JUMP AHEAD TO MAKE YOUR PICKS
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Mark Seliger
Close your eyes and picture your favorite rock star/movie icon/comic genius. There’s a decent chance that Mark Seliger created the image in your mind. After thirty years (and 125 covers of Rolling Stone alone) he winnowed his work to a few hundred favorites for a new book. help him make the final selection.
Words by Mark Healy
Design by Martin Flores
a select few
About That Cobain Cover
“That picture had never been published. We shot it in 1993 for Rolling Stone and I kind of sat on it until it was ready to come out. I’d done the “corporate magazines still suck” Nirvana cover a few years earlier and Kurt gave me a gift on this second shoot. I think he appreciated that we didn’t alter anything or press him to compromise his feelings about being on the cover of a magazine. Then, when we went to do these pictures, for In Utero, we did the baby head shoot as kind of an afterthought and it never ran. When we put it up as a possible cover of this book, we were like, 'Wow. This really encapsulates this body of work. It just really makes sense."
Imagine if you could spread your life’s work on the floor in front of you. What if you could pore over the decades of hassles and heartaches and occasional triumphs, and reduce it all down to a few hundred pictures? The photographer Mark Seliger did this last Spring. He and his longtime collaborator, the creative director Fred Woodward, who commissioned Seliger’s early shoots for Rolling Stone (and later worked with him at GQ) spread an edit of photos on the floor of Seliger’s Manhattan studio. Thus began a process of elimination and artful juxtaposition that resulted in the photographer’s 8th book, Mark Seliger Photographs, 256 pages that stand as a tribute to the people he felt fortunate to shoot. “A great subject,” he says, “is the most powerful experience a portrait photographer can have.”
The 58-year old Seliger, brings an urgency to whomever he is shooting—whether a rock legend, or a neighborhood drag queen, or a sitting President— careful not to squander a chance to make a lasting impression. “I always bought into the idea that this is going to be the last opportunity you get to photograph that person,” he says, “and so you want to make that imprint as lasting as possible. You fail as often as you succeed but if you walk away with an image that you’re excited about and that has the potential for some lasting power, that makes a great portrait.”
But wrangling even a lifetime of great portraits into a cohesive, equally durable book requires an undetectable, and usually underappreciated, logic. It needs creative direction, which is where Woodward came through. Together, he and Seliger selected the photos, set the sequence, determined the pairings. “The delight in working with someone like Fred over the year is the surprise in how he thinks about the visual sequencing and the pun, because there’s usually a little bit of a wink to it.” Some of their choices seemed pre-ordained (George Harrison and Paul McCartney) while others (Bryan Ferry and a naked Heidi Klum) are more like a secret handshake of rock history. We’ve scattered a selection of photos from Mark Seliger Photographs (with the artist’s blessing, of course) and we’ll let you guess which photos are paired with which. Tap them to hear Seliger explain the connection.
The Match Game:
