Image Shaker:
How One Creative Genius Redefined the Stars.
by Peter Crookston
(Independent on Sunday Review for 11 April, 2004)
In the 1960’s the covers of the American magazine Esquire were quite literally arresting. They arrested your progress in the street as you walked past a news stand. They arrested your eyes as you stood in the newsagents scanning the shelves. They made you reach out to pick it up, your lips forming the words ‘Oh my God!’ or ‘What the hell…?’
The covers that provoked these responses were usually studio pictures taken by Carl Fischer, a New York photographer, working with George Lois, a Madison Avenue ad. agency art director. They were commissioned by the late Harold Hayes, a brave editor of genius who made required reading for intelligent liberals on both sides of the Atlantic (there was no British edition then) in that most turbulent decade of the Vietnam war, civil rights marches, the feminist movement, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
The controversial covers devised by Lois/Fischer, encouraged and championed by Hayes, illustrated articles by writers such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, James Baldwin, Jean Genet and William Burroughs (No women? Well, it was subtitled ‘The magazine for men’).
The phrase ‘In your face’ had not been coined then – but that’s what these covers were. And within months they had doubled Esquire’s circulation. Some of Carl Fischer’s 42 memorable Esquire cover photographs, and other pictures from his magazine work, can be seen in an exhibition opening in London next week, [April 19] which is appropriate, as Fischer studied photography here at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now the Central St Martin’s College of Art) and is an Anglophile whose idea of a good time is to attend summer schools at Oxbridge colleges hearing lectures about Shakespeare’s plays.
Two of the cover pictures on show are particularly astonishing if you remind yourself that digital cameras and computer-aided photographic composition had not been invented when Fischer made these images.
‘Visual metaphors’ are what Fischer calls his pictures of Andy Warhol falling into a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and Dustin Hoffman standing much taller than he is among the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Everything was done by hand. What would occupy perhaps a few hours now - taking a digital picture then putting it into a computer and mixing it with images called up on the internet – would take three days in the Sixties, shooting disparate pictures which could then be cut and pasted.
To ensure that the cuts and the paste didn’t show, Fischer says it was important to get both the lighting and the perspective to match perfectly. ‘To do that, the least controllable part had to be done first and that would determine the way the second part would be done. “In the Warhol picture I shot the soup can first to determine the best angle to show the can and to find out what problems were involved with the splash. I dropped children’s marbles into the soup dozens of times to get a good splash. That picture determined the second picture; it was then easy to photograph Warhol in the proper position with the same lighting and fit him into the splash.”
So that he could superimpose his portrait of Dustin Hoffman on mid-town Manhattan, for a cover to illustrate Hoffman’s success in the film Little Big Man, Fischer stood on the pontoons of a helicopter tethered in a canvas belt that allowed him to hang free of the fuselage so that he could shoot the skyscrapers without any part of the aircraft being visible. “I wanted a wide-angle effect, which would be a more interesting design, so I had to both fly low and get outside the helicopter. Since I am not inordinately brave, I marvel even now that, consumed as I was by the problems and the noise, I had no fear during this stupid procedure.”
The brilliant idea of photographing world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali in 1967 as the martyred St Sebastian almost foundered at the last minute. Ali, who had converted to Islam, joined America’s Black Muslims and changed his name from Cassius Clay three years earlier, thought it would compromise his religious principles. He was on bail while appealing a five-year prison sentence for refusing military service in Vietnam as a conscientious objector. Boxing commissions had stripped him of his titles and denied him the right to box and he was being pilloried as a draft-dodger and even a traitor.
The idea of the martyrdom photograph was put to him on the telephone by George Lois. Ali agreed to do it and flew to New York to be photographed in Fischer’s studio. But when Lois showed him the postcard of Castagno’s painting of St Sebastian, Ali studied it intently then blurted out: “Hey, George, this cat’s a Christian!” Before Lois and Fischer could affix any arrows, Ali got on the phone to his religious teacher, Elijah Muhammad. “He explained the painting in excruciating detail,” says Lois. “He finally put me, a non-practising Greek Orthodox, on the phone. After a lengthy theological discussion Elijah gave me his okay. When I saw the first transparency I believe my exact words to Carl Fischer were, “Jesus Christ, it’s a masterpiece.”
As a cover it was the greatest, of the boxer who was the greatest. And there’s a happy ending. The Supreme Court quashed Ali’s conviction and he went on to become the first man to win the world heavyweight championship three times.
Esquire’s covers were the heavyweight champions of the magazine world. The imaginative flair of the tough, uncompromising Lois, combined with the artistry and meticulous attention to detail of Fischer, produced images that stay in the mind and continue to have an influence on the style of magazine covers we see today.
The exhibition of Carl Fischer’s photographs
is at the Pentagram Gallery,
11 Needham Road, Notting Hill, London
from 19 April to 14 May.