Play Audio Story 30-Year Retrospective Book
Mark Seliger Photographs showcases his best-known portraiture, as well as never before seen outtakes and select standouts from his landscape and personal work including portraits of Holocaust survivors and transgender men and women on Christopher Street, and documentary photography of Cuba. Accompanying the photographs is an interview between Mark Seliger and Judd Apatow, in which Seliger shares stories behind some of his most iconic work: Kurt Cobain showing up for a Rolling Stone shoot in a “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” T-shirt; taking a road trip with Brad Pitt; and navigating a room full of Tibetan monks while shooting His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In addition, the book also features an essay by Lyle Lovett. Mark Seliger Photographs is the ultimate celebration of one of the most in-demand portrait photographers.
Transcript
Book covers need to get the attention of the audience. I love a typographical book cover, and Fred is the master of type. So I had no doubt that we would come up with something great typographically, but the publisher really wanted to have an image. And something that we’ve never tried before, but with the 30-year book, it was pretty obvious that’s what we were going to do, is go and look in the archive and flush out images that were the ones that got away. And the portrait of Kurt Cobain that ran on the cover of Rolling Stone, that was the memorial issue, should have been the obvious cover for the book because people might sum that up as the seminal portrait that I did in the 30-year period. However, we went back and we found that image that we had never published, which was the image of Kurt Cobain and the doll heads and the shrine. And that just seemed emotional and haunting and unusual, and the color felt so almost painterly, but at the same time compelling to draw you in. What was the story behind that? How did that one get away?