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Even considering that I’ve had the good fortune to photograph some pretty impressive people over the years, when Ronnie Weil called from the Wall Street Journal and offered up John Cleese, it really knocked the wind outta me. People toss around the word ‘iconic’ a lot, but John Cleese is a true ICON. What he and the rest of the Pythons did to comedy in the early 70’s forever changed how people laughed. He is a manic genius who…to quote a famous Monty Python sketch…is a true master of sarcasm…dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire!
And I was getting 15 minutes with him…
Mr. Fawlty was in New York as part of a tour to promote his new book, “So Anyway”, and we met him in a midtown hotel where we set up two situations in a room slightly smaller than an average walk-in closet…
For our first shot, I wanted to do a tight portrait…just his face…to capture a range of expressions…
We started with just a gridded Profoto beauty dish on the grey seamless…
…then added a 4′ x 6′ Chimera over my shoulder for fill and a small strip light on the background for separation…
But something didn’t look right…the 80mm lens perspective was a bit uninteresting…so we swapped it for the 150mm…
Much better…now just add one Python…
…and let the rat-faced fun begin!
I began calling out various characters of his and sketches he was known for and he immediately knew where to take it…
And because we had a wealth of great expressions, I made the suggestion that we do a montage of them. Here is how it ran in the Journal…
Then we turned 45 degrees to the left and played around with some 3/4 shots…
It was like shooting fish in a barrel…
Then he started doin’ this…
…and like that, our 15 minutes were up. But I had a fantastic time with an honest-to-God ICON…and checked off one more Bucket List item!
Damn Ugly Photography 