Yahoo News From Taylor Swift to Pete Doherty: photographer Simon Webb on life behind the lens
“I just remember thinking: ‘Who is this dude?’ He was this young lad, really confident, 14 or something – and he wouldn’t let me move his hair out of his face.” Recalling the time he photographed Justin Bieber on his first press shoot in London, Simon Webb is illustrating the painful truth all journalists know deep down – it’s photographers who have the best stories.
He seamlessly moves on to snapping Jimmy Page with children at music therapy charity Nordoff Robbins. “To see that man, that great musician so in the moment and authentic and caring and gentle, was really powerful and beautiful,” he remembers. He once got paid for a week to track down Pete Doherty for a fashion shoot, turned up at his house on the first day – and found him. “We put him in a suit and just took some pictures of him,” he laughs.
And while it sounds like fame, glamour and rock’n’roll are what motivate and follow Webb, 44, he says it’s actually ignoring all that “stuff around him” that ultimately kickstarted his 20-year career. He has now amassed a portfolio that reads like a noughties who’s-who, winning over celebrity fans such as James Corden and Taylor Swift, as well as advertising companies and film distributors with his knockabout charisma.
From dragging his 120mm film camera around Alton Towers to an apprenticeship in the lads-mag-tastic early 2000s at Chalk Farm studios, it was retreating back to his Suffolk family home before returning to London to start again that made Webb the sought-after portrait photographer he is today. “I went back to London one summer, just stayed on a friend’s sofa and within six months I was a fully-fledged photographer,” he recalls. “That was by getting rid of all this stuff and money worry and just being really true to myself. I read The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra and it brings you back to the natural ways and just being a human being and doing what feels instinctively right, not doing what you think other people think you should do,” he says.
The lesson came with a touch of high glamour, in 2009, when he was called to Hendersonville, Tennessee, to photograph Taylor Swift at her parents’ home for UK magazine, Bliss. “I turn up, no assistant because there wasn’t the budget,” he says. “American Vogue had just photographed her and two trucks of equipment went past me. The PR looked at me like: ‘Where’s your equipment?’ and I just looked at my feet. But we were in the grounds and I set up and she came out in a beautiful dress and I just started shooting and knew straight away – it was absolutely beautiful. The record company ended up buying all the pictures to help promote the album. It was a lesson learned, just to keep your focus and not let people make you feel insecure.”
Years later, her team called him back to Nashville to shoot her in a hotel room – a job he declined unless they’d come to a studio instead, where he knew he’d get a better shot. It’s an attitude that comes off as well-won instinct, rather than arrogance.
And while with Taylor “the stars aligned”, conversely his signature style treads a fine line of making people feel “themselves”, while provoking them outside of their comfort zone. “I love to make people do things they’d ordinarily not do,” he says. “It’s about getting rid of the ego and insecurity, it’s my way of getting them to be authentic. Like when I photographed James Corden, we didn’t have a lot of props or ideas around it. So we just got some martini in a glass. I said: ‘Do you like martini?’ and he said: ‘No it’s disgusting’, so I told him to drink it. And that was what created that extra ‘thing’. That’s what I like, that moment of playfulness, youthfulness and excitement.”
They’re personality traits he’s found the biggest stars to have in common. “I think that’s where the magic is. I was shooting Pelé for GQ in Switzerland, in a beautiful five- star hotel. He came in and said: ‘I’ll just change here, no problem,’ and just took his trousers off in front of us. He was just really present and lovely. I just asked him to laugh and he was full of honest light – there was no crap.”
But he’s not name-dropping for name-dropping’s sake. Webb’s daily life at his Zap Studios is meeting the people we all want to know and capturing them, whole, in a split second. “You see a lot of the truth when you photograph someone – if they’re feeling insecure or stressed, it’s right there. With actors, a lot of them find that still image really petrifying. Because it’s capturing one moment in time, they can’t get out of that by acting.”
It’s probably why many A-listers now turn to social media to mould their image, which allows them to check and coordinate a limitless amount of pictures. “Nowadays, everyone wants to see everything straight away and see the behind-the-scenes,” he says. “But I want to create something that makes people think and has mystery. It’s not about reality, I like them to be fantastical. It’s just one image, but it’s so different to social media and that throwaway imagery – it’s the polar opposite.”
Growing up in Suffolk with his twin brother, playing in psychedelic bands, Webb dreamed of being either a rock star or a photographer. The two, he says, are bound together by a love for the fantastical and the hyper-real. It’s something he’s taken on as a signature style: finding a place in fantasy, where, ironically, he can capture a truth – a timeless, eternal moment.
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