IT’S NOT ABOUT ME
There are some photographers who truly capture the soul, unlike any other. Greg Gorman (born 1949) is one of those rare cases where the subject of the photograph may be an ultra famous star, but the image itself has much more impact on its viewer. Having worked with magazines such as Esquire, GQ, Interview, Life, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and The Sunday Times, this much celebrated artist is now as relevant as ever, with a new publication titled “It’s Not About Me”. Coming out by teNeues in July, it showcases his brilliant talent, being part of a very small group of iconic Hollywood photographers, who is a master of light and wields his magic to produce stunning and memorable images.
During the past fifty years, Gorman has created an impressive and distinctive body of portrait photography. “It’s Not About Me” is a comprehensive retrospective monograph with more than 400 pages, featuring his most iconic portraits such as Andy Warhol from the L.A. Eyeworks campaign, various shots of his long-time friends David Bowie and Grace Jones, a young Jerry Hall, and images from some of his most famous movie campaigns such as “Tootsie” with Dustin Hoffmann, “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Cry Baby” with Johnny Depp, and “Scarface” with Al Pacino. It also includes numerous color as well as black & white portraits of Hollywood idols, which have never been published before. From Kirk Douglas, Eartha Kitt, Robert Redford, Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, and Al Pacino to Viggo Mortensen, Diane Lane, Iggy Pop, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, and Liza Minnelli, as well as Mark Wahlberg, Halle Berry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sharon Stone, Michael Jackson, Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro and Marina Abramović – to name just a few
*Greg Gorman (*1949, Kansas City, Missouri, USA) found his true calling in 1968 when he took a picture of Jimi Hendrix during his concert in Kansas City. The photograph marked the start of his career as a personality photographer, lasting over 50 years. Gorman was later quoted as saying, “I never could take a photograph of anything that couldn’t talk back to me”. Many of his compelling black-and-white images would go on to appear on movie posters and CD covers, and grace the pages of magazines such as Life, Newsweek, Vogue, and Rolling Stone. Gorman’s photographs were featured more than a dozen times on the cover of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine. One of the earliest portraits in the book is the image below of the legendary director, Alfred Hitchcock, taken in Los Angeles in 1970. The most recent one is of actor Robert Wagner at 90, taken in the Spring of 2020.
