The job of the art director is not to take photographs, but to make photographs work.
In other words: the client tells both the a/d and the photographer what the job of the picture (or set of pictures) is to be. That job might be to sell a new product, to launch a campaign, to remind the marketplace how splendid the company is, and so on. The a/d is responsible for seeing that the final result fulfils that brief.
As for the art director shooting pictures, they will be aides-memoire. And perhaps a few snaps catching the photographer and the rest of the crew fooling about.
I was editor and art director for an international research and manufacturing company for fifteen years and I hope this short series of anecdotes about a few of my own experiences puts some flesh on the a/d’s bones.
I suppose the most interesting and rewarding of my duties as art director was to produce for our sales outlets around the world the company’s very large and pictorial annual calendar. The twelve pictures it carried were always photographs, and these were always shot ‘on location’. Thailand, Portugal, Finland, Greece, Germany - we travelled far and wide.
On almost every calendar location shoot, I liked to keep the crew size down to the minimum.
That does bring its problems; one of them is that I had to be prepared to be more than the chap who directs the end result in pictures. Tripod-carrier, messenger boy, reflector-holder - anything.
On this occasion I also found myself suddenly cast in a role that I was later to regret.
We were in Iceland, shooting the calendar. I wanted to show a boy and his well-bearded fisherman grandfather on a day’s fishing in a small blue boat. The small crew - that is the two models, a bearded man and the boy with his mother as chaperone, the photographer and I - had just started work on a seven-day location shoot. As all five of us sat at dinner on the first evening the hotel manager came to our table.
‘Excuse me, madam - the telephone for you.’
The boy’s mother got up and followed him to the desk.
She came back a minute later looking distraught and telling me that her own mother had just been rushed in to the Reykjavik hospital, some eighty miles away, and was seriously ill. She and the boy had to go. They would almost certainly not be coming back.
Six months of preparatory work was going down the plughole. The photographer and I exchanged glances that I think you might justly call desperate. Then, while she was packing, she had a second thought: she knew I had young children of my own. So, would I mind if she left the boy in my personal charge?
All our worries banished at a stroke. Our model stayed.
The next day the boy behaved himself well; he was in any case a thoroughly nice boy in every way and gradually I found myself relaxing and taking my eye off him from time to time.
At breakfast on the third day the weather shut down with a dull thud. Thick cloud and drizzle. The four of us sat in the little hotel lounge reading. The big window looked straight out to the little black-pebbled beach and the sea; the horizon did not exist.
Half an hour later a shaft of sunshine split the cloud and flooded the lounge in warm and cheerful light. We practically let out a cheer and with the boy in his red sweater pressing his nose against the window we started jumping up and collecting the gear together.
Then the sun disappeared again and the cloud made the light impossibly bad for the sort of shots we were after. The rain held off, however, and the boy pestered me to let him go out and fish in one one of the rock pools.
‘OK. But promise me you’ll stay where I can see you. When you settle somewhere, look back at this window and give us a wave.’
He promised, and fled.
I yelled after him to put on his waterproof. He did so and we watched him run past the window with his rod and line. He settled on a big boulder down near the water’s edge, turned, and gave us a wave.
We fell to chatting about this and that; the photographer began amusing us with tales of other locations. Then he stopped and looked up at the sky.
‘Tell you what,’ he said, getting up and grabbing his camera case, ‘it’s a nice light for portraits, isn’t it. Let’s go.’
Weeks before, when we were working out the details of shots needed, we had agreed that big and beautiful close-ups of our models’ faces would be perfect. And it is one of the basic laws of photography that, out of doors, a cloudy light is just about the best you can get for the job.
‘I’ll get my oilskins,’ said our fisherman (although a model, he was also an actual fisherman), and left.
I glanced out of the window again on my way out of the lounge and my stomach gave a lurch.
‘Jack!’ I said. ‘He’s gone!’
We banged out of the swing doors and ran down to the rocks, calling his name. He was nowhere to be seen. We split up, still calling. We ran and ran, clambering over rocks, jumping, shouting.
Then I saw him, about twenty metres out to sea, face down, his limp outstretched arms lifting with each wave. In those moments I knew real terror.
All I can remember of those seconds is being up to my waist in water and lifting him up by the collar of his yellow waterproof. He came up far too easily, though, water pouring out of his empty coat.
We ploughed back through the water up to the black beach. We ran, left and right, shouting, calling his name. We leaped over rocks and into pools. We kept staring out to sea.
We yelled and must have sounded like madmen.
A hundred yards up the beach among the black boulders I saw a piece of red litter. I ran towards it, ready to believe anything. I clambered up on to the top of the boulder and looked down.
Neither the red sweater nor his head of corn-coloured hair moved. I said his name.
The head turned sharply. He grinned up at me and, as best he could while holding his rod, spread his hands.
‘No fish,’ he said, and he lowered his line. The poor kid had no idea that he had probably just shortened the photographer’s life and mine by ten years or more. I said a few brisk words and then asked our driver to take him on one side and give him, in Icelandic, a really strong telling-off and a vivid description of our anguish.
The rest of the week went beautifully. The boy’s mother did not come back but her son behaved himself to perfection. The calendar was great. The orders from our international sales outlets rose higher than ever before.
There is one rule a photographer learns from experience: always to carry spares. On that location I learned one for all small-crew art directors: if a kid’s involved, carry a spare chaperone.
The photographer starting out on any location job has quite enough worries to be going on with; the last thing he or she needs is to have an art director who fouls things up - as I almost did as we began the Iceland job (see the previous story).
We had arrived at Reykjavik Airport and collected our bags from the carousel. I left the photographer with the pile of baggage and went to the girl at the desk. I asked where we had to go for the bus into Reykjavik.
She pointed to the doors and the busy area outside. ‘Your bus is being loaded, over there, sir,’ she said. ‘Just join the other passengers.’
I thanked her and we made for the door. Quite a lot was going on outside but I could see the bus, bright blue, with fifty or so other passengers waiting while their baggage was loaded. We joined them, surrendered our stuff for loading into the baggage compartment and carried on chatting. The weather, and what it was going to do - the likelihood or otherwise of it remaining fine and sunny. The job itself, and its scope for dramatic shots. We looked around us and made personal remarks about certain individuals standing around. Then four things happened almost simultaneously: (1) we realised we were now alone, (2) a porter slammed the luggage panel shut, (3) the door closed and (4) the bus drove off without us.
We stood there, open-mouthed. I ran back to the airport desk and said our hotel bus had just driven off without us - and with our baggage.
She shook her head and smiled sweetly.
‘Your bus, sir? No, there it is.’ And there stood a red bus, now revealed by the departure of the blue one, and being loaded.
‘But - the blue one?’
‘The blue one? Oh, no, sir, that was an American group on a ten-day tour round Iceland.’
Relative to - let’s say the USA or the sub-continent of India, Iceland is small. But when you’ve just spent six months organising a photo location, holding endless meetings to discuss policy and approach, visiting embassy officials and studying photo files, interviewing photographers, booking hotels, interpreter and driver, the sight of your equipment and luggage for a fortnight vanishing to even a small country’s distant parts does make it seem biggish. What now stared me in the face now was a schedule down the chute.
‘Quick! Taxi!’ said the photographer, doing his best to keep his head while the art director floundered. I got a taxi. We leaped in and told the driver to follow the blue bus. He seemed delighted to obey and we shot off. The bus would have been a long way ahead of us and the road, if not exactly a motorway, was a fast one. We drove on, engine flat-out. I was sitting on the left, sweating hard and gripping the back of the seat in front and watching for any sign of a cloud of dust on the horizon. Considering the size of the cloud raised by a car a few hundred yards ahead, the bus would leave a corker of a cloud. But there was no cloud.
We flashed past a group of buildings on the left and I was aware, for perhaps one-twentyfifth of a second, of a patch of bright blue.
It was a ridiculous reaction, but I yelled ‘Stop!’ We stopped and almost went through the windscreen. ‘Back! Go back! I think it’s in there!’
Blue is a popular colour in Iceland and it was one chance in a million that the flash of blue was the blue bus. We reversed until we came to the entrance of the complex; it turned out to be a school. We edged in through the gates and there, being unloaded in the playground, was our blue bus. Passengers stood around, waiting for their luggage to appear. We got out and went to the door of the building into which bags were being carried and saw a growing pile of exceedingly heavy and colourful luggage.
‘Delve!’, I said, or something like it. Ours was among the last to be loaded and so it would be the deepest in the pile. We worked our way down to the foundations.
And then the photographer breathed, ‘Yesss!’
In the gloom was a patch of bright yellow. Our bags, smothered with yellow-and-black striped gaffer tape for just such an eventuality, smiled up at us.
We yanked them out, one by one. I saw an elderly couple standing a few feet away and watching us with a frown. I explained what we were doing and they smiled and told us to have a nice day.
I suppose it says something for the special relationship.
I was standing inside a small, isolated church on the Aegean island of Ios, and I saw surprise - no, amazement - on an old woman’s face.
Working with photographer Adam Woolfitt on a ‘Kodak’ calendar we had climbed to the top of a grassy hill and spotted this little white church in the distance. There are many of them, but, for Adam, this one had a particular appeal. We walked the half mile along the hillside and knocked on the low, double doors.
A small and very bent old woman with a beautiful deeply-creased face let us in to the darkness. She stood for a moment, probably making sure we were not about to wreck the place, and then retreated into some back room and left us to it.
It was very dark. Dazzling sunlight shafted in through the open doors but the darkness sucked it up and swallowed it. We waited for our eyes to become dark-adapted, but even then we could see only the dim glimmerings of ancient gold leaf and mere shadowy suggestions of colour.
Adam rubbed his hands together. ‘This I must do,’ he said.
He was now possessed, in the way that you are when something difficult suggests itself and you see a way of achieving it. He opened the bigger of the two aluminium cases which came with us wherever we went, and pulled out a silver-coated roll of fabric sheeting, about five feet wide. He laid it on the ground outside the doors, silver side up, then unrolled it backwards into the church, half of it outside, half inside.
It was the standard reflector that every photographer carries on this kind of job. But what it did was extraordinary.
The Aegean sun bounced from it and flooded up into the dark church and it was as if a thousand spirits with candles had flown round the walls, lighting up every sparkling decoration, every silver, gold, red, blue, green glowing ikon. Every last piece of carved and polished wood shone as though with its own self-generated light.
Adam had just finished straightening out the sheet to get full value of the sunlight when the back room door opened and the old woman reappeared. She took one step in, then stopped. We watched her. Surprise is too mild a word to describe her reaction. Her jaw fell. She looked slowly up and then round the glowing ceiling, down the bright walls and ikons and eventually at us. We gathered later that she had spent nearly all her life in caring for that church, cleaning, polishing, letting people in, locking up at night, day after day. Now, she stood still, caught in the middle of taking another step towards us. Then her face broke into a smile, crumpled into tears and she came to us, arms outstretched. It was the first time she had seen her church.