle News
Trevor Franklin,
27 December 2011 14:00
Factory customs don't get any more 'factory' than this. Say hello to Morsus, a unique custom machine built for aftermarket exhaust giant Akrapovic. They commissioned specialists Dreamachine Motorcycles of Slovenia to build a bike to promote Akrapovics new range of custom exhausts. Morsus is the result. And what a result. It went from drawing to finished article in just two-and-a-half ...
Trevor Franklin,
03 December 2011 12:00
Honda's legendary Fireblade is 20-years-old and while the weight, shape and engine capacity in fact everything about it has changed since Tadao Baba's rule-changing 1992 original, the fact that Honda has retained the Fireblade moniker for its ultimate superbike proves just how important this model is to the Big H. Oh, and so does the impressive sales figure of 445,208 ...
Trevor Franklin,
21 November 2011 12:35
Yamaha has announced dramatic and favourable price reductions on five key 2012 models. The bikes are all 600cc plus and are from several classes including sports, adventure and roadster models. The biggest saving of £1400 is on its flagship sports R1, which, until the announcement at Motorcycle Live, the 2011 model had a list price of £13,528 including On The ...
Trevor Franklin,
08 November 2011 15:55
Check out this video of a guy who crashed during a trackday at Barber Motorsports, USA. Now there's braking and there's braking, but braking to the point of breaking your bike and yourself is taking it a bit too far in our book. The end result is the rider walked away (albeit shakily). But the point is he might not have ...
Trevor Franklin,
08 November 2011 10:14
A special edition model BMW K1300S will be available in early 2012, complete with BMW's own HP (high performance) Package. The 175bhp sports-cum-tourer missile will feature an exclusive 'Edition' badge on the airbox cover, with striking white, black and blue paint scheme to set it apart from the standard K1300S. HP components are liberally dotted around the bike and include ...
Trevor Franklin,
24 October 2011 13:03
Honda has just released full details on the new dual-clutch Integra maxi-scooter including a claimed 76mpg fuel consumption figure (250 mile tank range) and reduced service costs with an 8000 mile service limit with spark plug replacement at 32,000 miles. The Integra is the first of a proposed three-model line-up (the other two will likely be a naked roadster and ...
Trevor Franklin,
07 October 2011 14:26
Aprilia's new SR Max 300 fits neatly into the overcrowded maxi-scooter class, but with a less than subtle difference from its rivals – the Aprilia actually looks exciting to ride. With styling allegedly based on the RSV4 superbike – a little far-fetched, although the black/red colour scheme is eye-catching and the angular layout of the bike is striking – it ...
Trevor Franklin,
12 September 2011 14:12
While we await the arrival of the Nuda 900, Husqvarna's new F800-powered supermoto, two other equally important models from the now BMW-owned but Italian-based company have gone on sale. The SMS4 125 and TE125 are 124.45cc, four-stroke, learner-legal machines styled to mimic the company's off-road competition bikes. Both bikes are a big departure from the unrestricted 125cc two-strokes Husqvarna are ...
Trevor Franklin,
01 September 2011 16:34
The new LN125 is the first scooter 'branded' Lambretta for decades. But while the name is synonymous with Italian style - and the new scoot is styled by an Italian - it's based on a Taiwanese-made Sym four-stroke. So while the LN125's silhouette harks back to the iconic two-stroke workhorse of the '60s and '70s, any similarity ends there. And ...
Trevor Franklin,
21 July 2011 12:05
Harley-Davidson has just released details of its 2012 model range, which includes the new £13,499 Dyna Switchback – a custom convertible with removable hard panniers and screen. The idea is to provide two bikes from one chassis – a tasteful cruiser when naked and a competent 'bagger' with the two colour-matched panniers and screen in place. Harley claims both touring ...
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Little Red Dress
- Date: Feb 20, 2009
- Model(s): Nicole
29 Images at up to 4000 pixels
- Little Red Dress - Cover Page
- Gallery Preview
There's nothing hotter than a gorgeous blond wearing a little red dress... Except perhaps a blond taking OFF a little red dress.
Nicole loves to show off her perfect body, and honestly - who can blame her?
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Oracle Database Transportable Technologies
Oracle's Transportable technologies include Transportable Database and Transportable Tablespaces, which enable tablespace and database migration and upgrade, as well as efficiently solving a variety of data moving use cases.
Using Transportable Technologies for Database Migration and Database Upgrade
The Transportable Database feature enables users to migrate an Oracle Database (10g Release 2 and higher) to another platform that has the same endian format. Notice that for some platform combinations, Oracle Data Guard is the preferred solution for platform migrations. The prerequisites and procedure are detailed in the MAA whitepaper Platform Migration Using Transportable Database Oracle Database 11g and 10g Release 2 (PDF).
The Transportable Tablespaces feature allows users to quickly move a user tablespace across Oracle databases. An important use of Transportable Tablespaces is to support the migration a of database between platforms that have a different endian format. The prerequisites and procedures for migration are detailed in the MAA whitepaper Platform Migration Using Transportable Tablespaces (PDF).
Transportable Tablespaces also supports one of the methods for upgrading a database. The use cases and their procedures, as well as pointers to other methods, are covered in the MAA whitepaper Database Upgrade Using Transportable Tablespaces: Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (PDF).
Hint: query the
V$TRANSPORTABLE_PLATFORM view to see the platforms that are supported, and to determine their platform IDs and their endian format.
Other Uses of Transportable Tablespaces
Moving data using Transportable Tablespaces can be much faster than performing either an export/import or unload/load of the same data. This is because transporting a tablespace only requires the copying of datafiles and importing the tablespace structural information. You can also use Transportable Tablespaces to move both table and index data, thereby avoiding the index rebuilds you would have to perform when importing or loading table data. Transportable Tablespaces can also be used to facilitate a database upgrade.
The Transportable Tablespaces feature is also useful for copying multiple read-only versions of a tablespace on multiple databases and for archiving historical data.
Because Transportable Tablespaces works across platforms, you can also use this feature to:
|Technical Whitepapers (PDF)
|High Availability Case Studies