Greg Gorman

Outside the Studio is photographer Greg Gorman's tenth monograph. This book takes Gorman (born 1949) outside the reaches of his studio portrait and figure-study work, for which he is best known, and onto the streets of Southeast Asia—uncharted territory for the artist. Traveling initially on behalf of Epson, giving symposiums on fine art digital printing throughout Singapore, Malaysia, China and India, Gorman got a firsthand look at these very different cultures at the very beginning of the digital revolution. The transition from analogue to digital cameras was another new experience for Gorman, who had shot film for more than 30 years. For Gorman, being in the studio with the likes of Marlon Brando or Robert De Niro was second nature, but being thrust in front of strangers in China, Kuala Lampur, India, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam was a new adventure.

In 1982 Greg Gorman was just beginning his career as a photographer, creating campaigns and publicity shoots for such films as Tootsie, The Big Chill and Scarface, with stars from the worlds of film, television and music gracing his studio on a daily basis. It was also at this time that Jeff Gorman and Gary Johns created a campaign for the famous Los Angeles-based eyewear company, L.A. Eyeworks, for which they hired Gorman as house photographer. The ads were published as full-page bleeds in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine; and the campaign, one of the very first celebrity endorsed “advertorials” of its kind, has endured over 30 years, making it one of the longest running photo-campaigns ever. Gorman was able to recruit stars for the campaign from his film-studio work, and Warhol--who personally called the photographer and requested to do an L.A. Eyeworks shoot, which led to the series’ most famous portrait--also gathered famous faces for the company. Alongside Warhol, the many celebrities photographed by Gorman in their L.A. Eyeworks frames include Boy George, Philip Glass, Meryl Streep, Jodie Foster, Iman, Lypsinka, Bryan Ferry, Grace Jones, Quentin Crisp, John Waters, Johnny Rotten, Rob Lowe, Whoopi Goldberg, Mickey Rourke, Frank Zappa, Elton John, Divine, Pierce Brosnan, David Hockney, Debbie Harry and Pee Wee Herman. Gorman’s luscious, era-defining, black-and-white photographs are gathered here for the first time.

In Their Youth: Early Portraits comprises over 200 of the California-based photographer's previously unpublished portraits from the last three decades, featuring famous actors shot when they were still unknown young men, from teen years into their early twenties. "I decided to do a project that expressed my infatuation with male beauty," Gorman explains, "especially in terms of youth... the portraits don't have lots of backgrounds, they're straightforward. It's really about the person, not the elements. It boils down to the graphics of the individual more than the graphics of the setting." Gorman's intimate celebrity portraits hinge on the sense of his subjects' vulnerability. Here, famous young men are juxtaposed with photographs of promising unknowns: one of the first shots of Tom Cruise, for instance, shares a spread with some anonymous ephebe that Andy Warhol met at Studio 54.
Greg Gorman discovered his calling after taking a borrowed camera to a Jimi Hendrix concert in 1968. In 1990, after producing images for over 20 years, he published his first book, Greg Gorman Volume One, which reveals his skills as a portraitist. Gorman has created innumerable unforgettable images (for instance, a 2000 portrait of Jeff Koons shows the artist perched on a filthy toilet, flanked by two leather-clad ladies). His work has been featured in ad campaigns and has been featured on the covers of a number of magazines, including Esquire, GQ, Interview, Vogue, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.