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MOC: Do you ever have time to do work for yourself? Gregory Heisler: It’s a funny thing. I really do get to do what I want to do and so to me my personal work and my professional work are very much one and the same.
MOC: Why Profoto? These days we hear that you’re using that. Why? GH: For a bunch of reasons. A big reason for me, generally, is that a lot of the lighting control accessories that you can get are very, very, very, very useful. There are things like the narrow beam reflectors which I use a lot. They’re highly polished parabolic reflectors that wouldn’t look like they would do a lot, but they’re astonishing because they concentrate the light by focusing it rather than reducing it. Three-quarters of my work is done on location, and using those reflectors allows me to shape the light in really interesting ways and from a great distance and with less power.
I use the Pro-7b a lot because it allows me to do that without plugging in. Just the enormous convenience gives you a lot of creative freedom. You could shoot any place you want and fast.
MOC: Once upon a time you were an assistant, and I assume you hire assistants. What do you look for? How do you tell the good ones from the bad ones? GH: The person’s attitude. I want somebody who is a candid kind of a person. Who’s as excited to be there as I am, because I’m excited to be there. When I’m looking at an assistant’s portfolio, I’m not looking as much at their imagery as at how the prints are made, how it’s presented, how well it’s organized—because those are the things that are going to affect how they perform work for me. When you’re hiring an assistant, it’s like hiring somebody to pack your parachute before you go skydiving. The question is, you might love this guy, but do you want him packing your parachute?
MOC: Why did you choose to be a photographer? GH: I just loved it. I loved everything about it. I actually found something that I felt really suited me completely. I have a pretty short attention span and you can bring all of your creativity, all of your thoughts, all of your inspiration to bear on one specific thing for a specific amount of time and then you create this thing and then it’s done.
MOC: Did you have any outside influences on your career, on your imagery? Mentors of any sort? GH: Arnold Newman, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Jay Maisel. As time has gone on, I still respect those people as much as I did then, but there have been other influences. Mary Ellen Mark has become a close friend. Lately I try to look at photography less and less. And I would say that probably what interests me more as an influence would be painting, but not the work of a specific painter. Approaching photography in a painterly way where you’re working with color in a very subjective kind of way and looking to be very expressive in that kind of a way. Not documentary. Kind of the opposite of documentary.
