the evolution of their Thing™
unbelievable this show got me back on tumblr reblogging gifset like i’m 16
holy shit i finally got on the good girls train and i have been able to stop watching the last week, also rio??? help
wait you’re telling me there’s a podcast in germany partnered with tinder and put people on blind dates and a popular singer is a guest and their blind date is an asian woman? fuck yeah?
An afternoon with Benedict Cumberbatch
Celebrities spend a notable portion of their time with photographers. They spend this allotted time in front of a camera, choosing how much they reveal of themselves, posing, not posing, indulging requests, refusing them… Then they go away, often leaving a lasting impression on the photographer. Which begs the question, how much of an impression can a photographer leave on a celebrity? It would be easy to leave a bad one, just be an arsehole. But to leave a lasting positive impression before anyone even sees the photos, how often does that happen?
I am not flamboyant, loud, boisterous, camp or crass. I possess few of the imagined stereotypical celebrity photographer qualities. I am polite, patient, anxious in the beginning, more confident as the shoot goes on, witty if I get lucky and I like to talk to my subject. Not just asking them questions, like some kind of bonus interview, but talking about myself too, so it’s a normal conversation between two normal people. I don’t give enormous amounts of direction when making portraiture. I wait, I nudge, I wait some more, I suggest, I keep waiting until ‘the photograph appears’. Sometimes I take pictures to fill the time waiting for ‘the photograph’ and sometimes those pictures work, but most of the time I know when I have got the shot I’ve waited for before looking at the back of the camera, or seeing the contact sheets. In this case, with Benedict, I shot entirely on film.
I don’t want to exaggerate, I’m sure my assistant would tell you that to him and anyone else on the shoot observing, there were no remarkable exchanges between myself and Mr Cumberbatch. At one point I told him he was being 'too sexy’ - I think he’d undone some buttons on his shirt - and that became sort of a running joke for the rest of the shoot, but I’m probably romanticising. Even so, it sticks in my mind, begging embellishment with each retelling.
It’s intimidating, in truth, to talk to someone who’s very personality has catapulted them to international stardom. I didn’t achieve some small success in photography because I’m hilarious, brilliant, witty or charming, I got to where I am because of my ‘eye’ (and to an arguably larger extent, my business strategy). Whether or not I did a good job doesn’t become evident until much later on, after the shoot has finished and everyone has gone home. Benedict on the other hand, is required to exude charisma at all times, the nature of his talent means it is instantaneously evident, judged live. To photograph someone with his strength of character is to strive frantically to capture a portion of it. Even if you only manage half a second, that’s all you need, such is the immortality of a still image.
I’ve had a lot of excellent feedback on the story for OUT magazine, most notably from Benedict’s devoted fan-base, who arguably know him best of all, being followers of everything he does, every photo, every interview, chat show appearance and the like. Still I don’t know what Benedict himself thinks of the pictures, or me as a person for that matter, and am unlikely to ever find out, at least directly.
All I can say with absolute certainty about my time with Sherlock, Smaug, Julian, Alan, Khan, is that it never felt awkward or uncomfortable, I spent most of it smiling, a handful of it laughing, and whether I made any sort of impression on him or not, I am eternally thankful that he happened to be my first cover.
i’m sure i must have reblogged this before but i had a photoshoot today that reminded me of the Benedict covers
^ i just found this in my drafts how many years later and like, i don’t remember which photoshoot it was??? haha omg
“
Kevin’s dream-death is only one of endless images of suicide on “The Leftovers”: Nora has a prostitute shoot her in the chest, shock therapy after she loses her children; Kevin pulls plastic bags over his head, then tears them off at the last minute; Laurie appears to drown herself, accidentally on purpose. On another show, this obsession might seem grotesque, self-indulgent. But the power of “The Leftovers” is its capacity to embrace taboo impulses without judgment: to show radical faith, extended mourning, or hallucinatory paranoia not as pathological but as human, deserving of a gentle eye. The show is full of tenderness for every character who imagines seizing some control, even if that means writing his or her own ending.
Critics haven’t seen the finale yet, but for once the landing doesn’t seem to matter. “The Leftovers” could end with an hour-long monologue about how critics misread “Lost” and I’d be satisfied. In daily life, hearing someone else’s dream is a burden, but here it’s a gift. Or maybe it’s more that “The Leftovers” itself has felt as absorbing as a dream, the art you flee into during hard times. It’s not real, but you want to stay as long as you can. I’ll be grieving when we wake.
”— Emily Nussbaum, the Apocalypse According to the Leftovers
Bradley Cooper as Will Tippin with Jennifer Garner’s Sydney Bristow in Alias and Bradley Cooper as Jackson Maine with Lady Gaga’s Ally in A Star is Born
I’ve made mistakes before in work and in personal relationships where I’ve just been like, I just want to be here so badly, that I will look past this glaring issue that I do not like. And that makes me feel uncomfortable,” Slate said. “I would not be able to metabolize that thing that I didn’t like. It would just sit in me like a stone… It would burn me up from the inside out, and then I would reach a point where I still hadn’t processed it, until I would be like, Why am I sitting here on this job? Or, Why am I sitting across from this person? I’m not serving them, and they’re not serving me. You can—for a while—look past the problems, but for yourself, you can’t really look past anything. You can repress, and you can try and be blind, but you will always be hobbled. I think one will always be hobbled by what they’re trying to hide in themselves—that burden will always make a weird emotional posture for you.
The last three years of my life have been the best years of my life and also the hardest. It was really hard and sad to get divorced. It was really hard and sad to watch what happened in the last presidential election. It’s hard and sad to watch the news. And for me, I think I had to take a look at what wasn’t serving me. Because I started to not recognize the way I behaved. I think of myself, and I believe in myself, as a kind, rational woman. And I think I really started to expect the worst in people, and I really didn’t recognize that point of view in myself. I started to understand that it came from a dissolution of some of the belief systems that I had. I believed partnership should be one way, and then I got divorced. I believed that our political system worked in a certain way, and that democracy worked in a certain way, and that was really, really turned upside-down. I had to take a look at what my own behaviors were, why they didn’t serve me, and what I lost in my life. Whether it was my own self-esteem, whether it was my sense of reality, whether it was simply my temper that I lost… or was it just my faith or my innocence? Those are things I want to keep, no matter what’s going on in this world. [I want to keep] my faith in people—not my religious faith, but my human-based faith. Those are the things I need in order to be an artist and in order to be a good partner. And I just didn’t feel that I believed in myself as either one of those things. And so I had to really look at it. And it’s really hard. It can be humiliating.
The second that I started to have to be alone and really understand what I want from myself, it started to happen pretty quickly that I was able to make changes and grow up finally. I really do feel like I’m the adult version of my child self—which means that I haven’t lost my innocence or my inclination to be gregarious or have fun. But my self-respect has grown, and my dedication to being a feminist is stronger than ever… Whatever my next partnership is—even though I don’t know who that will be with, because I really have been so super-solo—I know I’ll be a good partner, because I feel that I have more dignity, and more flexibility and more eagerness to accept someone than I’ve ever had before, and I do think it’s because I accept myself.