When you can’t beat them, join them … literally.
Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of a professional photo shoot? In the golden age of portrait sessions, there was one recurring disruption that plagued Waring Abbott: someone with the persistent urge to grab a moment of reflected glory. What happens when a photographer gets tired of this obsession? He turns it into some funny art memorabilia. Instead of fighting the urge, he decided to embody it.
Related article: Interview with Waring Abbott
Featured image: Becoming the Subject with The Flirts © Waring Abbott
A Career Defined by Icons
To understand the humor behind this project, it is worth looking at the caliber of talent he has captured over the decades. He created an archive that defined the visual history of music and culture. His lens has captured:
Kurt Vonnegut (holding a bunny rabbit), KISS, Lou Reed, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Prince, Freddie Mercury, Blondie, Jimmy Page, Stevie Wonder, Electric Light Orchestra, The Clash, Aerosmith, ABBA, Simon and Garfunkel, James Brown, Grace Jones, Brian Eno, Joan Jett, Marc Bolan (T. Rex), Henry Rollins, Cyndi Lauper, Suzanne Vega, Barry White & Love Unlimited, Beastie Boys, The Beach Boys, Rod Stewart, Pink Floyd, Whitney Houston, Van Halen, Sly Stone, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Johnny Thunders, Ray Charles, Brian May, Outkast, Peter Gabriel, Alice Cooper, Eric Clapton, Scorpions, Rickie Lee Jones, Kraftwerk, Johnny Cash, Joe Cocker, Donna Summer, Toni Morrison, Andy Warhol, Calvin Klein, Brooke Shields, Robert DeNiro, Steve Martin, and countless others.
After teaming with KISS for the first time in 1974, he went on to take pictures of a number of famous early sessions, such as the band’s 1975 trip to Cadillac, Michigan. He photographed the KISS’s trio concert at Studio 54 in early 1982, as well as “The Elder” video sessions for “A World Without Heroes” and “I” (the latter video was never shown). In later years, his artwork expanded to include fine art and nature photography, reflecting a shift toward a more contemplative and personal practice.
The Meta-Photography Experiment
As he recalls, the irritation eventually turned into a creative outlet:
“There was a period towards the end of my working career when I got very irritated by people who kept coming up while I was doing a session and saying, ‘Take a picture of me with so-and-so.’ I thought: ‘Why are you doing this? What is your obsession with getting a picture with so-and-so?’ I figured if I participated in this process, maybe I could get rid of it psychologically. So, what I would do from then on out, at the end of every session, was try to dress up like that person, whoever I’d been shooting, and get my assistant to take a picture of me with them. It actually turned out to be very enjoyable, a lot of fun, and it made for some very strange pictures. So, that’s what I wound up doing in terms of pictures that I enjoyed.”
Those questions sparked this series. He was tired, yes; but he decided to conduct an experiment. The result? He turned a moment of frustration into a series of bizarre, and hilarious photo essays. These creative shoots are a collection that is as strange as it is endearing. These photos are a revealing look into his sense of humor, a deliberate, meta-commentary on the art of fame. It’s a subversion of the celebrity worship culture of the time; a photographer “becoming” the subject, turning the camera’s gaze back onto himself to bridge the gap between artist and idol. Below is the “Becoming the Subject” series: they are weird, they are funny, and they are a brilliant look into the mind behind the lens.
Becoming the Subject with Huey Lewis. In this photo, Waring Abbott is wearing a t-shirt featuring a portrait of Huey Lewis, a shot Abbott had taken in his own studio just months prior. That original photograph was, in turn, inspired by a scene from one of Lewis’s music videos. © Waring Abbott
His photography spans the street-level pulse of New York in his Disco FEVER project and the quiet, sprawling landscapes beyond it, rooted in a singular pursuit: finding the unmasked, unseen and new behind the subject.
Photos courtesy of © Waring Abbott
Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.
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