80s Headshots of Famous Artists
Central Casting, but make it art
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I just learned about a fun art thing from the ’80s that I’d never seen before. An artist in New York named David Robbins got a bunch of his artist friends, among them Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and others, and took them to get actor-style headshots.
It was 1986. Robbins booked the headshot sessions at the Times Square studio of James J. Kriegsmann, who had been shooting actor headshots in New York since the 1930s. Robbins wanted to treat artists like performers.
Robbins told an interviewer at the time:
It was very important that these pictures be headshots, not just look like them. I didn’t want them to be parody, but to be fact. So rather than make them myself, I hired a photographer who does entertainment photography for a living. I think that artists have become a species of entertainment, particularly in the ’80s when artists have become media stars. Personally, I’ve always thought of an artist’s style as his “act,” the idea of working up a style is like working up an act; and then dealers and curators book your act into their venues.
I look at these and I can totally picture them hanging in the lobby of some small black-box theater where I just paid $20 to sit in a folding metal chair to watch a new one-act play called “The End of Ontology” or “My Mother’s Umbrella.” Or maybe I could imagine them hanging on the brick wall of a comedy club.
Robbins titled the complete collection of headshots “Talent.” In all, he had 18 of his artist friends attend headshot sessions, making a complete work of 18 images. One image features two people, and one features Robbins himself.
In no particular order – well, in the order they happen to be listed in the Wikipedia entry for the project – the artists were Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, Allan McCollum, Ashley Bickerton, Michael J. Byron, Thomas Lawson, Clegg & Guttmann, Jennifer Bolande, Larry Johnson, Alan Belcher, Peter Nagy, Steven Parrino, Joel Otterson, Robin Weglinski, Gretchen Bender, and David Robbins
He ordered 100 copies of each headshot, the same order that an actor might typically make, to create 100 complete editions of 18 photos. A quick Google search shows no shortage of galleries and museums that have exhibited them all at various times, even once with a retrospective of each artist’s subsequent work.
A few years ago, a complete set with each photo signed by the artist depicted (except Cindy Sherman) went up for auction with an estimate of just $4,000 - $6,000.
On his website, Robbins publishes his reflections on the project from its 25th anniversary in 2012, and shares some wonderful outtakes from the photo sessions. These pictures of Cindy Sherman hamming it up on a director’s chair are everything:
Headshot Photographers of Times Square
The portrait photographer who actually took the photos, James J. Kriegsmann, had a long history photographing celebrities like Johnny Carson, Jerry Lewis, Duke Ellington, and more. Kriegsmann also photographed the portraits for New York City’s Miss Subways beauty contest. You can just make out his logo in the bottom right of this poster:
A 2010 New York Times article about Kriegsmann’s son, who had taken over his father’s photography business, notes that the elder Kriegsmann “charged $35 an hour, taking a dozen shots per session.” He died in 1994.
I was a photographer in New York starting in the late ’90s and I never really took headshots professionally but I did know some actors who occasionally asked if I would do it for them. I did a couple as a favor, but actor headshots are a specialty and I was not very good at it.
Looking back at these, especially compared to the headshots above, I’d say I was actually pretty bad at it.
But one friend asked me to accompany her to meet a headshot photographer in Times Square and see what I thought of him. It wasn’t Kriegsmann’s studio, but I imagine the set-up was similar. As I recall, it was a large single-room space with a backdrop and lights set up on one end, and a little office area on the other. There was probably also a changing room somewhere. The photographer’s name was Robert Kim, and he counted among his headshot clients Angelina Jolie when she was first starting out. It looks like he’s still in business, actually.
What struck me as brilliant about his setup was his “before and after” photo albums that he showed my friend, a potential client. They were page after page of excellent examples of what a good photographer can do. But part of the brilliance was that of course the “before” images looked bad. That’s why people needed new headshots! It’s not like people hire someone if they have already-amazing images. Many of the “before” images struck me as temporary photos that people were using while they got their feet wet, deciding if they really wanted to pursue this acting thing, and now that they were serious about it they needed something real. It was a brilliant bit of marketing that showed off his skills in a very clear and obvious way.
It must have worked, because on his current website, Robert Kim still has a huge gallery of before-and-after images.
One more photographer to mention
You remember Noah Kalina? His “Noah Everyday” video was the first big viral project by someone who takes a picture of himself every day. One might even describe it as taking his own headshot every day if one wanted to make sure to stay on topic.
But self-portraits aside, Noah is an amazingly talented photographer. And he just debuted a new website to showcase twenty years of his photographs. It’s incredible. He’s so good. I’ve seen many of Noah’s pictures over the years, but this gallery is just something else. Take a look and keep clicking through to see the next image. It’s hard to stop.
And that’s it for another newsletter! Thanks as always for reading, sharing, subscribing, donating, and all that fun stuff.
See you next time!
David