Albert Watson, who is from Edinburgh, has also been very successful in America, and does portraits and fashion pictures, mostly of celebrities and models, for magazines like Vogue and for advertising campaigns.
His website - http://www.albertwatson.net/ tells us that he has taken more than 100 Vogue covers, shot adverts for major companies like Channel, Prada and Levis, and that he has shot major iconic portraits of rock stars, rappers, actors and other celebrities.
He is blind in one eye, and sometimes goes with the nickname, Cyclops (the mythical one-eyed creature.)
This picture looks like it is from a series of fashion photographs, and it looks like a young Brad Pitt and Penelope Cruz. Many of his pictures are dramatic, larger than life, and this almost looks like a scene from a film. Fashion pictures often work like this - they create a scene and tell a bit of a story, and often look to films as references. We don't know what the story is, but the pictures, the choice of clothes, locations and objects, invites us to imagine what it may be.
His pictures are usually dramatically lit, glamorous, carefully printed and shot on large cameras that allow him to make huge prints. His pictures don't have the same spontaneity and sense of fun that Harry Benson has. Benson says that "speed is all" when photographing people. Watson, according to his website, "creates an aura that demands a reverent distance." This doesn't really mean anything much, except to say that Watson is a very serious photographer. Harry met Albert and made a TV programme, where they compared their ways of working and shooting. Harry Benson told Albert Watson to get over himself. I don't think they liked each other much.
I think I know who I'd rather spend time with.
See if you can find any film clips on Youtube for either Albert Watson or Harry Benson.
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