Albert Watson is a 76-year-old Scottish photographer who blends art, fashion and commercial photography into some of the most iconic images ever seen. Albert Watson is considered to be one of the world’s most successful and prolific photographers since he began his career in 1970. The Photo Industry Bible named Watson as one of the 20 most powerful photographers of all time, along with Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.Hamiltons GalleryAlbert Watson has been one of the most popular and most successful fashion photographers in the last four decades. The Hamiltons gallery states that Watson has a very distinctive and striking style to his work and ‘His way of lighting subjects, especially the fetish objects and portraits, creates a nearly meditative atmosphere in the photographs.’ Watson’s distinctive work was first noticed by an art director of Max Factor who offered him his first test shoot which then followed them onto buying two of his images.
Watson’s career started to take off when he had to commute from Los Angeles to New York often because he started to work with high end magazines such as Mademoiselle, GQ and Harper’s Bazaar. This then followed with him working with vogue which is when his career really started to take off. London Sunday times 2004 By Scott AthorneScott Athorne starts the article by explaining how photography is not about reality due to photo editing, styling and cropping. It is becoming more and more common due to photoshop. Athorne suggests that pictures are not real and are expressing lies.
Furthermore, this leads to Athorne discusses Albert Watson and how he is ‘One of the biggest and most original fibbers of all’. Athorne then contradicts himself by saying how beautiful and well composed Watson’s work is, which leads to a discussion about Watson’s photographs of Mick Jagger and Watson responds with saying the photo could be of anyone but the final image is always the one which shows power. Interview about Watsons lifeAlbert Watson is questioned about his Mick Jagger double exposure shot. Albert tells us that the original plan for this shoot was Mick Jagger driving the Corvette with a leopard in the front seat but it did not go to plan. A quote from Albert Watson in the interview is ‘Nowadays with Photoshop you would just do a shot of a leopard and a shot of Mick Jagger and then splice them together in the car, but back then of course you did it for real.
‘ This is Watson agreeing with what Scott Athorne wrote in the London Sunday Times in 2004 about photoshop not being reality. Although Athorne was suggesting Watson is ‘One of the biggest and most original fibbers of all’ but in the interview Watson explains how he had to put a partition in the car to protect Jagger from the leopard which suggests he did not use photoshop and although it was staged it was reality and not created on a computer screen. In conclusion there are many different opinions on Watsons work some negatives and some positives. After researching an interview with Watson, we found out that his work wasn’t produced on photoshop and was indeed real and not a lie which some journalists state in their newspapers.
