In his new book of portraits, British photographer Platon channel surfs through contemporary culture.
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MONICA BELLUCCI:
"It took me two weeks to recover from that shoot. At the end, I asked her if she'd mind taking a picture with me. She leaned very close and it made me sort of hot under the collar, so I said, 'You know, Monica, please don't lean too close. I'm a married man and it's troubling me.' And she whispered in my ear, 'Darling, I'm married too. In Italy we can do this kind of thing.'" (LOS ANGELES, 1997)
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN:
"This is a young Alexander. When he first started out [as a fashion designer] he was filled with this incredible bravado of youth and arrogance, but it wasn't in a negative way. It was this wonderful sure-footedness. I think this was after his second collection and there was this real buzz about him. He looks larger than life." (LONDON 1996)
MARTIN SCORSESE:
"Scorsese is an iconic figure for me. I loved his hand gestures, and I realized that he has a lot of the same gestures as Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. I didn't know if he adopted the gestures from working with them over the years or if they adopted them from him, or maybe they just all shared them because they were so bonded in the early years. His hands were so chunky and expressive, I wanted them to be important in the picture." (NEW YORK. 1997)
BENICIO DEL TORO:
"Benicio is a man's man. On this shoot they supplied a hairdresser, but he wouldn't let anyone touch his hair. Not because he was being a prima donna--he was saying, 'Look man, I'm a guy and no one touches the hair.' I think he smoked 40 cigarettes and drank eight Irish coffees throughout the day. He was like a modern-day Robert Mitchum." (LOS ANGELES, 2003)
DAVID BECKHAM:
"You have to remember that Beckham in Europe, there's nothing more important. So this is a picture of his celebrity in a way. You get a sense that this guy is very aware of his status, but in a shy, quiet way. He's a very gentlemanly type of person. This is a very quiet picture because you don't know what he's thinking and his face is expressionless. That's very Beckham--a quiet celebrity." (MANCHESTER, 1999)
THE STORY SOUNDS ALMOST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. When the late John F. Kennedy Jr. was putting together the nuts and bolts of his upstart publication George, he went on a mission to discover fresh, unknown photographers to shoot portraits of the politicians and celebrities that would grace the pages of his magazine. He became enamored with the gritty photos he found in British underground magazines popular during the late '80s. The majority of these poignant images were taken by a young Londoner named Platon, and JFK Jr. was determined to find him and bring him to George.
"When I began, I didn't know anyone glamorous or famous. We were always cold, it was always raining. It was depressing, and that's the way we took pictures," says Platon, whose collection of photos, Platon's Republic, is being published this month by Phaidon Press. "Kennedy wanted the rawer version of portraiture that he found in London, he wanted to show personalities in a different way. So he whisked me over to America without me understanding the significance of what was happening. He sent me on a roller-coaster ride and he gave me access to the heart of America."
Besides providing him the opportunity to capture the essence of icons such as Martin Scorsese, Rudolph Guiliani and Pamela Anderson, JFK Jr. instilled in Platon the belief that the lens of the camera should always remain democratic. "He said that photography should be for everybody--it should never be for the elite," recalls Platon. "You should always try to show people through your pictures what it's really like to meet somebody. Shoot from the hip and really go for more of the personality and less of the glamorous veneer."
Taking this aesthetic to heart, Platon has photographed a wide range of players on the world's stage, everyone from George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and John Kerry to Marilyn Manson, Ozzy Osbourne and Al Pacino. He's covered the aftermath of September 11 in New York; the funeral of Princess Diana in London; neo-Nazi skinheads in North Carolina; and surviving congressmen who fought in the Vietnam War.
Inspired by his obsession with American television, Platon decided to produce a book of his portraits that would grant people access to the powerful, controversial and exclusive figures that he's photographed. "I got the idea for this book from channel surfing," he says. "You flip from one channel and you see something that's pure pop entertainment like Pamela Anderson. Then you flip to the next channel and it's Larry King talking about a serious subject. You flip again and there's the Osbournes on MTV. There's this feeling that it doesn't matter if it's high or low culture, it's all treated the same. My book is based on that idea that if you turn a page it's like flipping a channel on TV."
Platon's Republic contains over 120 portraits taken over the past decade and includes 30 pages of the photographer's personal scrapbooks, which provide first-person, hand-written, behind-the-scenes accounts of what it was like to meet his subjects.
"This is very much a book of now," he says. "Almost everyone in the book is still growing and evolving every day. It's a book that's living and of our time. If anything, it's looking at the present and seeing ourselves for what we are."
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Melissa Quinlan