Photograph courtesy of Michael Wlison
Michael Wilson isn’t signed to Nonesuch Records, but the Cincinnati photographer has been making pictures for the expansive and adventurous New York label since 1998—gorgeously definitive black-and-white portraits of such artists as jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Akron rock duo The Black Keys, and the late opera singer Lorraine Hunt Leiberson.
As part of its 60th anniversary year, the label gave Wilson his own boxed set, featuring 20 signed and numbered prints: Michael Wilson / 25 Years: A Nonesuch Collection. It’s both limited (100 copies) and expensive ($600), a true objet d’art, though you can still get a taste of it online.
“Michael Wilson approaches a portrait session as a conversation,” composer Timo Andres writes in his notes for the set. “His pictures become mementos of mutual trust between photographer and subject. This ad hoc relationship cannot be anticipated or constructed in advance; it must be discovered through trial and error, improvisation, and meeting halfway. Like with live performances, there’s a spontaneity to the result.”
When you are doing a portrait, how much of the process is the dynamic with your subject and how much of it is the camera, light, and setting?
Those two worlds, I think of them as the subterranean part of the portrait and then the topical part of the portrait. There’s the brass tacks concerns of where you find yourself with the subject. I am always [thinking], What can be built from what exists here in this space?
The bigger part of it comes down to understanding. For me, it’s kind of an empathy. To be photographed is an unusual kind of attention to have levied on you, that may or may not feel comfortable or welcoming to a person. You’re trying to find some place of genuine connections, where somebody feels trust, and it shows up on their face.
Your choice of certain cameras and your preference for black-and-white—those are both constraints and open new possibilities?
Yes. The physical aspect of the cameras factor into it. And I do shoot color—for any project, they need color as well as black-and-white. When I shoot color, I drop the film at the lab and send it off to the record company. But I have always gravitated toward black-and-white work, and that’s because I have more intersection with it. I see the film when I develop it. I’m handling it when I make the contact sheet. I study the contact sheet very carefully when I go into the darkroom and make prints. You have all these repeated intersections where you are thinking very intensely about whether the photograph succeeds or doesn’t succeed.
In his notes, Timo Andres said that he figured you hadn’t heard his music. Is that because you don’t want to form a preconceived impression?
If something has been sent to me, I will listen to it. But I won’t try to find out about them as a person. The beautiful thing about the Nonesuch artists is that everybody, whether it’s The Black Keys or Emmylou [Harris] or Steve Reich, these are all people that are making music not necessarily to become popular, but because they are in love with the music they’re making. And that’s pretty great to be around people like that.
Let’s talk about one particular shot: The Kronos Quartet.
They were in town doing the MusicNOW festival. I remember meeting them at Memorial Hall. I live in Price Hill, so I remember driving them to the Sixth Street viaduct. They’ve recently re-done it, but a few years back it was this really interesting iron bridge works, and there was sort of an abandoned street part. We spent a couple hours just driving around to places that I’ve driven by and photographed my whole life. The picture that was chosen for the portfolio was done along the street called Mehring Way with that Ohio River flood wall right behind them.
Jeri Heiden of SMOG design, who did the Nonesuch box, also gave you your first break. It sounds like she caught you by surprise by wanting you to be yourself instead of your idea of what a record company guy needed a photographer to be.
One of the things that was a through line for all these years was spending a lot of time at record stores, studying record covers, not just for the artwork, but for who was the producer. If I spent an hour in a record store and pulled out five album covers that I thought were great, Jeri’s name would be on three of them as art director. I started noticing, This person is responding to the same kind of photography that I’m responding to.
I made a small collection of maybe a dozen photographs, portraits, mostly, and my wife bound them together into a little book, and I just sent it to her cold. She wrote back.
I showed up there with a very poor portfolio that showed laminated printed pieces, assignments I’d done here in Cincinnati, that I assumed would show that I was professional. I remember sitting in her office, and next to me was a box of 11-by-14 prints. It was Herb Ritts’s photograph of Madonna. Across the room is Jeri Heiden looking at my pieces. I’m thinking this is a bad deal, because there was nothing related to the work I love in the stuff that I had brought to show her.
By some sort of stroke of luck, I had been working on a project that I’m still working on, and I had a bunch of those photographs. Jeri says, “Do you have anything else you can show me?” Luckily, these pictures I had made for the love of photography, but I assumed that she wouldn’t want to see those. She did. And among those was the picture that wound up being the cover for All Shook Down, The Replacements’ record.
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