Albert WatsonOBE (born 1942) is a Scottish fashion, celebrity and art photographer. He has shot over 100 covers of Vogue and 40 covers of Rolling Stone magazine since the mid-1970s, and has created major advertising campaigns for clients such as Prada, Chanel and Levis. Watson has also taken some well-known photographs, from the portrait of Steve Jobs that appeared on the cover of his biography, a photo of Alfred Hitchcock holding a plucked goose, and a portrait of a nude Kate Moss taken on her 19th birthday.
Watson's prints of his photography are exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide. Photo District News named him one of the 20 most influential photographers of all time, along with Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, among others.[1] Watson has won numerous honors, including a Lucie Award,[2] a Grammy Award, the Hasselblad Masters Award and three ANDY Awards,.[3] He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2010.[4] Queen Elizabeth II awarded Watson an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in June 2015 for 'services to photography'.[5]
Watson emigrated in 1970 to the United States, beginning his career in Los Angeles and then moving in 1976 to New York City.[citation needed]
In 1970, Watson moved to the United States with his wife, Elizabeth, who got a job as an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles, where Watson began shooting photos, mostly as a hobby. Later that year, Watson was introduced to an art director at Max Factor, who offered him his first test session, from which the company purchased two images. Watson’s distinctive style garnered the attention of American and European fashion magazines such as Mademoiselle, GQ and Harper’s Bazaar, and he began commuting between Los Angeles and New York. Albert photographed his first celebrity in 1973, a portrait of Alfred Hitchcock holding a dead goose with a ribbon around its neck, for that year's Harper's Bazaar's Christmas issue. The image has become one of Watson's most famous portraits on a list that now includes hundreds of well-known photographs of movie stars, rock stars, rappers, supermodels, even President Clinton and Queen Elizabeth II.[6] In 1975, Watson won a Grammy Award for the photography on the cover of the Mason Proffit album "Come and Gone," and in 1976, he landed his first job for Vogue. With his move to New York that same year, his career took off.
In addition to photography for magazines, Watson created the images for hundreds of successful advertising campaigns for major corporations, such as the GAP, Levi’s, Revlon and Chanel, and he has directed more than 100 TV commercials and photographed dozens of posters for major Hollywood movies, such as Kill Bill, Memoirs of a Geisha, and The Da Vinci Code.[citation needed] All the while, Watson has spent much of his time working on personal projects, taking photographs from his travels and interests, from Marrakech to Las Vegas to the Orkney Islands. Much of this work, along with his well-known portraits and fashion photographs, has been shown in museum and gallery shows around the world, and Watson's limited-edition prints have become highly sought after by collectors. In 2007, a large-format Watson print of a Kate Moss photograph taken in 1993 sold at Christie's in London for $108,000, five times the low pre-sale estimate.[7] The art critic Francis Hodgson, in a gallery review of Watson for the Financial Times of London, called the prints "astonishing".[citation needed] Watson is regarded[according to whom?] as a master print-maker and has lectured on the subject at numerous venues, including PhotoPlus International Expo in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and Le Recontres de la Photographie Art Festival in Arles, France.[citation needed]
Watson has had numerous solo museum shows around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art in Milan, Italy; the KunstHausWien in Vienna, Austria; the City Art Centre in Edinburgh; the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, Belgium; the NRW Forum in Düsseldorf, Germany; Fotografiska, in Stockholm, Sweden; the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany; and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia, among others.[3] Watson was the first Western photographer to be exhibited at the Lianzhou Museum of Photography in Lianzhou, China, with an exhibition in December 2017. Watson’s photographs have also been shown in many group shows at museums, including the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, the International Center of Photography in New York, and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany.[8] His photographs are included in the permanent collections at the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[8]
Watson has published several books, including Cyclops (1994, Little, Brown),[9]Maroc (1998, Rizzoli),[10] "Albert Watson" (2007, Phaidon).[11] Two books were released in the fall of 2010: "UFO: Unified Fashion Objectives," a look at 40 years of selected Watson fashion photographs, and "Strip Search," a two-volume set of hundreds of photographs Watson took in Las Vegas. There is also Kaos (2017, Taschen). In addition, many catalogs of Watson’s photographs have been published for shows, including "The Vienna Album" (2005).[12]
Watson received an honorary degree from the University of Dundee in 1995[13] and was inducted into the Scottish Fashion Awards Hall of Fame in 2006.[13] His first exhibition in his homeland, Frozen, was held at the City Art Centre of Edinburgh in 2006.[14][15]
Edward Quinn (1920–1997) was born in Ireland. He lived and worked as a photographer from the 1950s, on the Côte d'Azur, during the "golden fifties" the playground of the celebrities from the world of show biz, art and business.
Nicholas David Gordon Knight is a British fashion photographer and founder and director of SHOWstudio.com. He is an honorary professor at University of the Arts London and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the same university. He has produced books of his work including retrospectives Nicknight (1994) and Nick Knight (2009). In 2016, Knight's 1992 campaign photograph for fashion brand Jil Sander was sold by Phillips auction house at the record-breaking price of HKD 2,360,000.
Guy Bourdin, was a French artist and fashion photographer known for his highly stylized and provocative images. From 1955, Bourdin worked mostly with Vogue as well as other publications including Harper's Bazaar. He shot ad campaigns for Chanel, Charles Jourdan, Pentax and Bloomingdale's.
Erwin Olaf Springveld, professionally known as Erwin Olaf, was a Dutch photographer from Hilversum. Time magazine described his work as straddling "the worlds of commercial, art and fashion photography at once".
Martin Schoeller is a New York-based photographer whose style of "hyper-detailed close ups" is distinguished by similar treatment of all subjects whether they are celebrities or unknown. His most recognizable work are his portraits, shot with similar lighting, backdrop, and tone. His work appears in "National Geographic Magazine", The New Yorker, "New York Times Magazine", Time, GQ, and Vogue. He has been a staff photographer at The New Yorker since 1999.
Saul Leiter was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography.
Lillian Bassman was an American photographer and painter.
Stephen Gill is a British experimental, conceptual and documentary photographer, whose work has been exhibited internationally along with his books that are a key aspect to Gill’s practice.
Nick Brandt is an English photographer. Brandt's work generally focuses on the rapidly disappearing natural world, as a result of environmental destruction, climate change and humans' actions.
Beate Gütschow is a contemporary German artist. She lives and works in Cologne and Berlin.
Miles Aldridge is a British fashion photographer and artist.
Ina Jang is a photographer based out of Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA in photography in 2010 from the School of the Visual Arts in New York City. In 2012, she completed the school's MPS program in fashion photography. Ina Jang is represented by Foley Gallery.
Jun Ahn (안준) is a South Korean photographer, known primarily for her Self-Portrait series of photographs taken from atop high buildings. She has worked extensively in the United States, particularly in New York, as well as South Korea.
Sarah Moon HonFRPS is a French photographer. Initially a model, she turned to fashion photography in the 1970s. Since 1985, she has concentrated on gallery and film work.
Siegfried Hansen is a German street photographer known for his work in Hamburg. He was a member of the In-Public street photography collective.
Joachim Baldauf is a German photographer and publisher. He currently lives in Berlin.
Volker Hinz was a German photographer. Early in his career he became known for his political reportage and travel stories; now his portraits of artists, authors, fashion designers, sports men and politicians are better known.
Paolo Ventura is an Italian photographer, artist and set designer based in Milan.
Ola Kolehmainen is a Finnish photographer.
Franz Christian Gundlach was a German photographer, gallery owner, collector, curator and founder.
"Exhibition in Vienna". Archived from the original on 7 September 2008. Retrieved 17 February 2007.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) 29 September 2005 – 29 January 2006 (in German)
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