Some Damn Ugly Photography

News from my photo shoots

Song of the Day – Kate Tucker Sings for Her Supper!



DOWNLOAD: On The Radio

I’m tag-teaming a Song of the Day along with a bit of good, old fashioned log-rolling today. The song is a previously unreleased acoustic version of ‘On The Radio’ Kate Tucker and Mark Isakson layed down for Seattle’s Bumbershoot festival last year. The log-rolling is explained below…..

Kate has finished recording White Horses, her new solo album, but she need a bit of help. Being an indie artist often means little details like coming up with the last few bucks to press CD’s, promote the album and loading up the tour bus sometimes force her to employ extraordinary measures…in this case, hit up folks on the internet for whatever they might be able to contribute! Kate has put together a Kickstarter Funding Video…complete with ‘prizes’…in order to raise the final $5000.00 she needs to put White Horses to bed. If you toss her a few measly bucks you can get a signed CD and a bit of good Karma…for 50 bones she’ll unlock the vault and give you her bootlegs from her first album, the out of print Eros Turannos, and a few more goodies…$500 and she’ll record an acoustic version of any of her songs, dedicate it to you, post it on YouTube, and send you an exclusive mp3…..and for you seriously High Rollers, a grand will get Kate to play a concert for you and 40 of your closest & dearest friends (!)…two grand and she’ll sing for you, and cook you dinner and get you drunk (!!)…and if somebody were to kick in the whole five grand…well, I think it goes without saying that if anybody hits that target, Kate’s gonna have a friend for life!!! (Or it means she sold herself into slavery…I’m not quite sure…..)

I’m asking all of the friends of The List to head over to ‘Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is! Kate Tucker Sings for Her Supper!’ and watch the Kickstarter video…and if you can, show her a little love. And then pass it along to a few friends. It’s a lot more interesting than those damned LOLCats videos that keep filling up my inbox! And let’s be honest…the more true artists like Kate out there might mean we have to endure less of Lady GaGa…!!!

Check out more of Kate Tucker on MySpace

Jim Marshall Has Left The Building

Jim Marshall

February 3, 1936 – March 24, 2010

© 2007 Tim Mantoani

Jim Marshall…the only photographer allowed backstage at The Beatles last concert, the chief photographer at Woodstock, the guy who shot Jimi Hendrix as he set his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival and Janis Joplin with that Southern Comfort bottle and Bob Dylan casually rolling a tire down the street and Johnny Cash famously flipping the bird at the World…died in New York on Tuesday night. He was here for the opening of his “Match Prints” exhibition, a book project he and Timothy White did together, at Staley-Wise Gallery in Soho.

Every year for more than a decade, Michael Grecco and I have hosted a dinner for photographers who are still hanging around New York after the annual Photo Expo, and Jimmy was always there…telling stories, grabbing the ladies and usually yelling at me ‘cuz his wine glass was mysteriously empty! Jim is an honest to God legend in photography circles…one of the few guys I know who can be described as being ‘The Real Deal’. And a total wildman, too…that prizefighter nose of his wasn’t for show! One night he showed up with a shiner under his eye and a big gash across the bridge of his nose…the result of a ‘disagreement’ he had in a bar the night before…but Jimmy was also one of the nicest guys you’d ever wanna meet and a true friend. I’m gonna miss him at the dinner table…..

Jim at Woodstock

Bob and the Tire

Jimi Flaming Out at Monterey

Janis with the Southern Comfort

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BusinessWeek – Over & Out

I just heard from my friends at BusinessWeek…the entire Photo Department has just been fired and the phones in the Art Department are starting to ring, so they’re probably all gone too….

1:00PM UPDATE: Everybody in the Photo, Art and Graphics departments got fired……

4:10PM UPDATE: I dunno if this has anything to do with the days events, but I just heard that the 43rd Floor is on fire…for real!!!……

Ron Burkle For BusinessWeek

It’s kinda bittersweet to be posting about a job I just did for BusinessWeek on the same day I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop regarding the expected job cuts, but what the heck…it might just be a long time before I have another BusinessWeek story to talk about, right?!!

Last Tuesday, I get a 7:00AM wake-up call from one of my favorite people in the whole World, Sarah Morse…the magazine just got an eleventh-hour OK to shoot Ron Burkle, the supermarket Gazillionaire, and would I be available…like right now…to shoot him?!! I was literally getting ready to head out for a location scout on another gig, but sure…I can call and get Bo’s lazy ass outta bed and the two of us could hang with Mr. Burkle for a bit. And I actually knew a lot about Burkle…he was a huge Democratic fundraiser, a regular on the New York Post’s Page Six, he owns the Pittsburgh Penguins, he hangs out with Bono and Diddy and Leo and various Supermodels…and he recently bought Sky Studio, a triplex photography studio with it’s own swimming pool that I used to rent, as a New York pied-à-terre for about 17 million bucks and that’s where we were gonna do the shoot! Of course, we were told that he would have very little time for the shoot and I wouldn’t get to meet with him until he arrived, but that didn’t matter. Even with a ten-minute shoot window, I figured I should be able to pull something kinda cool off…..

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The backlit, cantilevered staircase gave us a grand entrance focal point and we quickly saw it as the perfect location for our opener. Thank God Burkle showed up wearing a suit and not the jeans and polo shirt his publicist had promised!

After an extremely quick five-minute shoot on the stairs, I asked Ron if we could have a few more minutes to shoot him up on the roof…he graciously obliged and this was the result…..

You can read the article, ‘The Other Ron Burkle’, HERE and y’all stay tuned to see if I have any more BusinessWeek stories to relay in the future!

More Cuts At BusinessWeek???

The sad news racing through the photo community this morning…or at least the small portion I find myself a part of…is that another sweeping round of axings layoffs at BusinessWeek is imminent. I suppose my acting surprised might seem a trifle disingenuous, but since Bloomberg assumed the reins back in December and the initial firings were announced, things seemed to be stabilizing and I was hoping (against hope?) that the friends and colleagues I have known for years would be spared further cuts, but with word that a new design team is in place and both the New York Post and Daily Finance reporting that as many as 30 more people might face the chopping block as early as tomorrow, it’s probably time to face the fact that the magazine I knew is due for some pretty big changes.

Sue Bloom gave me my first assignment back in October of 1988. Roxanne Edwards (then the Photo Director) took a chance and gave me my first cover story a few short months later. It was in 1991 that I began working with the current Photo Director, Ronnie Weil, when she sent me of to shoot the CEO of Pepsi. And Larry Lippman, Kathy Moore, Scott Mlyn, Anne D’Aprix, Sarah Morse, Andrew Popper, Mindy Katzman, Lori Perbeck, Regina Flanagan, Kat Malott, Burte Hughes, Sandra Torres…throughout the years these photo editors and researchers have been like family. This is one of very few magazines I have worked for where I could drop by and feel like an insider and that my opinions and viewpoint actually mattered. I’ve been allowed access into some pretty amazing executive suites over the years…culminating in Ronnie and me getting to spend an afternoon in the Oval Office just a few months ago for our Obama cover story…and I’ve had the opportunity to produce some rather interesting work. I honestly can’t tell you how many covers I’ve shot for them, but it’s gotta be North of thirty by now, and through it all it’s been a wild ride. Now all any of us can do is see how the next act plays out…..

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The Barron’s Roundtable – 2010 Edition

I’ve kinda been neglecting to include any actual photo-related posts lately, but a lot of what I’ve been shooting hasn’t run yet and until it does, it’s gotta stay under wraps, but here is a recent job I did for Barron’s…..

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I’ve been shooting the Barron’s Roundtable cover for a lotta years now, and every year the challenge is to reinvent how to photograph these ten fund managers in new & compelling compositions that will work for the cover, an inside spread, a couple of weeks worth of feature portraits and if that’s not enough, another cover that runs mid-year…all in a little over an hour! The entire production takes a boatload of planning before we even show up at the location…this year’s meeting was at The Harvard Club…but the main trick is keeping to a schedule that will allow us to get all that work done with only seven or eight minutes per person. It’s one thing to make an interesting portrait of a person given those time constraints, but add in all of the different final uses, the fact that most of the images will have to be assembled into group shots in Photoshop and the meeting room we were using as our ‘studio’ was so old that there was only one fifteen-amp electrical circuit for the whole room which meant we had to rent just about every battery-powered strobe in Manhattan to light the two sets, when we’re done it felt like we had gone to war!

Since we always do the actual shoot very early in the morning, before the meeting starts, we always give ourselves a pre-light day, and this was what we came up with for our cover test…..

…then, on a second set, we put this together…

The ‘fun’ part on a shoot like this is always convincing these very buttoned-down investment executives to trust me when I ask them to do whatever it is we’ve cooked up for the cover. This year, the little metaphor we were trying to hammer home was ‘looking around the corner’, so we rigged a few foamcore panels and had each person playing with that idea…..


…Dr. Marc Faber


…Mario Gabelli


…Bill Gross


…and Kelly, touching up Oscar Schafer!

All of which came together inside as this Photoshop-realized group shot…..

With that part done, we quickly moved to the second set for a few tighter portraits which would result in these images that ran in the following weeks……

I’m Disgusting In China…?!!

One of the cool things about the blog is the ability to look at the stats to see exactly who is wasting time in here, and one sort of weird thing has happened in the past few weeks…suddenly I’m getting a lotta hits from China and the blog is being fed into translate.google.com for English to Chinese translation! The only problem is, when I see how what I post gets translated, I hafta wonder if Google is getting it right! ‘Damn Ugly Photography’ comes up as ‘Disgusting Photography’ and ‘The Home Of The Song Of The Day List’ results in ‘But To Date Name List Song Home Page’…!

I dunno…I should probably just be happy that there are people half a World away checking out what’s sitting at the top of my iTunes folder!

Charlie Rose for BusinessWeek

As the new era at Bloomberg BusinessWeek begins, so does a new stable of columnists, and one of the first new names added to the masthead is the revered television interviewer and journalist, Charlie Rose. We had the pleasure of photographing him in his TV studio…at the table…for his new column portrait.

Happy Holidays !!!

Click image for the full-size card!


A Parade of Guys in Suits…..

It seems like in the past few years the overwhelming majority if the people who have stood before my camera have been businessmen….so much so that I’m beginning to have dreams of long lines of guys in suits! I have a bit of a backlog of recent shoots that I haven’t dropped on the blog, so before the holidays take over I figured I had better clean out the closet and put few of them up…

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Henri de Castries for Barron’s

This weeks cover story on AXA Group CEO, Henri de Castries…

AOL Executives for BusinessWeek

With the spinning off of AOL from Time Warner, I was sent to shoot CEO Tim Armstrong and his inner circle at the New AOL for a feature story in the first issue of the new Bloomberg BusinessWeek…

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong

Jon Brod – Vice President of AOL Ventures

Jeff Levick – President, Global Advertising and Strategy

Bill Wilson – President, AOL Media

Brad Garlinghouse – President, Internet and Mobile Communications

IndexIQ for BusinessWeek

And finally, one more BusinessWeek story. For this one one, we went down to NYU and shot the principals of IndexIQ, a Westchester-based hedge fund with a former Time Inc publisher at the helm and an NYU finance professor at it’s chief investment strategist.

Seated: Professor Robert Whitelaw. Standing (L-R): Adam Patti, Anthony Davidow, Sal Bruno

CEO Adam Patti

Shooting Kate

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I have taken a rather long time to talk about the two shoots I did with Kate when she was in New York back in October…partly because I was waiting for her to finish her new album, but now that ‘White Horses’ is in the can, I guess this is a good time to bring them up.

Kate was in town for CMJ and we knocked around some ideas for a cover shoot that involved horses…she was thinking of calling the new record ‘White Horses’…so we took a drive up to Connecticut to look for some horses…but the horses didn’t wanna cooperate and with the sun rapidly falling outta the sky, we had to change direction and came away with these shots…

A few days later, back in the city, we talked about doing something a bit edgier and since, like all rock stars, she was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, we thought we might try a commando-style shoot in the halls. Johanna Cranitch, of Johanna and the Dusty Floor, has been singing back-up with Kate and she joined in the fun. We managed to get off one shot in front of Harry Houdini’s eyes before a security guard kicked our asses back to Kate’s room…..

…but once we were in the room, the light pouring in through the windows gave me more than I needed……

Remember…Kate’s album comes out next Spring, but you can pre-order a limited-edition signed and numbered copy of White Horses and receive a free gift from Kate right now…just check out the ‘NEWS’ section on her Website for details.

Todd Oldham For BusinessWeek

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I had the opportunity to spend some time with multi-faceted designer Todd Oldham when I shot him for a BusinessWeek story that documented his nasty public breakup with Old Navy. It’s been a long time since I’ve met someone so completely at ease and refreshingly upbeat, especially given the drama he’s been put through for the past couple of years in his dealings with Old Navy.

One thing that came out of this whole mess was that since Old Navy had most of his trademarks tied up in a contract dispute, Todd couldn’t really work on anything besides book projects. The good news is that he just released a fabulous book, Kid Made Modern, that I would whole heartily recommend to anyone with kids! The book has over 50 craft projects inspired by modern design masters such as Alexander Calder, Noguchi, Charles & Ray Eames, George Nelson and on and on and on and I can’t think of a better way to introduce young minds to art & design. Christmas is coming….are you parents listening?!! Check it out at Todd’s Website (where you can get an autographed copy) or over on Amazon

Although the time we had was short, it was truly inspiring to be able to hang out with Todd for a while.

Let’s Back Up A Little Bit…..

A couple of weeks back, I shot Stuart Janney and John Hilton of Bessemer Trust for Barron’s…but the cool part you didn’t get to see was the location across from St. Patricks Cathedral…go on….click on the photo below for the really BIG view…I dare you!

Still Life Of The Day – BusinessWeek Shopping Bag Cover

A couple of weeks ago I got a 5:00PM call from Ronnie Weil, BusinessWeek’s Director of Photography, asking if I was available to shoot a rush-rush cover. The magazine was doing a feature on retailing and wanted to show a shopping bag filled with various products….and they needed shot the next morning….and the finished art that afternoon! Fast forward to the next morning and my stylist Megan Terry swoops into the studio with bags full of props and we get to work on Rich Michiel’s layout…..

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Rich would be adding a houndstooth pattern to the white shopping bag in post, but we had to shoot multiple variations of the bag’s contents for them to decide on the final mix of products. After moving the props around into a hundred or so different arrangements, Bo, Megan and I managed to squeak in before the deadline…..

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…and the cover (without the Teddy Bear) hit the stands that Friday!

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More Foto Funnies…..The Photo Editor

DISCLAIMER: This video is meant for humorous purposes only. The Photo Editor represented in this bit of fluff in no way represents any person, living or dead, and certainly not anybody I have ever worked for….my clients are all groovy!!! This is just something I made up over on www.xtranormal.com

R.I.P. Marty Forscher

In yesterday’s New York Times, I read of the passing of Marty Forscher.

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Marty was as old skool as it got…I mean, he got his start serving in the Navy photographic unit headed by Edward Steichen, for God’s sake! After the war, he opened his own repair shop, first on Lexington Avenue, but later at the 37 West 47th Street location that everybody knew. Professional Camera Repair wasn’t just a repair place…it was one of the ‘hubs’ of the New York photo business. The old bulletin board in the waiting area was filled with assistant’s resumes, studio shares, camera ‘for sale’ notices, photo show openings and just about everything else you could imagine that related to photography in this city. And when Marty wasn’t simply fixing cameras, he was always coming up with ways to make them do things that the manufacturers didn’t think of…or inventing his own stuff…the most famous of which was the Forscher ProBack. What a simple idea…a Polaroid back for a 35mm camera…except is wasn’t. There were all sorts of optical reasons why you couldn’t simply slap a Polaroid back onto a 35mm camera, and before the ProBack, the only way to get an instant image from a 35mm camera was to slap on the ungainly monster known as a Speed Magny…..

SpeedMagny

For those of you who spent any time in a physics class, you can imagine how the long optical path of that periscope-like device would suck up light…in this case, about about 5 stops worth…so a shutter speed of 1/250 second effectively became 1/8 second…not very useful at all. Marty had another idea…he invented a system that used a free-floating fiber optic lens to transfer the image from the camera film plane directly onto the Polaroid film plane…..

proback

I’ll always remember the day when I saw my first ProBack…and then the second, and the third…..and soon there was nobody who didn’t own one! To anybody not involved in the business, this probably seems like nothing, but overnight, Marty’s little invention had changed the way a generation of photographers took pictures! Here is the first two-on-one 35mm Fiber Optic Pro-Back Polaroid shot ever taken…..that’s Marty with one of his repair techs, Noah Schwartz…..

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It’s been a long, long time since I have seen Marty, but I’ll fondly remember him and how he would offer up a bit of grandfatherly advice or a few suggestions on how to solve a problem…..then he’d shoo me away from the counter ‘cuz there were other customers waiting!

R.I.P. Irving Penn

I’m lost for words. Irving Penn, one of the people whose work inspired me to become a photographer, died this morning……

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Irving Penn – NY Times Obit