For this week’s Lit Mag interview, we asked celebrity photographer extraordinaire Art Streiber some questions about his work. Streiber has photographed the likes of the Obamas, entertainers such as Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Robin Williams, Kevin Hart, Angelina Jolie, Rod Stewart and Cate Blanchett, athletes such as Usain Bolt, J.J. Watt, and Serena Williams, and entrepreneurs such as Caroline Herrera, Arianna Huffington, Travis Kalanik, Marc Goodman, and Reed Hastings. His work is not limited to portraiture, however. His advertising clients include Oakley, Cadillac, Subway, and Disneyland.
Some of Streiber’s work has been selected for the APA National Photo Competition in 2006, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Streiber lives and works in LA.
When working commercially, how do you ensure that the subject is relaxed and that the environment is comfortable? How do both the subject and your personalities affect this?
“Well, there’s a common misunderstanding that it’s really easy to photograph actors and actresses because they are used to being in front of a camera. The truth is, they are used to being in front of a motion camera, and they are used to having a role to inhabit and lines to recite and a motivation to get across and blocking to get through, meaning they got something to do with their physicality and with their brain, and when you stand them in front of a still camera, 90% of actors and actresses are lost.
And want and ask for and beg for direction. These are A-listers who are academy award winners or emmy winners, but in the absence of all of those facades, or you know, tools, they want help. So I assure them right out of the gate that I will absolutely direct them, and that I’m here to make them look fantastic. There’s an old adage in the business, which is that ‘You treat real people like celebrities and celebrities like real people.’ So I will go out of my way not to mention the obvious project, and I will never ever say upon meeting and actress or actor ‘ohmygod I love you so much i’m such a big fan.’ That is a deathwish. Because not only are you feeding the power to these people, but you’re the 35th person that has said that to them that day, so I want to enter the experience completely professionally and directorially and say ‘Hi! How are you? Great to meet you. This is what we’re doing today: We’re going to do this, then we’re going to ride the elephants, then we’re going to herd the zebras then we’re going to climb the building, and this is not going to take that long and what do you think?’ and kind of involve them in the process.”
A lot of your work involves constructed and/or very deliberately arranged sets, do you plan these sets beforehand, or at the moment?
“Well that question answers itself, I mean these are set pieces I’ve been working on and thinking about for a week or two if it’s a studio set piece, if it’s an environmental portrait like the picture of Mrs. Obama on the cover of Variety.
So I did all kinds of homework on the room we were in, which if you read my instagram, we were in like the nastiest room in the white house and there’s a huge difference between the east room and the east reception room. We were in the east reception room and the walls are wood paneling and the floors not great and the chandeliers too low. The room is not big so I did research on the locations on whether we are building a set or we are going to a location I know what these places look like. The short answer is yes, all sorts of planning and homework go into these things so that they look effortless. Even down to the grey seamless paper that Mrs. Obama is standing in front of. That width of paper does not exist, meaning you can either buy a 4 foot seamless or a 9 ft seamless but I knew that I wanted to back off just far enough so i could see the edges of the seamless, so we had a seamless cut down to 6’. Maybe 5.5. So everything is pre planned and thought of which is not to say that in the moment, in that same room we said let’s photograph her against the windows. So I have to be optimally prepared and optimally flexible.”
Do you often think about where your photographs will end up, such as on a mantel in someone’s living room, or on social media? Or does this not take up too much mental space?
“I am always considering the end use but generally the end use is already prescribed, meaning I know this it is a cover or a movie poster; I do have end use in mind. I’m never thinking of how it will look on someone’s mantel. That’s never in my brain and I don’t think it’s in any artist’s pre consideration. I think it’s like ‘this is the best picture of this person at this time.’ I am assigned so I really have to make sure I am fulfilling the needs of my clients.”
How do historical photographs influence you? Do you draw a lot of inspiration from other photographs?
“Absolutely. The answer is yes. I have extensive notebooks full of picture researching extensively. I draw from old photographs and from the past. A lot of times I emulate some of those classics, pay homage to some of those classics, and I’m sure it’s nostalgia, but there seems to be in a lot of photos from the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, a lot of what I would call purity. They don’t feel contrived. They feel light and pure and without a lot of artifice and they feel effortless. So that effortlessness, that purity, that whimsy, that ease, I am always trying to emulate. I am attempting to create something timeless, I am attempting to create an image that stands the test of time, so that if I throw out to you some iconic people from the 20th century your brain is going to start thinking of them in terms of images you’ve seen of them. That’s what your brain does. If I can take one of those photos where someday someone says ‘Ryan Gosling’ or ‘Neil Patrick Harris’ or ‘George Clooney’ or one of those, whoever it is the thing that comes up in their brain is a picture I took, that would be huge. I would be incredibly honored to have created that photograph.”
Article and interview composed by Aisha Glenn and Audrey Kalman
