I realise, with hindsight, that when I began the tedious squabble with the
assistants crowded around the high-profile editorial photographer Mark
Seliger – How much time can we have with him? Forty seconds? Five days? –
that this was a vital primer for what was to follow. For, when you visit
Planet Celebrity, like an incoming astronaut you have to pass through the
fiery atmosphere first. Once you are there, time will bend, the natives will
have incomprehensible motives, and everything will just be about “where
you’re at”.
I was visiting Seliger at his studio on the outskirts of Greenwich Village in
New York because here, in 1997, in a corner of the mid-19th-century
warehouse-cum-stable that he had then acquired, he had discovered a lift
shaft that seemed to have some possibilities. “I didn’t need a horse
elevator,” he said, quite reasonably. So he tore it out and created a
stairwell. He left the exposed brickwork, some fittings, such as the rusty
ladder and the girder that jackknifes across the space, and he let in
beautifully diffused light through windows that have yellowed with rust
stains.
He came to be fond of the space and began to invite celebrities who had
arrived for photo shoots in the studio downstairs to step into the stairwell
for another, more soulful, shot. Then he started inviting people there
specially. “I asked people whom I’d always wanted to photograph,” he said.
“I asked Bill Irwin first – he’s one of the last vaudevillians.”
Irwin came in February 2002 and posed hanging from the ladder with a bendy
elegance. Then came the naked back of the supermodel Heidi Klum (“it was
almost this idea of the body as a container, a kind of X-ray”), then the
composer Philip Glass (seated at a miniature piano like a clumsy giant),
then Ralph Lauren and David Bryne. Over the next few years Seliger shot all
kinds in his stairwell, from Mick Jagger to the Right Rev Desmond Tutu.
Some brought props (“I thought it would be kind of interesting to do Jeff
Koons with a mask on, but he said: ‘That’s not really where I’m at right
now. How about if I have a blow-up lobster?’ ”). But many just came as they
were, ready to be photographed by one of the best in the business under the
same simple conditions.
Michael J. Fox posed as a boxer with Muhammad Ali: “They both have
Parkinson’s,” Seliger said, “and my Dad had Parkinson’s. I’d worked with
Michael for years and I’d never photographed Ali. I wanted them to share a
stage – you know, the idea of putting up a good fight.”
In rather different circumstances, Johnny Knoxville, of Jackass, came and was
shot while hanging from hooks attached to his chest (he also threw up
several times, having been out past his bedtime). And Giorgio Armani
visited: “A lot of the restrictions had to do with time,” Seliger said.
“Giorgio Armani had only 12 minutes and, really, it was the most lovely 12
minutes I’ve ever spent with anyone.” Finally, when he felt he was done,
Seliger gathered the prints all together in a book. This week he opens an
exhibition of them at the Richard Goodall Gallery in Manchester.
It was inspired by the stairwell, of course, but also in part by Seliger’s
medium. “We started producing platinum palladium prints,” he said.
“It’s a beautiful turn-of-the-century process where you make your own paper.
You take actual metal and developers’ contrast agents, and you make an
emulsion and paint it on to watercolour paper. Then you make a contact print
of the enlarged negative and expose it to an ultraviolet light. It has a
particular sensitivity in terms of bringing out an exaggerated greyscale.”
Simple, really. And that was the point, for Seliger’s usual style is all
fuelled up and fabulously baroque. He has posed Chris Rock with his head in
an aquarium; Bill Murray singing into the trunk of an elephant; and Drew
Barrymore as a dissolute Alice in Wonderland blowing smoke-rings. Indeed,
the beauty of Planet Seliger is that it is a wonderland of bottomless
budgets, beach locations and Alist stars.
Born in Houston, Texas, in 1959, Seliger began his ascent working for Rolling
Stone. He still has something of the rocker in him, and even heads up a
decent country rock band called Rusty Truck. He can melt into sweet camp at
times, but his complexion speaks of many nights of hard fun, and maybe it
was this devotion to the lifestyle that won him a contract with Condé Nast
in 2001.
Since then he’s been a regular among the jet-set demimonde, and the day I
visited him seemed like any other: as we sat by his rooftop Jacuzzi, Minnie
Driver showed up to be poured into various outfits for the next shoot. She
poked her head out of the window at one point and asked what the plan was.
“It’s just all about where you’re at with your music,” Seliger assured her,
as if he barely knew what she was there for. “Oh, right,” she said, “that’ll
be in my pyjamas, then.”
I began to wonder whether this pose of negligent disarray might be Seliger’s
genius – that while assistants might indeed be clock-watching and
quality-controlling, the man himself gives you the impression that all is
well and we can do, well, just whatever. Of course, that can change if the
personalities don’t behave themselves. “Mikhail Baryshnikov was a little
problematic at first,” he said, “because he didn’t want it to be dance – he
wanted it to be a little more, as he called it, ‘lifestyle’. But eventually
he figured out what he wanted to do.” This was dance – which, conveniently,
was what Seliger wanted.
Yet even in explaining decisions already made, Seliger sometimes talks as if
he just tossed a coin. “I don’t try to get too intellectual about the way
things are going,” he said. “I just say this is what I’m doing right now and
I grab a camera.”
In 2005 Seliger made the papers when Vanity Fair published an article about
the infighting on the set of a shoot he did involving the stars of Desperate
Housewives.
According to the writer, Marcia Cross, who plays Bree, “lost it” when Teri
Hatcher (Susan) was moved to the centre of the shot. Hatcher’s selection of
a red swimsuit also proved vexatious. Publicists and personal assistants
descended, and tempers further frayed. The story revealed just how vapid and
overblown modern celebrity had become.
At the time Seliger said: “A lot of times you’re unaware of the side stuff.
You’re working with incredible time restraints. The great thing is that for
the most part people leave me alone. That’s a lovely thing, but it took
years to establish.”
I wondered whether the stairwell pictures were designed to get closer to the
soul of the star? He wouldn’t say; instead he just said something strangely
random that suggested that his pictures were little more than flash cards.
“Well, we’re so used to the power of celebrity now - being a mass of
pop-culture whores! – that we know what people look like, we just want to
see their faces. It’s not about the great experience of a photograph any
more.”
Even when I asked him about the roster of sitters, his rationales seemed to
flip-flop. “A lot of these people you would never get to know if you
weren’t in the hub,” he said. Yet earlier he had said: “I saw this
interesting documentation of people in pop culture who were maybe not
mainstream, maybe peripheral, less out in the limelight . . . ” (If anyone
sees Mick Jagger, please tell him he’s peripheral.)
Eventually, I realised that it was fruitless to grill Seliger on his motives.
His genius is in his intuition and his charm, which are probably as
inscrutable to him as they are to anyone else. As he says himself, it’s all
a bit mysterious. “Life is short and a lot of these people are, you know,
they’re in their . . . they’re kind of like . . . either their
prime or . . . there are moments when you never know what’s going to
happen.” Does it work? It just depends, I guess, where you’re at.
— Mark Seliger: In My Stairwell is at Richard Goodall Gallery, 103 High
Street, Manchester (0161-834 3330), from Oct 25 to Nov 24
Mapplethorpe movie
The personal and professional relationship between the photographer Robert
Mapplethorpe and the curator and collector Sam Wagstaff is the subject of
Black White + Gray, showing at The Times BFI London Film Festival on Sun, at
6.30pm, at NFT3, and Oct 24, at 9pm, at the NFT Studio (020-7928 3232; timesonline.co.uk/lff)
