 Mark Seliger is a photographer whose amazing portraits of cultural icons have been so inspiring to countless photographers across the decades. The secret that he shares about how he creates these iconic portraits is at once both so profound and yet so simple. How's it how's it? Mark Seliger was Rolling Stone's chief photographer from 1992 until 2002 and since then he has gone on to photograph for the likes of Vanity Fair, GQ and countless advertising and fashion shoots. But it is his portrait photography that is so inspiring. If you are not familiar with him you may recognise this iconic portrait of Kurt Cobain. The story behind this image is absolutely fascinating. Mark was in Australia originally to photograph the band and Kurt turned up with this t-shirt that said corporate magazines still suck. Thinking that they must throw Mark. But you know Mark took the photographs without any sort of too much of a fuss and played along. The image ended up on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and that built up a trust between Kurt Cobain and Mark Seliger. The next time Mark was photographing Kurt he only had six or seven minutes and he was photographing four by five and those are the large sheets of film. And he took some polaroids, took about 20 sheets of images and then went back to the polaroid and had another look at it and he realised that that was the image. That was the one that summed up Kurt Cobain. And that photograph was one of the last images taken of Kurt and of course has now become iconic. It just goes to show the power of having trust between photographer and subject. Indeed I was inspired as a student who was looking for ideas about photography by Mark Seliger and that is because he was photographing the cultural icons of the 90s and I was a huge fan of Drew Barrymore. I still am. And that is what I was drawn to. I was drawn to these photographs of Drew Barrymore and other people who I found fascinating. And I was absolutely blown away by Mark's images because they were completely different. So radically different to the photographs that I've been drawing inspiration from up until that point. We talk on the channel a lot about style, about how to find it, about what it is and things like that. And you know photographers who have a very specific style. And yet there are some photographers who don't fit into this category at all. They don't seem to have a very specific style. They evolve and they morph and they try things out over time. Look at some of Mark's conceptual photography setups. And then contrast with some of his more simplistic portraits. For somebody who's learning photography who is acting like a sponge and finding inspiration. It is wonderful to see this kind of approach from an established photographer because it says to you, look, you can do this, these elaborate magazine type images, but you can also do something basic. You can do them both at the same time. Those basic images, they can inspire you to run downstairs into the studio to recreate those images. Although I think you might struggle to get pain to come and pose for you. There was an article I was reading recently that when Mark talks about this exact same point, his advice to photographers starting out is to keep it simple to not ever be afraid to do that. He says taking a great portrait doesn't require a lot of fancy cameras or equipment. You just need to appreciate and study your subject. He also advises us to take our time to think what it is that you love about portraiture. Why does it appeal to you? He says that when he is stuck, he always circles back to the simple studies that he did when he first started out in photography. And that looking back at his old work, he realizes that the pictures he's making currently have come full circle, that the same values that he had initially as a photographer have always been there. I think this is fantastic advice because it doesn't matter how long you've been taking photographs or what sort of photography you take. When you come back to the thing that initially drew you to photography, you can find it so reinvigorating and it's wonderful to hear this advice echoed from a photographer who have a great deal of respect for. In a recent video about David Luschepelle, which I will link to at the end of this episode, somebody made a comment about how they thought the photographs were not very good, because they were simply candy colored images of vacuous celebrities. And this is a problem when you have a photographer who is extremely talented, but mostly takes portraits of well known people is that so many people are only drawn to the subject themselves, much like you know, Drew Barrymore, when I was saying earlier, that's when I was looking, I wasn't liking the photograph because of the way it was photographed, I was liking it because it was Drew Barrymore. And you know, you need to learn to get past that you need to appreciate show the surface quality of the image, but then also go beyond look at the subtleties behind it. Mark Seliger's photographs of the Oscar parties, now the after party things have become legendary. And on the surface, this is a fantastic example, you know, you have these famous people, you know, John Hamm and all this, and yet then look at the images themselves go beyond the celebrity and see the beauty of the image that is created and appreciate them both together equally. When you are trying to learn how to create photographs and you want to learn from from the famous people that often you what you'll find is is technical stuff, you know, lighting diagrams and lens choices and stuff like that never so much about the creative inspiration that leads the photographer to the idea. And Mark talks a little bit about this when he recounts how he made the cover for Rolling Stone magazine featuring Emma Stone when she was doing Lala land that he said that he'd been commissioned to do the shoot and was given quite a lot of free reign and started off by going to see Lala land to get inside the head of the character that Emma Stone was portraying to to think about how she was. And he came away thinking what Emma herself is very feminine and very elegant. And then the character that she's playing is empowered, very confident and yet at the same time, very vulnerable. So he writes all this sort of stuff down and decides how he wants to portray and he thinks that when we won't do Hollywood, we'll take her out of Hollywood and go somewhere that is all very natural. Unfortunately, has access to a ranch in California. They go there and for some reason end up photographing in the middle of the day, which is awful in terms of the lighting and what have you. But that dappled light gives the images a impressionistic feel which he then feels works perfectly for the session. So think about that when you're next time creating a portrait or something like that, try and get into the mind of the person, you know, think about what is this portraying of them. And it's like connecting with the people you need to connect with the process of photography as well. Connecting with the process of photography, the alchemy of photography, you know, whether in a traditional environment or a digital environment is something that that Mark feels very strongly about. He says that, you know, with the advent of digital, that we're kind of losing the tactile nature of the medium. And he says, because of this, you know, people are not following through their shoots to the end, they're not following everything through because they're not printing stuff. There's an immediacy to everything that people do that either something needs to be resolved right now, or is immediately forgotten about. And so they're not connecting with it probably. And he says that the way to connect with with the process is to make a print to be into printmaking, because at least that way you are taking photography to its natural conclusion by by creating a print, a physical object that you can at least hold. And that's something that I feel also extremely strongly about that is something that's missing from my photography. So irrespective of the genre that you photograph in, let's take the time to print some of our images. Mark Selinger's photographs have shifted and they've changed over the years. They transport me back sometimes to the days when I was a grungy student. And sometimes they, you know, they appeal to me. Now when I'm a bit more sort of relaxed and laid back, or maybe just sort of lacking in the energy, whatever they do, they inspire me, they look at me, they look at me, they reach out to me and make me want to try and recreate some of those. And I challenge you to try and take one or two of these photographs, maybe some of the simpler ones, and recreate them yourself. Explore the ideas behind there, use them as inspiration for ideas and a springboard in which you can play around with your photography that you can have ideas that are both at once serious and playful. A photographer whose work is very much playful and extremely distinctive is David Lashapel. And he is the perfect antidote to the sometimes often very overly serious world of photography. I've linked him up here. Go check him out. I know you'll love him. Thank you ever so much for being here and I'll see you next time.