From Our Archives: Platon: Portraits of Power

© Platon

This interview originally appeared in ISSUE NO. 19 - POWER

Andrea Blanch: Platon, you’re a prolific and world renowned photographer. You’ve given talks and been interviewed regarding your work and published 5 photography books. What new insights can you share regarding your experiences with people in power?

Platon: One of the biggest things I’ve learned is to be really honest with people. It’s a great risk, but if you are sincere and have the courage to reach out with an open hand, do it. The experiences I’ve had in my life have been extraordinary, and I’m really blessed because of it. To be able to reach out and connect with someone, especially if that someone is a world leader, that’s a moment in history.  And even if it’s just an ordinary person dealing with things that we all deal with, like love and loss, that can become a moment in history too. I am proud to be part of those moments, like the Civil Rights and human rights movements, because they became history as well. You’ve got to look at the fourth industrial revolution, which we are now in the middle of. If you’re going to be on the frontline of history, you need to have the courage to find your own way, and to learn from what came before. The person that doesn’t do that is in danger of believing they are inventing things. So, I’ve done my homework. For instance, I know every Avedon picture, every Penn. It’s in my blood more than people could ever imagine. 

© Platon, Barack Obama.

Most young photographers today just look at photography. But I’m hungry for culture, I always have been. My mother is an art historian and my father was an architect, so I was brought up to be. And my heroes were not always photographers. They were architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright, and painters and musicians like Miles Davis, Picasso, and Van Gogh. And we have to be informed by everything around us and tear up the rule book and follow our instincts, because the context is always evolving. 

Andrea: Isn’t it.

Platon: There’s something inherently wrong if you are of someone else’s time, and I was very aware of that. When I was graduating, Annie Leibowitz was a huge deal; because that was her time. The end of the 80’s was really about fame, power, and celebrity, and she just rode that time’s wave. But I hated what she was doing.

Andrea: You deal with famous people, but more so politicians. Why didn’t you take the route Annie did in photographing celebrities?

Platon: Celebrities didn’t mean anything to me because I grew up poor in London during a recession. There were no famous people in my life. They were so distant that it intimidated me, to be honest. Not in terms of authority, because I’ve always had a healthy disregard for that, but celebrities were trying to sell this idea of perfection that I just never bought. Martin Luther King always talked about the illusion of supremacy. He said, always be careful of the illusion, because that’s all it is, it’s not real. So, I grew up thinking, these people can’t really be better than the rest of us. So that’s why I started taking pictures. I was part of a movement in London that was reacting against… I wouldn’t say America, but certainly celebrity and glamour. Instead, it became about aspects of Brit-pop and grunge.

© Platon, Edward Snowden.

David Sims and Corrine Day reacted against the glamorous fashion photographers because they were going through the same thing I was. But I wasn’t really entrenched in the fashion world, although I learned a lot from it. I had no choice but to react against glamour, because I didn’t have access to it. I started taking pictures that were visceral, that were about the connection and the reality instead of the facade. I wanted to give myself a sense of what it’s really like to meet people, to interact with them, to connect with them, to feel their anxiety, their confidence. And then comes that moment when they can overcome their adversity. That’s always a magical moment.

There are also moments in which we don’t have the strength to overcome. The human condition is that we all go through defeats and victories, and I was fascinated by that from an early age. Then I started shooting for a lot of underground magazines like The Face, Arena and i-D. They were the most influential magazines, and they were the ones that were big in London at the time. It wasn’t about Vogue, and it wasn’t about Elle or the establishment. It was a new movement of people who were all thinking alike, even though they were very different. You had sensations in the art world, you had bands like Oasis, Blur, and Massive Attack. And you had the fashion designers like Alexander McQueen and Hussain Chalayan, who I was in college with. I knew all those guys. They used to lend me their unfinished clothes and I used to take pictures of them for their portfolios. 

As I said before, you have to be an artist of your time. I was publishing all these pictures that were gritty and when JFK Jr. started his magazine, George, a few years later, he knew nothing about photography; thank God for me. And he decided that he wanted to show fame and power from the inside. Because to him, the President was his dad, not “the President”. He grew up playing underneath the President’s desk, and he wanted to show what that was like.

So he sat down with his team, looked around, and realized he didn’t know anything at all about photography. His team brought him every magazine published over the last five years and then they sat in a room for months philosophizing and talking. They would go through every magazine tearing out pages he liked until they had a massive stack of torn sheets. He pushed it over the desk to his creative director Matt Bourbon and said, “I don’t know who these guys are, but whoever they are, that’s the feeling I want.” And 90 percent of it was my work.

© Platon, Muammar Gaddafi

Andrea: What is it that attracts you to power?

Platon: The illusion of it, and finding out what’s behind that. That was the beginning of my fascina- tion, but I’ve also become fascinated by the responsibility that comes with power. And because now I’ve seen from the front line how bad decisions can affect people. A photographer friend of mine, Tim Hetherington, was actually killed in Libya.

And we would always chat about stuff like this. I would photograph leaders who caused the problems and he would photograph the people suffering because of them. That was our constant. And I remem- ber the day I got word that he had died. It was my birthday, and I was printing a large scale print of Gad- hafi. So as I heard that my friend had just been killed by Gadhafi, there were his eyes staring at me. That felt like an acknowledgment that I’ve got to start doing more to cross the line and photograph people who have been robbed of power instead of just the leaders. Maybe I needed to step into Tim’s space.

Read more of this interview in ISSUE NO. 19 - POWER