Abstract: The Art of Design (2017–…): Season 1, Episode 7 - Platon: Photography - full transcript

[Platon] I'm not really
a photographer at all.
The camera is nothing more than a tool.
Communication,
simplicity,
shapes on a page.
What's important is the story,
the message, the feeling.
[man in Greek] Sit here?
[Platon] The connection.
[speaking Greek]
How do you make this...
[in Greek] Yes. There, there.
reach people?
[speaking encouragement in Greek]
It's a combination of graphic simplicity
and the power of spirit and soul.
[man in Greek]
You want angry, not happy.
[Platon] It's design.
[music playing]
[camera clicks and winds]
[Platon] Cory, can you
show me the fisherman?
Okay.
I think that looks pretty nice.
I know that Bob will be able to
bring so much texture out of the sea.
[Cory] Oh, yeah.
And there's loads of stuff in the island
you can't see, but we'll bring it out.
This is denim, which will be a gift to us
because of the texture.
-I hit it really hard.
-All the wood, Bob can bring all that out.
-Okay. Let's set up for the shoot.
-Cool.
[Pollack] You can look
at a Platon portrait,
and you know it's by Platon.
He has photographed the most
important people in the world
from the last two decades.
A Platon portrait is about lighting,
it's about the person's eyes,
it's about the graphic nature
of how he positions the camera.
Sometimes it's from below,
sometimes it's straight on.
Sometimes it's really about the hands
and about getting an exaggerated look
from the person.
It is about getting the soul.
[Lois] Everybody he shoots
has a look in their eye...
where you say, "Holy shit!"
You're drawn to it,
and somehow he gets it all the time.
But I really think he's a mystical
and magical photographer.
[Biondi] Platon brought an enormous power
into that square
or into that white background.
The composition is graphic.
Once it's published,
you can't help but look at it.
And no one can intimidate him, you know,
Putin didn't intimidate him.
Platon has made this his own,
and it's bold, graphic and fearless.
[Platon] Before a shoot,
I'm not thinking,
"How can I get a good picture?"
but "What can I learn from this person?"
Every time.
The human condition is so complicated.
Questions like: what is good leadership?
How important is compassion?
Following your own moral compass.
How to cope with failure.
Questions that we all
actually want to know.
Including myself.
[exhales]
To get to that point
where someone is just open,
you've got to earn it.
When a flower just opens to the light,
that's what it is.
-[Cory] Do you want more?
-[Platon] No, we should be good.
All right, thanks.
What book shall we give him?
-[assistant] I think Service.
-I think definitely Service, right?
Yeah, of course. Yeah.
Yeah.
We're good.
-It's perfect.
-[Cory] Okay.
[Platon] I don't know
what he's going to be like,
I don't know how open he's gonna be.
If he's gonna be nervous,
how warm he's gonna be,
how conservative he's gonna be
with his personality.
You have to prepare yourself for that.
[entrance buzzer]
[Biondi] It is very unselfish, really.
He's generally interested
in whoever is there in front of him,
and this does something, you know,
and people are willing to work with him.
Well, this has been
quite a journey to meet you.
Well,
I looked through your site last night.
-Right.
-Just incredible pictures. Remarkable.
-Well, incredible subjects.
-Yes.
I see. Hi, Bill.
[both laugh]
-George is behind.
-George? Over there?
And so is Barack.
I've got a present for you, my book.
Oh, thank you. Ooh!
[Platon]
And it's the whole military project.
It's really a tribute to all the men
and women who serve their country.
And family members.
As I discovered through doing it.
I didn't really understand that.
[Powell] People don't know what it's like.
By the time my son was ten years old,
I'd been away three years of his life,
two years in Vietnam and a year in Korea.
People don't realize
the toll it takes on a family--
-And a wife.
-And a wife.
[Platon]
Taking a picture is very technical,
but 99.9% is spent on this connection
that allows me to reach someone.
And through that connection,
there's just a chance
you're going to feel something too.
Right now, so, this is paper.
Don't lean on this.
-Got it.
-Have a seat.
So, uh, probably, more world leaders
have sat on this box
than any other chair on the planet.
Gaddafi sat on that box and Putin.
-So...
-[all laugh]
Not all bottoms are good bottoms.
Having your portrait taken
is a collaboration,
or a dance, or a battle,
depending on how I'm feeling that day
and how my sitter's feeling.
Click.
With Chavez, I had 30 seconds
and I got one frame.
But he gave me his personality on a plate
and he knew it.
He got up. He turns 'round,
puts his fist in the air
like a power salute
and he shouts, "Platon!"
It was just the most
extraordinary moment!
There I am in front of Putin,
I'm asking him about The Beatles.
I don't know
if I'm gonna get in trouble or not.
But with Putin, you have to go in close,
because no one gets close to Putin.
When I was doing Gaddafi,
I knew that this is going to be
a moment where the story is summed up.
I've never experienced
a chilling sense of menace and defiance.
He's not really posing for me.
He's posing for America.
My work is made
from lots of brief encounters
with extraordinary movers
and shakers of our time.
[Pollack] It could be
President of the United States
or it could be an undocumented migrant.
And he's always finding
a certain dignity to both
and he's also finding
a certain power in both.
He's getting that
often through the person's eyes.
[Biondi] He says something
that starts a conversation.
While it is rather spontaneous,
he does his homework.
You know, how did he know
that Putin likes The Beatles?
This is unusual for me,
because often I'm working with a magazine
and that's the vehicle.
-This is just completely personal.
-Mmm-hmm.
It's not even a picture just of you
at this point in your life,
it's a picture about us.
[Lois] It ain't just designing
a nice photograph.
He communicates
something deep inside somebody.
That's his art.
You've been married how long?
Fifty-four years, 54 years in August.
Dude, you've gotta give me advice.
[laughs]
-Pass me the camera.
-Do what she tells you.
That's the best advice,
do what she--
My wife will love you for that.
-Play dumb, don't argue.
-Right.
I don't know about playing dumb,
I actually just have to be myself,
which is pretty dumb.
[both laugh]
All right, now this is how it works.
[Platon] You may ask,
"What is a Platon picture?"
There's a path, there's a path
from the very beginning.
I was brought up in the Greek Islands,
and my mother is an art historian
and my father was an architect.
He would take me to beautiful buildings
and he would say, "Look at this building.
Look at the rhythm,
look at the fenestration,
look at the sense of human scale.
How does it relate to us?
And look at the majesty
of this giant beautiful thing
that someone created and designed."
My father used to do
these beautiful drawings in pen and ink.
And I grew up with this sort of
black and white aesthetic in my head.
It was so bold.
I spent most of my adult life
in the dark with a small red light on,
trying to find that visual language.
If it's necessary, it's in there.
If it's not necessary, it's not there.
So strip it down, simplify it.
Just go... for the core.
So I got used to looking
at something like the Acropolis
and thinking, "God, the power."
And many years later,
I found myself in front of Bill Clinton,
the first president I worked with.
I mean,
he's just a larger-than-life character.
You have to get
this giant monument of power.
It almost has the same feeling
as the Acropolis.
[guitar music playing]
There were churches everywhere in Greece.
In that church, you're going to have
a singular simple portrait
of a religious figure.
And it's just head and shoulders
and there's probably a halo.
That graphic simplicity
taps in all my design ideas,
all the things I'm drawn to.
A religious icon structure
mixed with modernist design.
Simple. Bold. Clear.
And you end up with a Platon picture.
So I grew up being educated as a designer.
I studied graphic design at art college.
My deep respect for form
and positive and negative space
comes from studying Frank Lloyd Wright's
idea of compression and expansion.
You walk into
a Frank Lloyd Wright building
and the entranceway is so small,
it makes you almost dip your head.
And then, as soon as you walk
into the main room,
he blows up the space
and it makes you feel...
[inhales]
"Aw, that's so good."
These are all lessons
I've put into my work.
If I can tap into someone's spirit,
it's the same feeling as when
you walk into a Frank Lloyd Wright room.
It opens you up. It does something.
And that's either a feeling
of complete menace or fear,
or feeling of inspiration and hope.
But it does do something to you,
as a person.
Another great designer
and incredible person through media
is George Lois.
He's the one that taught me
to be a cultural provocateur.
That's what I can do in society.
I can't solve any other problems,
but provoke.
I consider him
one of the few people I know
who are cultural provocateurs.
I think everything he photographs,
there's a chance for him to make a comment
about what the hell's going on
in the world, good or bad.
And he deeply cares about the poor.
He cares about the...
[stammers]
He just cares about humanity.
[Platon] All my heroes are people
who teach me about pushing buttons
and pushing myself to a point
where I can make you feel something.
[Pollack] Platon approaches
all of his pictures as an art director.
He embeds in his shoots
a sense of pacing,
how something's going to lay out.
[Platon] Because I'm trying
to simplify everything,
my pictures stand out
on the covers of magazines.
But it's really made out of my flaws.
That I can't cope with complication.
I'm extremely dyslexic.
I have trouble writing.
I write very slowly.
And reading for me is a huge problem.
For me, a very complex world has
to be simplified.
Has to be stripped down.
And design, for me,
was a way out of confusion.
Because great design simplifies
a very complicated world.
I still shoot with the same type of light.
The same film.
The same box.
The same shoot-through umbrella.
The same camera.
Everything is the same
and it allows the message to change.
Now, I'm going structure you a bit,
so I want your shoulders dead on to me.
Okay? This is all that's in the frame
right now, all right? So that's...
I begin with a long lens headshot, color.
That's always my first base.
Don't move, that's beautiful.
Now, I want you to think...
[camera clicks and winds]
about what we talked about with sacrifice.
Stay there, stay there...
And then suddenly,
I break through a tiny bit,
and instead of taking it and absorbing it,
I give it right back times a thousand,
and I normally yell at their face.
[loudly] Amazing!
Well, let's go home then. What the...
No, we're warming up.
It just keeps getting better!
Right, stay with me.
The shock of that destroys all walls
that they thought they were building.
Very gently, head a bit this way. Stop!
[camera clicks]
-Black and white.
-[Cory] Same thing?
Yep. Black background.
I want you to stay exactly where you are.
We're going to put
a small black background behind you.
-Mm-hmm.
-Okay. Gabby will come in.
I'll put up a black background,
because I want a sense of closed intimacy.
-You okay?
-[Powell] Yeah.
Now, keep your spirit.
Don't move.
That's beautiful. Hold that.
Eyes here. That's it.
Beautiful.
[camera clicks and winds]
One more, black and white.
We're good here. Go to white background.
I don't believe you should ever
allow your tools to dominate the message.
Great design is when all those things
take a backseat and you get the message.
[Pollack] He still shoots with film.
That really creates a very different set
between a photographer and a subject.
When you're photographing digital,
you're constantly looking
at the pictures on the screen
and what has happened
is you're losing that intimacy
between photographer and subject.
The magic part of the relationship
of getting to the picture
that you want to make.
[clicking]
[Platon] Hold that.
Cory, come lower.
I need to be close to my sitters,
and I need to feel what they're feeling.
It's a very painful process
of growth and experience.
Don't move.
I learned that being an immigrant myself.
When I arrived in England
at the age of eight years old,
I wasn't just a foreigner.
I was a "bloody foreigner."
Years later, I found myself walking
on a Saturday afternoon
and... I got jumped by this guy.
And he beat
the living daylights out of me.
Skull fractured, both cheek bones,
eye sockets, all my ribs busted.
And I was a mess, man.
It was just like, "Why me?"
Mumbling through my messed-up mouth.
And this old lady
in the bed next door said,
"Young man,
why not you?
What's so special about you?"
I would like to say
that angels started singing, and choirs,
and there was a light
came through the window,
as a photographer, I saw it...
That's all bullshit.
None of that happened.
But after a while,
I realized that if I can harness
the experience of what happened to me,
I now know what it is to hurt.
That is a door to something
that you never had before,
and that is empathy.
I was doing pictures in London
that reacted against façade,
because fame and power and celebrity
meant nothing to me.
My early pictures, like Alexander McQueen,
are part of that process of trying to say,
"Screw looking great and suave
and sophisticated,
I want some truth."
I was shooting from the hip
in street magazines
that were coming out of London.
So one day,
I got a call from JFK Jr.'s office.
He saw all that work in Face, Arena, i-D,
and he said, "There's something
in your work that lacks polish.
This is the kind of work I want
in George magazine."
If I look at the picture
and I feel I know them,
that's what I want.
Show me what it's like to meet them.
And it began me on a path,
which was incredible.
I thought that's gonna be my big break
in America.
There's no way I'd have access
to people at the highest level
without George magazine.
It gave me confidence to keep pushing.
I would be a fraud if I said
I wasn't ever dazzled by the lights.
It's the most dangerous thing.
You stop thinking straight.
And when John tragically died,
I thought, "It's all over."
So I went back to Greece.
[ship's horn blaring]
Just focused my creative attention
on what I know.
Where I can express myself
in an authentic way.
And that's around real people
who don't give a shit
about whether they've got lines
on their face.
[men speaking Greek inside]
Oh!
-[Platon in Greek] Hello, my friend!
-[man] Hello, my friend!
[in English] How are you?
So nice to see you again.
[in English] You look fantastic.
So what we're going to do is sit.
Sit where your father sat.
-So he was always here and there.
-Yes.
[Platon] When I was a kid,
I would always sit and draw in the square.
I used to draw all the old men and ladies.
It was calm and slow.
The old man would sit in that chair
for five hours.
When you are still and sitting,
your powers of observation
go through the roof.
If someone walks by,
it's a massive event.
You start noticing that
the lady's stockings have got a tear,
that the bag they're carrying
maybe has nothing in it.
You tap into the human condition.
That's a very powerful thing.
And it's those amazing details of humanity
that you start to understand.
[acoustic guitar playing]
[guitar continues playing]
[church bells ringing]
[people chattering in Greek]
-[woman in Greek] Oh! How are you?
-[Platon in Greek] Yes, fine.
-Bravo.
-You? So-so? Come on...
No, I'm fine. I have my cane.
-Okay, okay!
-What can we do?
[laughs]
[continues laughing]
You know, people say
I probably developed my style
looking at Richard Avedon or Irving Penn.
But that's not actually true.
My white backgrounds come
from these white houses.
[laughing and chatting in Greek]
My 35mil. stuff
is about context and atmosphere.
It's not always about
getting all that detail
that I would get in a studio sitting.
Always available light.
The best light is just raw sunlight.
No lights, no assistants.
It's photography alive and kicking.
The only thing you can do is focus
on compassion, dignity and humility.
[whispers in Greek]
[camera clicks, winds forward]
[camera clicks, winds forward]
[clicking and winding continues]
[softly] It's a very powerful connection,
and that is what photography feels like.
[sighs]
[laughs softly]
[Platon] At the end of it,
you've got the aesthetic.
That comes last.
[traditional Greek music playing]
When I came back to Greece,
I came back to my people.
And it was an empowering experience
of finding my feet as a human being.
[whoops]
[more whooping]
[cheering and applauding]
[cheering and clapping continues]
After that, I went back to New York
and I spent a year working
on the material with my team
and then The New Yorker heard about it.
[Biondi] We were actually looking
of adding another photographer.
He showed me his work, and what I remember
of them most were his Greek photographs.
[Platon] The irony is
I went back to Greece
to do something that is the antithesis
of what I expected The New Yorker to like.
My first project for them
was a large-scale photo essay.
We were heading into
a very complicated, divisive election.
Obama's first election.
And we wanted to do something that would
provoke respectful debate in America.
And I got embedded with the US Military
as our troops trained
for America's most recent wars.
[gentle piano music playing]
It became a year-long project.
We went to Arlington Cemetery
as one of the important sessions.
And I noticed this lady takes a fold-out
picnic chair every day to her son's grave,
and reads to her son's gravestone.
[piano music continues]
I was just devastated.
And if it meant something to me,
there's just a chance
it means something to other people.
Is it wrong to be
a Muslim in this country?
The answer is, "No, that's not America."
[Powell] I feel strongly
about this particular point
because of a picture I saw in a magazine.
It was a photo-essay about troops
who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And one picture was of a mother
in Arlington Cemetery.
She had her head
on the headstone of her son's grave,
and you could see his awards,
Purple Heart, Bronze Star.
He was 20 years old. He died in Iraq.
And then at the very top,
it had a crescent and a star
of the Islamic faith.
He was an American and he gave his life.
There was something I had wanted to say
about the intolerance that is
being shown increasingly in 2008,
and frankly it has continued.
And so I said, "How can I really
illustrate and demonstrate this?"
And bam, there was the photo.
[Platon] That was the beginning.
I realized that from now on,
the hero is the person that inspires us
to think again about our own moral compass
and our own responsibility
as global citizens.
Platon talks truth to power in his work,
and he talks truth to power
in the subjects
that he chooses to shoot sometimes.
[Platon] Human Rights Watch approached me
and they said, "There's this country
called Burma
that's run by a brutal military regime.
No one's talking about it.
Can we do something about it?"
We published all the work,
and it blew up!
That sort of aspect of pictures
can change the world.
These stories will be placed
in publications
and that collectively brings a focus
on horrible situations
that exist in the world.
[Platon] I realized if I were to
raise my own money,
I could go to my friends
in the NGO community,
and I'll say, "Give me your stories
and I will bring them to life."
[Pollack] Platon came to me
with an incredible series of pictures
on undocumented migrants in this country.
He was interested
in families that were being torn apart,
and we were able to publish that work.
And not only did he photograph them,
but he interviewed them.
It was an incredible series.
[Platon] And my job
is to be the bridge builder.
And we're nothing as human beings
if we don't experience that connection.
So I founded The People's Portfolio
to help tell these important stories
of our time.
[African drumming]
What brought me to Congo
was a chance meeting with this
incredible man called Dr. Mukwege.
He's a gynecologist.
He set up a small practice
to help women give birth
in a happy, normal environment.
But what started to happen,
women were arriving
at the gates of his hospital
who experienced the most traumatic
sexual violence you could imagine.
He's dealing with
this trauma of civilization.
He invited me to his hospital
with my team.
I was committed to see
if I could help him.
And I said I would love
to photograph the survivors
and I would like to tell
a broader story as well.
So I hooked up with two partners,
the Panzi Hospital Foundation
and then another organization
called Physicians for Human Rights.
And we all formed
this giant network together.
[Mukwege] Hello, Platon.
It's been a long journey.
-And we're here for you, my whole team.
-Thank you.
[Platon] This was the hardest mission
I've ever put together.
It was a three-year project to plan.
-[people singing]
-[drums banging]
[Platon] People need to know
what's going on in Congo.
And my job is to build that bridge
in a solid way.
The power of the content,
that's the whole point of design.
That moment when
you feel something very powerful.
[all singers] Amen.
[Mukwege in Swahili]
He is a famous photographer
and is known all over the world.
Platon.
[crowd clapping and laughing]
[Mukwege] Glory be to the Lord.
[all] Amen.
[Platon] The crisis in the Congo
is very complicated.
It's a mineral-rich country,
but with that mineral wealth
has also come great corruption,
rebels, civilians, militia.
[gunfire]
The underlying notion of the Congo
is that if you want territory,
you take it.
And the easiest and cheapest way
to take the land
begins with using rape
as a weapon of warfare.
Rape is cheaper than bullets.
We all just have to be aware.
We're dealing with women
who have been through
the worst circumstances in their lives,
and we're a bunch of guys.
Just be gentle. All right?
I'm going to photograph
one at a time, maybe two together.
Okay.
[speaking French]
All right, turn over the paper.
[interpreter speaking indistinctly]
[Platon] Cory, go easy with the reading.
[camera clicks and winds]
[Platon] What makes this work
is not a calculated argument
that you've scripted.
It's just the beauty and delicacy
of the human condition.
-Pregnant, all from rape?
-[male nurse] Yes, all from rape.
[Platon] All right,
you got to be fast, Cory.
Okay.
Now...
[Platon] I know exactly where, if I reach
my hand, the lens is right there.
I don't want to look down at my camera
to adjust the f-stops.
Because that means I'm taking my eye
off the story for a second.
If I'm losing the glint in your eye
a bit too much,
I'll get you to look just above the lens
and that would just be enough
for your eyes to hit the light.
It's just a twist of the neck now.
Sometimes I just touch my chest
and gesture out,
as if to say "Open up."
[camera clicks and winds]
Black and white, let's move fast.
[gentle music playing]
Can I ask her to tell me
what happened to her?
[Esther in Swahili]
One day I was coming from school
and went to fetch water from a river.
I met a man who told me
that if I didn't have sex with him,
he promised he'd kill me with a knife.
Then after he let me go.
I got treatment, and after,
I gave birth to this baby.
[camera clicks and winds]
[Platon] When I'm really locked in...
Got it.
it's an amazing, terrifying experience,
every time.
There's such strength in everyone here.
In these next few pictures,
channel all that strength from the women.
It goes through your heart,
out, into the camera,
out to the world.
Because if I get it wrong,
I can actually do great harm.
[camera clicks and winds]
It's really important
that my homework is done.
[sighs] All right, it's a bloody wrap.
[general chatter]
[upbeat music playing]
All the things I have learnt about
the difference between right and wrong,
I need to learn these things
through my job.
And if I can pass those values on,
then it's a good thing.
And a lot of the time, to do these things,
I'm away all the time.
Here I am talking about the responsibility
of telling people's stories
and getting it right...
But I also have a responsibility
as a family man.
Shall we get some more?
-All right...
-[girl] What are you going to do?
I don't know. I'm going to take this one
and I am going to use
the same blue as you.
So just the spots, what do you think?
It's funny, because I am actually
the one that freezes time.
So I now know
how precious every moment is.
And I'm trying to squeeze it
so dry every second.
-Cory?
-Yup?
Can you tell me what frame we used
for Esther? Was it frame 12?
No, it was contact one, four C,
frame three.
Got it.
Hmm...
[gentle piano music playing]
Let's have a look at the edits.
[Cory] This is everything thus far
that you've selected.
And then Esther.
So here, there's something beautiful
about just focusing on the baby,
but in this case,
I think you need her.
You can tell she's in pain.
I mean look, there's a scar.
But I've also seen this shape
so many times.
But there's something
totally open about this.
No one's performing.
She's just very open, very raw.
So let's scan it and give it to Bob.
The drum scanner I have was built
by NASA in the '80s.
It does something beautiful to the grain
that you just can't get
with other scanners.
Everything I do is based on the dark room.
[Bob] Let me show you this.
The only way I can bring out
all these elements in a print
is to start isolating different elements
and treat them all
with their own reverence.
I think they're a little intense,
so let's bring them down.
The danger of Photoshop
is that everything is just
a constant sliding scale.
We never use the magic wand,
which is a tool
to just instantly select certain areas.
Everything is hand drawn.
Everything.
And now we're just getting to the bit
where we just have to balance it all out.
With all this amazing technology,
the tools must never dominate us.
I think we're good.
[Bob] Okay.
[expectant, hopeful music playing]
[Platon] It's getting close.
Wow.
[exclaims]
Look at that.
Wow.
That's beautiful.
Through this picture,
she will give other people
in a similar position great strength.
So when I press the shutter...
Hold that.
something amazing happens.
Yes!
It's 500th of a second,
but it's freezed an event.
You're looking for a moment
when you feel
you're as close to the soul as possible.
That's what good design is,
when it liberates you,
and it allows you to do that,
to help you feel something very powerful.
And that's when you make an icon.
[upbeat music playing]