Lou ©2012 Kirk Tuck
See his work here: Victor Skrebneski.
I was in a discount bookstore an I came across a book of portraits by Victor Skrebneski. I was stunned at what he'd done, bought the book and looked around for more copies. Then I started to study him. He is a fashion photographer who has been working in Chicago since the 1950's and is most famous for decades and decades of beautiful Estee Lauder ads. Amazing skin tones and wonderful colors.
But the book I bought, Skrebneski Portraits, was filled with high contrast images of faces and torsos. It was powerful and different from all the stuff I usually saw in photo magazines.
More and more my work started to reference Skrebneski's. I find the directness of his black and white technique very compelling.
Edit June 5: Do you need a copy of one of my first two lighting books in Chinese?
Here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=kirk+tuck
Scroll down to items 10 and 11.
Internationally published. Yes.
9 comments:
A wonderful photo you have here Kirk! And yes, a bit like Skrebneski's. Wonderful light.
Just looking at your photo again from my workplace, and I'm trying to figure out how the heck you lit this. Fresnel? Heavy use of gobos? Hmmm...
Iman and David Bowie: that picture made me exclaim out loud. Thanks for pointing me down another photographic byroad Kirk. His work is unlike any I've seen before.
Thank you for that link! Orson Welles is looking so cool. So much Body, ant then the little head in the corner. Great!
Such a pity, that the frames in the web have such a small size!
Beautiful high contrast portrait. Her eyes are mesmerizing.
Love Skrebneski. He can make anyone or anything look elegant.
Yes, his pictures of film-makers in particular are amazing for how they manage to capture a feeling of the director's work in his portrait. The Welles picture is a great example of that, as is the less famous 3-strip portait of Peter Greenaway.
I can remember back in the 70s, 80s and 90s every Sunday looking through the Sunday Chicago Tribune Magazine for ads with photos by Victor Skrebneski. I could never figure out why he wasn't written about as much as the other big names of fashion photographers.
To be honest, I haven't looked for his work in the past 10-15 years so I just did a Google image search using his name and came up with 24,900 hits. It's going to be a wonderful couple of hours perusing these images.
I have taken my own advice and purchased another copy of his book, A Matter of Record. Apparently so have a bunch more people. It's now in short supply.
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