to say that this, my second shoot of hugh hefner, was brief would be an understatement. the entire session lasted four minutes and three seconds, including two setups in two locations in the playboy mansion – a total of 26 frames. i first photographed hef for time magazine about five years ago. this time, for german newsmagazine der spiegel, i noticed the years catching up to the 85 year old hef. he seemed more frail, a little more unsteady, and he complained of a bad back. though when the lights and camera hit him the guy just looked great. he’s an icon for a reason. he’s got a charisma that’s hard to deny.

late last night paul sent me a link to a story about the marines involved in the haditha massacre. it seems they have all been cleared, except for one.

as a bit of background, this is from the NPR website:

Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the leader of a Marine squad that killed 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha, faces a military hearing Thursday at Camp Pendleton. He is charged with 18 counts of unpremeditated murder in the largest criminal case to emerge from the war in Iraq.

On the morning of November 19, 2005, as Sgt. Wuterich’s squad approached Haditha, a roadside bomb killed a fellow marine. Wuterich said the dismembered body is a sight he will never forget.

About 100 yards away, Wuterich, who had never been in combat before, saw a taxi with five young men in it. In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Wuterich said the men were ordered out of the car and “as they were coming around, they started to take off. So I shot at them.”

this is staff sergeant frank wuterich, with his daughter, talia, at their home in camp pendleton, california. it was shot on september 5th, 2006, and was one of the strangest and most interesting assignments i’d ever been involved in. the story was for TIME magazine, and they seemed to have an exclusive on it. the assignment was strange because of the exclusive – i found out about the shoot maybe a week before it happened, and was instructed to tell no one any details about it whatsoever. it was a big story, and breaking news, and the more excited i got about it the harder it was to refrain from talking about it. i started to feel like i was in a spy movie. i couldn’t tell my friends or family or my girlfriend anything about where i was going or what i was doing, not until it was published. when i was processing the pictures after the shoot i had to hide them from people so no one could know the subject matter until the magazine came out. we were sneaking into the base, so i couldn’t even bring an assistant on the shoot.

i drove down to san diego, picked up the writer at a hotel and went over to camp pendleton. we had a cover, in case the security guard at the gate stopped us. we were officially going to see someone else. the military wasn’t too keen on wuterich talking to the press. but i drove up to the gate and even though i had a big car full of gear they just waved us on through. i guess we got lucky. he was living in a house on base, with his wife, marisol, and two daughters. marisol was pregnant at the time. frank was supposed to be out of the military at that point, but they were keeping him in just until they figured out what to do with him. i guess two years later it’s still ongoing.

i was really surprised to find a relatively normal looking house, and even more surprised to see that it was just frank and his family there to talk to us. no lawyer, no official military liaison. still, he was expressly forbidden by his lawyer to discuss specifics of that day in haditha, so instead we got to talk to him as a human being, not as a soldier. it’s difficult to reconcile any of the details of what happened in iraq with this guy i saw sitting on the couch in front of me. he looked like any normal, clean cut guy in his mid twenties. he played guitar. he liked rock and jazz, he was an honor student in high school. he loved his wife and his kids. he joined the military in part, he said, because he wanted to be in the band.

now it seems that wuterich has filed a lawsuit against congressman murtha for libel and defamation. murtha was instrumental in bringing the haditha massacre to the public consciousness. the charges against wuterich now stand at 12 counts of voluntary manslaughter. this is all brings to my mind the idea of the craziness of war – how it’s all about semantics. it’s okay to kill people, just so long as you do it according to the rules we make up. and if you don’t follow the rules just make sure nobody finds out. then again, i don’t know how these soldiers do it. regardless of your politics, whether you think we should be in this war or not, when you look at the situation it’s hard not to view it as an even tie for last place. is anybody actually winning here? in a situation that’s designed where you have to kill people to progress, is there a way not to come in last? you’re sending kids off into hell, they’re scared out of their minds and miserable, they generally don’t speak the language and everything probably looks like a threat. if ever there was a lose-lose situation, this has got to be it.

when TIME was laying out the original article they were initially going to go with my first select – the B&W shot below. it was to run a full page, no text, and i was really thrilled. it was great space, a great layout and i was really pleased with the picture. it had a quiet that i quite liked. then the editors (not the photo dept.) started second-guessing the picture. the writer said “a marine would never lower his head” and they started worrying that maybe the picture made wuterich seem guilty. maybe it made too strong a statement. i kind of thought that was the point (not an assumption of guilt, but of making a statement of some kind), and tried to argue it, but eventually the photo was swapped out for an alternate of him looking straight ahead. it was okay, but nowhere near as good in my opinion. still, the story got good space in the magazine, which is always satisfying, and it was a unique experience to be involved in. my sincere thanks, as always, go to martha bardach at TIME, a continual champion for photographers.

some relevant links:

the original news story corporal bennett sent me that prompted this post.

the original TIME profile of wuterich in which my pictures appeared.

the wikipedia entry on frank wuterich.

frank wuterich’s home page.

wuterich on 60 minutes – this is long, but it’s really worth it.

an NPR news story on wuterich.

the haditha story broke when an eyewitness to the attacks reported what had happened. this is a youtube video interview with one of the eyewitnesses.

(the opinions expressed in all these links are, of course, not necessarily reflective of our beliefs here at msgphoto.com. if you have a problem with them, blame them, not me.)

last weekend lili haydn played with roger waters at the close of the coachella music festival. i was not in attendance at coachella, but this likely has a lot more to do with my dislike of the great outdoors than it does with music. i like roger waters. i listened to shine on you crazy diamond parts 1 through 14 over and over again when i was fifteen years old and hoped it might make me deep and thoughtful. i watched the wall at home by myself and thought it was a bit messed up. later on i learned that not being on drugs was the problem with my enjoyment of that movie, though i did have a drug-thought-moment when it prompted me to first consider that little children with british accents sound creepy. like little tiny college professors who drool and bite things.

anyway. . . lili haydn is an amazing violinist who i’ve seen all over the place for many years. anytime some rock band needed a violinist who could shred, and also be hip and beautiful at the same time they’d call lili. i was worried initially that this shoot wouldn’t go through due to a nasty publicist-enforced contract, but everything seemed to work out okay ultimately, and things went off without a hitch. lili couldn’t have been more gracious. even gave me an orange for the ride home, which i ate while stuck in traffic on the 5 south. thanks, lili.

this was shot for LA citybeat, and is likely among the last thing i’ll be shooting for them. all of you photographers out there have a publication like this one. that is to say the pay is horrible, the exposure is negligible, the subjects are often great (i.e., not just guys in ties in conference rooms)  and usually you get conned into working for them because you have a buddy who is the editor – or the art director – or the music editor. don’t object, i know you do this. the fact is, everybody knows you do this. and they expect it. yes, all of us photographers have to make a living, pay rent and buy food and CF cards or whatnot, and even though we angst over running a business the truth is that most of us are terrible at it. for myself, i’ve gotten a lot better at turning down obviously bad deals. and now, with some shakedowns that took place at citybeat over the last couple weeks the chains have finally been broken. the last personal connection i have to that mag has been fired and/or resigned. so there is no longer anything obligating me to do a cheapo shoot at the last minute for someone calling in a favor.

truth be told, though. . . i might miss some of the subjects.

thanks, lili, for being my last one for this paper. it was a pleasure.

abigail breslin (star of little miss sunshine), photographed at the four seasons hotel in beverly hills. we waited around for three hours, and were promised a full fifteen minutes with abigail. i looked at the time stamp on my camera’s metadata. the publicists shut us down after six minutes and thirty-six seconds. this was, of course, a full three minutes after they first started demanding we ‘wrap it up’.

as photographers we learn early on to pick our battles. there are some things you can change, there are some things you can have an effect on, and there are definitely some things you cannot. there are a great many obstacles in the way of a good result on any given shoot. part of the job of the photographer, of course, is to overcome those obstacles. high on the list of obstacles are two things: time and cooperation.

on a celebrity shoot time and cooperation are controlled by the publicity industrial complex. the subject’s handlers. the ‘Bad Cop’ to their ‘Good Cop’. the handlers are there to make sure that all the bad news is delivered through them so the celeb can still be a stand up guy and shrug and pretend that it’s out of their hands. time and cooperation are in the hands of the publicists, and publicists are responsible for ruining more stories than they actually help. this is because over the years the role of the publicist has changed dramatically. ever wonder why celebrity and music photography in the 60′s and 70′s is so good? one word: access. no retouching, very often no lights, even. but there was access. there was the general feeling that everyone – the magazine, the photographers, the record companies, the celebs, the studios and yes, even the publicists were all in it together for the same goal: to make something really special that people would want to see. photographers actually got to see a real part of a celeb’s life, and those lives were allowed to be documented, not like today when the predominant celebrity image is essentially a manufactured advertisement.

but oh, how times have changed. now the primary function of the publicist is to block from view specifically the kinds of things that might make a story interesting or special. it seems as though their primary function is not to facilitate a good result, but to remove any shred of inconvenience from their clients. unfortunately most things in life that are worth doing or watching or participating in are also somewhat inconvenient. and take time. and patience. and access. and cooperation. rare commodities at the moment.

are all publicists bad? no, of course not. i’ve met one or two that have actually been helpful. debby hambrick certainly deserves a mention. she helped tremendously with the shoot for the hold steady for the cover of the village voice. sharrin summers at hollywood records made my shoot with DJ z-trip way better than it could’ve been without her. my good friend brian used to be a music publicist here in los angeles, and we would get into good natured arguments. me saying that he was inherently evil because of it, and him defending the profession. why was i friends with a publicist? well, we were friends at age 13, before i was a photographer, and before i knew he would become soulless on purpose. a while later he became the editor of a short-lived magazine in LA and a few weeks after that called me to take it all back. it seems as an editor he ran into the same thing from other publicists that i had always told him about. it hurts to be so right, so much of the time.

i want to like publicists. i really do. i want them to be helpful. the ones that are helpful make life so much easier and absolutely do contribute to getting a better photo, or making a better story for the magazine. but it’s hard to overlook the teeming masses who just show up, order room service (though not for you), text message their friends, and refuse to validate parking all the while demanding that you WRAP IT UP three minutes in to the shoot. it’s hard to overlook all the missed opportunities with really interesting subjects where it could’ve been so much better had the publicity industrial complex simply not been involved.

in the case of abigail breslin, the publicity industrial complex almost killed the story entirely. this was shot for TIME magazine’s 10 questions column. that’s where readers submit their questions. aside from dramatically slicing down the time we had with her to take pictures, the publicist immediately cut out all the interesting questions from the poor reporter’s list. (my favorite: who would win in a fight between you and dakota fanning? i’d like to bet on abigail, but i fear that dakota might be ruthless and scrappy) what we were left with were softball questions along the lines of what’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?

in fact, the publicist-approved questions were so uninteresting that TIME almost axed the story entirely. is that the result the publicist wants? is it so important to avoid controversy that you would chance pissing off and alienating a national magazine? i mean, this is an eleven year old girl. does she need an entourage? her mother was with her, as she should be, but are the PR cops necessary?

it’s very disheartening. mostly it’s disheartening when i get an assignment to photograph someone i admire or am a fan of, only to have the experience soured by their publicists. like i said, everyone, i’m really trying to like all of you. make it a little easier on us. you might be surprised at how the results improve.

we all know that life in the photo world has been speeding up lately. where we used to wait for labs to develop our film and for fedex to deliver it to the client, now everything happens at T1 speeds. when i first got a modem on my apple IIc in 1985 i had a 300 baud modem and at that point i could type faster than the internet. now is a different story. (actually, given the shoddy service i’ve been receiving lately from charter maybe i could still type faster than the internet – thanks, charter!)

now it seems like all these photo-blogs face similar issues. we’re all in a mad scramble to update constantly to keep the attention of the readers. nevermind, of course, that these readers are most likely just other photographers and not those mythical art buyers who will swoop down and give us that six figure job we’ve been waiting for. but here’s the problem: when i do a shoot for a magazine what i’m licensing to them is the right of first publication. usually this means i don’t put any of the pictures from the shoot on my site until after that magazine makes their selections and goes to press. sometimes, though, this is many weeks after the shoot takes place. so i wait ’til i have the all-clear. the people who are hiring me are paying to produce the shoot, and for this it’s understood that they get the first crack at publishing any pictures from the take.

i’ve just assumed this is common courtesy, and a way to conduct this business in good faith. still, i frequently see other photographers post images from same-day shoots long before the magazine ever has a chance to publish them. what gives here? is this okay, and i’m just being a sucker? i’ve polled a few of the photo editors i’ve worked for on this issue and they seem pretty evenly split. some don’t mind, some would prefer i wait to post anything until after the mag comes out.

on some of the monthly pubs, though, it can  be a long agonizing wait. digital is a wonderful thing, and the availability of new information on the internet is a wonderful thing, but it makes waiting for gratification all the more arduous and strange.

in the meantime, here are a couple of old pictures from my backyard. birds on the telephone wires between the house and the garage. taken for no reason at all, and thus available for public consumption.

well, the hearts site is now up and (mostly) running. please visit it at:

www.heartkidsproject.org

also, you can watch a slideshow of pictures from the book, and hear me talk about it here.

more updates coming soon, just waiting on certain shoots to go to press before i’m authorized to post out-takes here. . .

i’m happy to say that the final files for the hearts book (My Heart vs. the Real World) are on their way to the press. our official release date is february 1st, 2008, but it seems to already be listed on amazon!

hell, i even have a sales rank:

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,575,848 in Books

so, yeah. the book is coming out early next year, but you can pre-order it now, from amazon or even from the publisher’s website. we should have books in the warehouse for pre-sales soon. man, it’s been a long strange road to this one.

look for a dedicated website coming soon – and more promotional activities.

thanks as always to bill smith for his selfless efforts and impeccable good taste.