ScreenSpace @ Smashbox Studios Launches

Introducing SCREEN SPACE — A monthly streaming exhibit at Smashbox Studios West Hollywood and Culver City. Featuring the most sought after photographers and directors in the world, this innovative celebration will include slideshows, bios, and exclusive interviews with our featured subjects for each showcase.

Presenting Andrew Eccles as our first Screenspace Photographer. His work will be on display from July 1 -31, 2011. Catch the exclusive interview with the amazing photographer after the jump…

Andrew Eccles

Andrew Eccles has been a professional photographer in New York City since 1987. He’s shot models, athletes, musicians and prominent figures for numerous editorials and advertising clients. Eccles’ images have graced hundreds of magazine covers internationally including Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Time, Life, GQ, Esquire, Newsweek, ESPN, New York Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. For the past 10 years, he’s documented the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, capturing the dancers anywhere from performances and behind the scenes to stunning portraiture and action shots leading to his book, “Ailey Ascending: A Portrait in Motion” with a preface by Judith Jamison. The New York Times honored Eccles by selecting him to shoot the cover of their millennium time capsule issue featuring Robin Williams which is scheduled to be opened in the year 3000. Corporate clients including Buena Vista Films, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Miramax, New Line Cinema, Warner Brothers Pictures, ABC, NBC, TNT, TBS, Sony Music and Atlantic Records all call upon Andrew for movie posters, advertising, publicity and CD cover packaging. Over the span of his 20-year career, Eccles has received various awards including Society of Publication Designers and Communication Arts and is marked as one of the 100 most important people in the industry by American Photo Magazine.

SCREENSPACE INTERVIEW

SMASHBOX STUDIOS: From your body of work, it seems like you’ve photographed a lot, or maybe even most celebrities. Who was your first? (No punn!)

ANDREW ECCLES: I’m glad that my body of work creates that illusion, haha. Sometimes it does feel like I’ve photographed everyone, but if you look close enough, you won’t see Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts or President Obama in the mix, so there’s still a few on the hit list. Believe it or not, “my first” was Vincent Price. I was studying photography, I really didn’t know anything yet but somehow got roped into shooting stills on a film in Toronto that he starred in.

SB: What was the film about?
AE: It was a documentary on Dracula and he was the host. It was shot in a castle and I think I was paid $50.00. The director handed me his Hassleblad and said, “Here, shoot with this”. I somehow figured out how to load the film. When the Director yelled, “stills!” I ran out on set with my tripod, crawled up a little ladder (Vincent Price was very tall) and tried to take a photo.

SB: You tried to take the photo? Sounds like you weren’t too familiar just yet.
AE: I had handled a Hassleblad only once. No matter how many times I pushed the button, the camera wouldn’t fire. Mr. Price reached towards me and pulled out the dark slide. I was mortified but managed to fire off 12 frames. Six months later, one of the pictures ended up on the cover of Cinema Canada magazine.

SB: Well done! You’re photographic series with Brooke Shields is fantastic. What have been some of the inspirations behind shooting her?
AE: Brooke and I met for the first time on a shoot for In Style Magazine in ’96. I was TERRIFIED. Here’s this incredibly beautiful woman, arguably the most famous model of all time that’s been photographed by every great photographer there ever was… and then there’s me. What a mismatch! Once my nervousness subsided, we actually took some pretty decent pictures and ended up getting along really well.

SB: Did you then shoot her for other projects since you got along so famously?
AE: Yes! She requested me a couple of times for various shoots, and we soon became friends. We collaborated on some wonderful assignments including a fashion piece for the New York Sunday Times Magazine where we styled Brooke as TV stars from the past. We made her up to look like all 3 Charlie’s Angels, Sam from Bewitched, That Girl, the girls from Gilligan’s Island and Lucille Ball. We started getting together on our own without any clients and shot some things for ourselves. We’re still great friends and have made a pact to continue working together until she’s old and wrinkly.

SB: Where are you most, New York or LA?
AE: I jokingly say that I live in seat 11A, somewhere over the Grand Canyon! I spend so much time flying back and forth between the two. I live in New York but there are times, like last week, where I’ll travel to LA twice in 7 days. Sometimes I’ll go on the first flight in the morning, shoot something, and return home on the red eye. Most people commute to work for an hour and work for 8, for me it’s often the other way around.

SB: Busy Bee. Now for some funny time — The NY times selected you to shoot Robin Williams cover for their millennium time capsule issue. How did you ever keep a straight face?
AE: One of the best things about this job is that on occasion, you’re given an exclusive glimpse into something remarkable that few others get to see. The afternoon I spent in San Francisco with Robin Williams was one of those occasions.

SB: Highlights, please!
AE: We set out a table covered with props, all items that were genuinely going to be put inside a time capsule. Many of them were common place objects…. and just let Robin loose! He was acting the part of someone in the year 3000 that had just opened the time capsule and found these things. It was hysterical! The entire crew was in tears.

SB: Do you have a favorite image of him from that shoot?
AE: Out of the hundreds of frames we shot, my favorite is the one of him holding the flip-flop.

SB: Let’s get a little deeper: When was that moment when you knew you were a photographer?
AE: This is the toughest question I’ve ever been asked in an interview. I don’t know if there was any single moment where I had an epiphany, “I’m a Photographer!”. I think it was a gradual process that took years to come to terms with and accept. Being a photographer is such an emotional roller coaster: one minute you feel brilliant, the next you feel like you suck. I guess when I finally believed I had made it and that I deserved that title was after I had been shooting for a few years — I went to a newsstand and noticed that my pictures were on 6 different national magazine covers within the same month. I thought “OK, I couldn’t have pulled the wool over THIS many people’s eyes!”

SB: It must have felt amazing. On that, who were some of your mentors when you started to progressed in your career? I know you’ve worked with photographers like Annie Leibovitz…
AE: The two people in my life that had a strong influence on my wanting to become a photographer early on were my father, who was a really good amateur shooter, and Father Tom, a Reverend at a boarding school I attended in Hawaii when I was a teen. Father Tom would use some of us [students] as subjects and create these very surreal, disturbing large format black and white portraits. They were really amazing photos. Then later Annie ended up being as close to a true mentor of mine as there was and by assisting her I gained enough experience to go out and try it on my own.

SB: Alvin Ailey. Your book, “A Portrait In Motion”, is on my desk right now. What inspired you to document this top-notch dance company for 10 whole years?
AE: In 1989, a magazine gave me an assignment to photograph Alvin Ailey. I had heard of the man and his Dance Company, but only vaguely. The portraits were very stirring despite the session being very brief. It was the final portrait taken of Alvin; He passed away 3 months later to the day.

SB: What happened next?
AE: In ’94, I was asked to photograph the company’s new director Judith Jameson. The pictures from that session were successful too, and in ’98 Ms. Jamison invited me to shoot the company for their advertising campaign. I continued to do so each year and then in 2007, Judith asked me to create a body of work to commemorate the company’s 50th anniversary. She gave me unprecedented access to her dancers. For 5 months I embedded myself with the company, photographing them while they performed, during their rehearsals, and traveled with them for a part of their European tour. The result of that work is the book Ailey Ascending.

SB: Looking through the book, I get a feeling of, “Wow, someone actually got the human body.” What (if any) creative rituals were used in your process?
AE: I don’t think there was any magical recipe to the success of the work, but I do acknowledge that I have some sort of deep inner connection to dancers in general — this company specifically. My older sister was a ballet dancer when I was a kid so I was given an introduction to the dance world at a very young age. I remember being 8 and falling madly in love with her ballerina friends when they would come over after school! Over the years I’ve grown to appreciate what these people can do with their bodies. It’s otherworldly at times. Dancers possess an extraordinary combination of strength and grace that requires a well-trained eye to capture. I’ve been shooting dancers for so long now that it’s become second nature for me to know when to release the shutter. Plus at times, especially when I was working on the book, I felt as though my chance encounter with Alvin himself may have had something to do with it all. At moments I could swear he was watching what I was doing, overseeing what I was shooting, and it felt very safe…as if he was somehow giving me and the pictures I was taking his blessings.

SB: Are there any projects you are working on that we can look forward to?
AE: The two things that I’ve just begun working on is a 25 year retrospective of my career that will hopefully be both a book and a gallery show, as well as another project involving the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Judith Jamison has just retired this year and passed the torch to Robert Battle, who has officially taken over as director of the company. I’d like to create a new series of pictures depicting ‘Ailey at 50′ featuring it’s emerging dancers and where they’re headed as they enter their next half-century.

SB: I wish you the best on that! You’ve shot at Smashbox/Quixote numerous times. Has your relationship with our stages been a fruitful one?
AE: My relationship with Smashbox/Quixote has been much more than fruitful over the years. I first shot at the West Hollywood stage in the early 90’s. That was when I met the CEO, (your boss) Mikel Elliott. He asked how my experience shooting there had been and I told him quite honestly, not all that great. He asked me why and when I explained he listened, he didn’t get defensive, nor did he blow me off. The next time I shot there the things I had complained about had been rectified, the things I’d found to be dysfunctional had become functional. The staff was efficient and courteous. I felt as though my clients, subjects, and crew were being well taken care of. Then, at the end of the day, a giant cooler of my favorite beer was rolled in on ice. Ok, call me a cheap date but Smasbox/Quixote quickly became my studio of choice in Los Angeles, and I’ve been working there for almost 2 decades.

SB: Mikel pays full attention to client needs.
AE: He sure does. It really made a difference to me that Mikel listened to what I had to say. We’ve truly become good friends over the years. It’s nice to be heard… and hey, the free beer doesn’t hurt either!

*Beers are always on us, Andrew*