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MOC: Tell us about working with Helmut Newton. George Holz: Up to that point, school had taught me all of the necessary, fundamental techniques in large format. Helmut would go into a shoot with a 35mm Olympus and everything would be ambient or very minimal lighting setups. I thought, "This is so cool. He really sees the light that’s there and finds the beauty"—and just everything from the ambience of a living room to the harshness of the mid-day sun or direct flash on-camera. He just seemed to break all the rules. But you have to know the rules before you know when to break them.
MOC: What do you think was the single most important thing you learned while you were assisting? GH: Don’t talk too much. Just be a good assistant. You know, think on your feet. Try to think ahead.
MOC: When you travel and need a local assistant, what do you expect? GH: I usually travel with my first assistant from New York, and prefer a local assistant to know that city, where things are, the services, the labs, etc.
MOC: What do you expect an assistant to know? GH: They should know my cameras and lighting equipment. Also, when I’m looking at the resumes, I like to see that they are a rock climber, carpenter, or something . . . unusual skills that could all be useful. They must know how to travel and be smart and pleasant even when they’re tired.
MOC: Why do you shoot with medium format? GH: I just know that the quality that you can get off the RZ is phenomenal. I see no reason with the work that I do to shoot a larger or smaller format. Just pop a 50mm, 65mm, or 90mm lens on there—that’s all you really need, it’s so sharp. I shoot the majority of my work with the 90mm lens.
MOC: How do you think aspiring photographers should approach lighting? GH: I think it’s important to learn with continuous light in the beginning just to really see what light does, to see the effect it has on a ball and cube. Profoto has a lot of beautiful tools like grid spot and focusing spots and you have to understand how light behaves before knowing how to harness it with all of the tools to choose from.
MOC: Tell us about the Marion Jones cover image. GH: It was for a story for Teen People magazine, a feature they were doing on the Olympic athletes for the 2000 summer Olympics in Australia. Our location scout found a mental institution, which was bold in a neat way—lots of cool dials, engines and turbines and generators . . . very industrial. While we were location scouting, I had noticed this really great location down in the basement. I went down there and I saw these really neat bright orange pipes and metal ducts. It was very cool looking. I thought those colors would be just amazing against her, so we put her in this blue bikini and high heels. I had literally less than five minutes to do this shot because of her tight training schedule. We ran downstairs and popped on a Ringflash. It all kind of came together: her muscles, the colors, the contrast . . . it was amazing.
MOC: How do you approach a shoot? GH: I like to set up my lights a lot of times beforehand. I’ll pick maybe five setups. I’ll use a stand-in or one of my assistants. We’ll do Polaroids and get the lighting set up so basically all the talent has to do is step in and we might tweak it a little bit. Sometimes we don’t even shoot a Polaroid if we don’t have time; we just go right to film. MOC: Does your creative process have anything to do with the tools you use? GH: The camera should become just a tool, like second nature. You don’t really want to have something you’re fumbling with. The RZ disappears in my hands.
