Greg Williams took an unusual route into shooting A-list stars - Photojournalism. Inspired by the Sunday supplements, he started out shooting in trouble spots such as Burma, Chechnya and Sierra Leone in the 1990s and later set up the Growbag collective with Simon Roberts, representing amongst others, Tom Craig and Simon Norfolk.
Well on the way to establishing a successful career in the field, he stopped because, he says, he got scared. 'Sierra Leone put me off,' he says. 'When I got there I realised I'd probably get killed if I carried on working in war zones. I think I was out of my depth and as a result I wasn't doing very good work.'
Greg started shooting photo-essays instead, putting together in-depth studies of a woman dying of CJD, brain damage rehabilitation, and the second generation of children deformed by Thalidomide, for magazines such as The Sunday Times Magazine and Time. All the while Greg was also photographing with the renowned collaborative artists Olly and Suzi (Olly is Greg's big brother). Their work, spanning 12 years of travelling the natural world, was published in the book 'Olly&Suzi Arctic, Desert, Ocean , Jungle' (Abrams, 2002).
In 1997, Aidan Sullivan, then picture editor at The Sunday Times Magazine, proved instrumental in kicking off the next phase of Williams' career when he agreed to let him shoot a photo essay on the newly thriving British film industry. Williams started out gaining access to 'Elizabeth' and 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'. Over the next three years, and after visiting the sets of over 80 films, the project evolved into his first book, Greg Williams On Set (Vision On, 2001).
More on-set work followed, and now Williams is well established as an on-set 'special photographer' as well as a celebrity portraitist. He's shot portraits of stars such as Catherine Zeta Jones, Brad Pitt, Colin Farrell, Cate Blanchett and John Travolta for magazines including Vanity Fair, Premire, Esquire, LIFE, Stern and Paris Match. He put together the publicity materials for Peter Jackson's King Kong and for the latest Bond film, Casino Royale. Dorling Kindersley has just published his shots of the latter as a book, 'Bond On Set - Filming Casino Royale'.
Williams says photojournalism still informs what he does, whether he's shooting on set or in the studio. 'In my portraits I now use the same lighting found on film sets, and recreate compositions from my reportage. I also encourage actors to perform rather than just pose. In that way the portraits and reportage have started to converge as one style.'
He also tries to avoid digital trickery, preferring to shoot against real backgrounds and use in camera special effects than add these elements in afterwards. 'I like the photos to retain a realistic look where the brief allows,' he says. 'The teaser poster shoot for Casino Royale was shot using a rented ballroom location with huge chandeliers as a background. You get a more convincing depth of field than you would shooting against a seamless and dropping it in later. I'm really not into everything being pin sharp so try, wherever possible to avoid using strobe.'
'For the main Casino Royale posters we wanted the light to look like sunlight. They wanted them against a grey background so we painted a giant flat and wheeled it outside and used the sun. The shots feel a little grittier than they would have under artificial light.'
'In the King Kong shoot we had the run of the sets for 5 days while the film crew were shooting at another location. On several of the 25 setups we simply added to the film lights already on set to keep in with the mood of the film.'
He keeps retouching to a minimum too, editing out blemishes but keeping skin tones realistic. Most of the retouch budget goes into adding grain and perfecting density and colour balance. But although he says he hates anything that looks too perfect, he adds that he doesn't aim to make people look bad either. 'I just want the pictures to be believable. You can't do that if your 45 year old actress looks 18'.
'Even if I'm shooting reportage on set, I'm shooting positive pictures,' he says. 'I don't ever shoot with a negative agenda, or try to take the piss. That doesn't mean I'm not looking for amusing shots, but if someone is picking their nose there's no reason why I would want to take that picture. It's not a nice thing to look at and it would offend them. I don't take pictures if they aren't helping anyone's cause.' This is after all entertainment and not hard news.
Building trust is essential, and the fact that he's taken candid on-set photographs without offending cast and crews has helped win the Hollywood studios over. As he points out, if you shoot on set and mess it up, you'll never get another invitation. 'I can count on one hand the photographers who can go on big movie sets to shoot reportage 'specials' with the working film unit,' he says. 'Every unit has a unit photographer who is part of the crew. The last thing the director needs is another photographer to distract the actors so you have to tread really lightly.'
Building a good working relationship with the individual actors is just as important, and he often shows them their images as the shoot progresses. 'I shoot digital on a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II' he says. 'I like people to see the images. It's a more honest way of working and it helps them see why they are putting up with you or what your asking them to do. For example I recently shot Gong Li, Asia's biggest female actor, in Hong Kong to promote her roll in 'Miami Vice'. On the day of the shoot a typhoon hit Hong Kong so I convinced her to let me shoot her under the torrential rain. I ended up using a rain machine to add to the effect and the water was freezing cold, but because she could see the photos we were getting on a large computer screen I'm sure she held the pose for longer than if I had been shooting film.'
'Actors are much less troublesome and controlling than you might think, and the better I get at my job the fewer problems I have over control,' he says. 'That's not to say that I'm not constantly having to compromise. I am but that's because this is commerce not hi-art. When I shoot an ad campaign I'm generally working to a creative directors sketch and trying to interpret it but that's fine, I'm getting well paid for that plus I keep my stamp on the images. But when I shoot editorial (and generally get paid badly), I choose what to do. You just have to hope that you get to the stage where you get paid well to do what you want to do but I've learnt that you have to give people what they want before you can give them what you want'.
Williams is modest enough to add that it's only in the last year or two that he's really found a portrait style he can call his own. I first started lighting portraits about 7 years ago. I didn't learn about lighting at college. Simon Norfolk once spent an hour explaining the basics to me, but the rest I learnt on the job from a mixture of trial and error and advice from assistants. There was a lot of mimicry. I was shooting a lot of strobe and trying to look like every other photographer and any identifying style got lost in it all. Once I learnt all these different lighting set-ups, I kept the techniques I liked and threw the rest away and slowly built my own style.'
'Many photographers have a very fixed lighting style. That is how they can turn up 4 hours after their assistants, schmooze the client, look over things and push the button. They've done it all before. Every movie I watch, and I watch a lot, I'm taking screen grabs of moments from great scenes to recreate those elements on my next shoot. I'm learning so much. Nearly all the portrait jobs I do I insist on a day to pre-light with stand-in models to work out how to make it all work. You don't want to be scratching your head with an a list star sitting around the studio.
Williams' lighting style is influenced by his background in photojournalism. He prefers to use natural light if possible for the ambient and builds and shapes his subjects from there. That's not to say that he doesn't use plenty of lights though. A shoot can often utilise well over 20 hot lights of all shapes and sizes. 'I've shot a lot with strobe but always feel that flash somehow embalms subjects. Everything is pin sharp and frozen and life just isn't like that. I'm happiest shooting with hot lights dimmed right down at apertures as low as f1.2. I think the Casino Royale teaser poster was shot at f1.4 at an 8th of a second.
With that many lights Williams obviously needs some help, and on big advertising shoots he's used a crew of up to 25 assistants/riggers/set builders/sparks and digital technicians. When he shot King Kong he had to shoot 25 set ups on eight different stages in just two days. 'I had to get each stage set up in the prep days so that I could walk from set to set and everything was ready,' he says. 'Otherwise I couldn't have got through it physically. I was walking to a new set every 14 minutes and the producer was juggling the actors from set-up to set-up.'
'You need to have good people and you need to prepare. A big shoot takes days of preparation and it's not unusual to have 60 people on a set by the time you have clients, publicists, agents, stylists, hair and make-up artists, props, special effects and all their assistants. It's huge and the pressure would be terrifying if you had a minute to think about it, but luckily you don't.'
But although he's used to working on huge sets, Greg also still likes working by himself. He likes this versatility, 'I'm currently doing a personal project. I'm shooting some every-day people's extraordinary stories and filming them as well. It's very rewarding as I'm not trying to sell anything. I only have to follow my own brief. Maybe it'll be a book, exhibition or film one day.
Art and Commerce should be able to help - he joined the prestigious New York agency in February 2005 and he now lives in the city with his wife and daughter. Perhaps typically for someone so down to earth, he was introduced to the agency via his mother 'Glen Luchford's mother goes to the same church as mine in a small village in Kent and they got talking about their sons,' he says.
Williams admires Luchford's work, and also enjoys the work of another Art and Commerce stable mate, Steven Klein. 'The work that impresses me most besides photojournalism is fashion photography,' he says. 'There is so much freedom in fashion. Besides having to show the clothes you can generally be a lot more creative than in portraiture. Since joining Art and Commerce I have done some fashion shoots and really enjoyed the experience. The last one was a full story with a beginning, middle and end with captions to tie it all together. Somewhere between a photo-essay and a movie storyboard.'
© Diane Smyth - British Journal of Photography 2006
