LIFE AS BUT A DREAM
5 Decades of Work with Douglas Kirkland

Imagine this: A young photographer from a small Canadian town finds himself alone in a studio with Marilyn Monroe, who is wearing nothing but a transparent white, silk sheet. The year is 1961, and the photographer is Douglas Kirkland, on assignment for Look magazine’s 25th anniversary issue.

Fast forward nearly 50 years:

That same photographer gets a call from his friend Steve Newman at 20th Century Fox asking him to photograph Angelina Jolie’s version of that very same photograph of Miss Monroe. By his own admission, Douglas Kirkland is living a dream. “Just put it in your mind what it would be like if you went to sleep and woke up in the most beautiful place in the world. That’s where I find myself today, and I haven’t even been asleep. But I open my eyes and I can’t believe all these things are happening.”

This dream life of Douglas Kirkland’s goes back to Fort Erie, that idyllic town of 7000 where he grew up. “My family was very loving, my father owned a tailor shop, I walked to school in the morning, played hockey in the winter and swam in the Niagara River in the summer. It was very much a Tom Sawyer existence,” Kirkland fondly remembers. And as with many families of that era, Life magazine arrived on Fridays at the post office. “My father would bring it home at lunchtime, and we’d pore carefully over every page until I had to go back to school, and I’d walk back with visions of all those great photographs from all over the world in my head. This was photography for me, and the people who took those pictures in Life, Look and other publications were my heroes. In my wildest dreams, I never thought that could ever be me.”

That early passion for photography served Kirkland well. From high school on, he was focused on a career behind the camera and he set his sights high. After paying his dues for a short while as a young newspaper and studio photographer, he wrote letters to all of the prominent photographers in New York City asking if he could meet them. “It was a long shot, but to my amazement,” recalls Kirkland, “one of the people who responded was Irving Penn. He said he had no opening, but if I was going to be in New York, I should call and, if he could, he would try to see me.” Kirkland did eventually land a job in Penn’s studio, and it had an amazing effect on him to see photography on an entirely different dimension than he’d known before.

Kirkland’s next long-shot lucky break came in 1961, shortly after joining Look magazine as a fashion photographer at the age of 24. As if that wasn’t lucky enough, he got a call one day from his boss asking him to go to Las Vegas to help the magazine’s movie editor who was interviewing Elizabeth Taylor. She had specified that she wouldn’t be photographed, but after the interview, Kirkland was able to talk her into taking some photos, one of which wound up on the cover of Look. The rest is Hollywood history.

Over the course of the next five decades, Kirkland wound up photographing nearly every marquee movie celebrity, including Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, Katherine Hepburn, Orson Wells, Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren, Julie Christie, John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DeCaprio and Nicole Kidman, to name but a few. He has also published over a dozen books of his photos, including Freeze Frame: 5 Decades / 400 Photographs, which came out last year. These photographs were drawn from the work he did on the sets of over 100 motion pictures, including such classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Camelot, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sound of Music, Saturday Night Fever, Aliens, Cabaret, Risky Business, Rain Man, Sophie’s Choice, Out of Africa, Titanic and Moulin Rouge.

In talking about the process of putting this amazing book together, Kirkland confesses, “I kept finding things that I couldn’t believe were there. All of these images that have lived beyond the assignment. Don’t get me wrong, those assignments were great, but ultimately you have to live by your images.”

While Kirkland is in his mid-70s, he still maintains a busy shooting schedule, including working on a big project for Vanity Fair magazine in Milan and Rome. He also enjoys the fruits of going through his archives with his wife and business partner, Francoise. Their most recent book, Coco Chanel: Three Weeks/1962,  is drawn from the photographs he took while spending three weeks with the renowned fashion designer back in 1962. “Just think about it,” declares Kirkland, “Here’s this kid from a small town and today, in 2008, having all of these possibilities of exciting things both from the archives as well as current-day shoots. There’s just so much going on. And HP is such a central part of it because they’re printing this huge museum show which will travel around Europe. It’s really quite extraordinary that this is still happening to me. I’m still feeling the beat, and enjoying every bit of it. I’m still living a dream!”