Tag: Douglas Kirkland

  • The Master of the "Freeze-Frame" – The Digital Journalist

    akakkdk04 1.jpg

    :

    I don’t know if Douglas Kirkland has ever thought of becoming a director, but all his images contain the rich, contradictory synthesis of the stills from a successful film. If he had become a director instead of a great photographer, he would have told stories of men and women on the run from reality, reckless lovers considered mad by the world around them, exalted in their attempt to make sense of the events in life which nobody around them can understand. The perfect stills in his book, Freeze Frame, in my opinion, make up his film. It does not matter that the story refers you back to other famous films; all directors quote the colleagues they love and Douglas uses them to narrate his film. The camera (let’s call it that) focuses on the central characters – isolated, laughing, tired, concentrated, in thought, arm in arm, in a trance, but always detached and far from the universe surrounding them, the universe to which they seem not to belong. A world which looks at them with indifference, as though they were misfits desperately searching for a connection, for an impossible story.

    Check it out here.

  • Freeze Frame: 50 Years of Fun and Fame – The Digital Journalist

    akakkkff20 1.jpg

    Douglas Kirkland:

    My first encounter with a movie star was with Elizabeth Taylor in Las Vegas. I looked directly into her violet eyes and said, “I’m new at this magazine. Could you imagine what it would mean to me if you gave me an opportunity to photograph you?”… A beat of silence, then she said, “Come tomorrow night at 8:30.”

    The photo session was a great success and was published worldwide. Thus, my career working in the movie industry was launched.

    All doors seemed opened to me and everyone around me vigorously encouraged all forms of experimentation. I carried my camera through this period with a child’s wide-eyed wonderment and exhilaration. I was living a fantasy and I felt my mission was to record everything, from the beat of the flower children and the fashion of the day, to the brightness and shadows in the lives of movie stars.

    Check it out here.

  • My Lover, My Life – The Digital Journalist

    :

    We have fun, don’t we?” Douglas Kirkland calls from downstairs after a long day of working on this book, arguing and laughing. Editing thousands of images to create “Freeze Frame” was both an emotional and exhilarating process, watching our life through the work, discovering images we didn’t remember existed, seeing ourselves through the 40 years of our marriage.

    Our relationship began in 1965 in Paris on the film set of “How to Steal A Million,” with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. I was a 21-year-old student at the Sorbonne; my mother worked for the film company. Douglas came to take pictures of the movie stars and romanced me by the Seine. We fell in love, continued our love affair while meeting in London, Rome, Venice and Madrid. It was my first taste of working together and it was wonderfully exciting and romantic. We eventually got married in Las Vegas late one night.

    The Sixties and early Seventies were a period of abundance for photojournalism and we enjoyed the best of it. We lived like millionaires without the responsibility of being rich, staying in the best hotels of Europe and mingling with the “aristocracy” of the cinema. It was all very unpretentious, full of joie de vivre, and we embraced it heartily.

    Check it out here.