We delve into the world of photographer MARC HOM to discover the vision and story behind his latest photo book and fascinating exhibition…
Photographer Marc Hom has a knack for turning fleeting moments into iconography. In his new book and exhibition (now showing at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York), the Danish snapper revisits some of his most intimate portraits of Hollywood’s biggest stars. From Angelina Jolie to Quentin Tarantino, Johnny Depp and Cher, Hom’s subjects are not unfamiliar in photo books. What sets his images apart is the sharpness.
A Copenhagener by birth, the photographer was born in 1967 and grew up influenced by the social and artistic movements that swept across Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. But no one was more influential than his own father. As he recounts in Re-Framed, his father, Jesper, was an accomplished photographer as well. “(He was) like the Scandinavian Cartier-Bresson, always standing on a corner with his Leica, taking pictures, capturing beautiful and very poetic moments in the sequence of what was happening in front of his lens,” he says.
Jesper gave up photography in the 1970s and declined advertising and commercial work, an early lesson in not compromising on creativity. “He didn’t really care about making a living. He didn’t care about anything but the integrity of the photograph, and that kind of belief was wonderful,” Hom remembers. “One day, he’d make some money, and we’d go to a restaurant; the next day, we would just eat toast.”
Thankfully, when Hom launched his own photography career, he (wisely) decided not to eschew lucrative advertising assignments. By the early ’90s, Hom had graduated from Danish photography school and was struggling to make a go of it in New York as a photographer’s assistant. Fortuitously, he crossed paths with legendary Harper’s Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis not long after she took the reins at the glossy publication in 1992. Inspired by the likes of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, Hom would join Mario Sorrenti and David Sims in reshaping the fashion magazine to compete with Anna Wintour’s Vogue. From those early days in New York working on fashion spreads and portraits for magazines, Hom approached his work the way a painter might approach a canvas. Sketches were made days in advance. Lighting was a project in perfectionism.
By the time the shutter closed, Hom had already carried in his mind an ideal of the finished photograph, as polished as a memory and no less challenging to re-create. While the influence of most fashion mags has waned in the digital age, celebrities continue to make time for them, mostly for the chance to work with creatives like Marc Hom.
“Open-mindedness is something that you learn,” he says. “Maybe you have an idea at the start, but then something completely different happens and it’s better,” Hom says.
One of the most striking images in the book is a portrait of actor Samuel L. Jackson created in 2019 for Esquire magazine. Hom was dispatched to produce portraits of the actor, whom he had never met, during a tightly scheduled shooting day. They started early. Over a cup of coffee, Hom worked to get to know a man who, at 70, had been photographed more than many heads of state, trying to figure out how to make such a familiar face seem authentic and new. On an impulse, Hom led Jackson into an open bathroom with a can of shaving cream.
“Sometimes you gamble – I just took him,” Hom remembers. Jackson spread the cream across his head. His publicist, impatient to begin with the day’s approved outfits and locations, began banging on the bathroom door. But Hom and Jackson were already at work. Stripped to an undershirt, lathered from his cheeks to his scalp, Jackson was captured with a razor aloft in one hand while lifting the other in parallel — a gesture of query or surrender. “In this life, in order to create a portrait that both you and the subject are proud of, you have to be able to establish true intimacy and mutual respect in a short time,” Hom explains. “Sam really liked the idea – he could see what I wanted to do.”
The portrait quickly became one of the most memorable of Jackson’s career and is also a striking example of Hom’s simultaneously brave and stylised aesthetic. Seen another way, the image carries social overtones: the white cream traces Jackson’s lips, as if in a defiant inversion of minstrelsy make-up; the raised hands channel a gesture of innocence and protest; the blade turns toward the subject, making this a portrait of a man who has spent his career resisting threats to his flourishing. Hom’s image alludes to George Lois’s famous Esquire cover, of 1965, depicting the actress Virna Lisi shaving her cheeks, in a moment now admired as a herald of the years of women’s liberation.
Marc Hom: Re-Framed is a summation of Hom’s work to date and a portrait of an artist’s moving mind in exhibition form. The show has two large parts. The first, indoors, resembles a traditional black-box gallery retrospective. The second, outdoors, brings Hom’s work into a space of wild uncontrol.
Here his polished studio portraits are printed eleven feet high and mounted on Masonite frames that catch the weather and that swivel in the wind. When the rain comes, they bear rivulets of water. In the mist, the landscape collapses to white. Although the portraits are a constant, our experience of them transforms day by day.
Mixed in with the gritty photos are more elegant portraits of the Hathaway and the Jolie types in elegant gowns. There’s also cheeky stuff, like Quentin Tarantino with a glove across his cheek to show “his hardness and his kinkiness”. Christopher Walken, in anguished introspection; and Martin Scorsese, as a drifting head among his frames. Then there’s an arresting image of the writer Joan Didion perched in a chair that travelled with her coast to coast. Actor Willem Dafoe also pops up a lot throughout.
Whether it’s a decades-old photo of Vanessa Redgrave or a brand-new portrait of Miley Cyrus, Hom’s work appears to exist away from timescales in its own liminal space. This is not a coincidence. “It’s about being able to still look at my own photographs 10 or 15 years from now and not say, ‘Oh, this is such a ’90s picture, or this is from the mid-2000s,’” he says. “The only thing that should give the period away is people getting older.” ■
MARC WHO?
Marc Hom is one of the most iconic portrait photographers in the world. He is renowned for photographing some of the most influential and innovative individuals of our time. Celebrity portraits include Cher, Aretha Franklin, Glen Close, Christopher Walken, Samuel L. Jackson and many more. Marc has also photographed multiple fashion campaigns for Gucci, Patek Philippe and Boss while some of his entertainment clients include Netflix, Showtime and Amazon.
MARC HOM: RE-FRAMED by Marc Hom with Nathan Heller (published by teNeues Publishers, $80.00rrp) is available at all good bookstores or online at Amazon and fenimoreartmuseum.org
By NATHAN HELLER with additional words by REILLY SULLIVAN
Photography by MARC HOM
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