April 02, 2016
By Amy McRary of the Knoxville News Sentinel
Photographer George Holz fished with Brad Pitt in Montana, hopped a New York bus with Kevin Spacey and shot Madonna in her 1980s finery. But his first celebrity portrait was taken years before at the Anderson County Fair.
Holz, 59, is a renowned portrait and fashion photographer. His work portrays icons of popular culture from Jack Nicholson to Beyoncé to Michael Jordan to Yoko Ono. Holz's images, often credited with showing his subjects' personalities rather than their personas, have graced such magazines as Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and Harper's Bazaar. He's taken photos for movie posters and album covers, including his Grammy Award-winning work for Suzanne Vega's "Days of Open Hand."
He selected 283 photos of 256 people for his coffee-table book "Holz Hollywood: 30 Years of Portraits." About 75 percent of the photos haven't been previously published. Some were taken as candids, as the last images of a photo session or because Holz knew what he saw through his lens would one day work great in a book.
He'll talk about his work and book at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 14, at the University of Tennessee College of Nursing auditorium, 1200 Volunteer Blvd. The lecture is free; the public is invited.
For Holz, who now lives on a farm in upstate New York, the UT appearance is a chance to visit home. His 95-year-old mother, Rose Holz, still lives in Oak Ridge where he grew up. His sisters Bonnie Dings and Barbara Holz live in Knoxville; sister Jane Holz Vercruysee is in Avon, N.C.
He studied at UT from 1975 to 1977 and was a photographer for The Daily Beacon school newspaper. While here, he hopes to see other Beacon photographers with whom he's remained friends. He remembers the fun of that work, especially shooting football and basketball games. "I'm still a lifelong Vol fan. My blood still runs orange. And I have a whole contingency of my friends in New York I have converted to Vol fans."
Holz talks like he was always taking pictures. "I think there was a point after maybe I was 10 or 12 I started disappearing from the family photos. Because I was taking them with my father's Instamatic or Brownie."
His interest grew at Oak Ridge High School when he took a journalism class and learned to develop film. "I remember seeing the pictures come up in the developer, and it was magic. I was transfixed." His sister Jane was in the Navy when she bought her teenage brother his first camera, a Minolta SRT-101.
"I used to develop film in our basement. I ruined all the pipes in our basement. My dad (the late Peter Holz) wasn't so happy about that."
One day in 1971 Holz took his Minolta to the Anderson County Fair. Country singer Lynn Anderson of "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" fame was there for a horse competition. "She got off her horse and stuck her tongue out like she was exhausted, and I took the picture." His sister Bonnie convinced him to send the photo to People magazine. They used it, paying him $50.
Later, as a UT student, he took "every available photography course" before transferring to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. He became an assistant there to photographer Helmut Newton and credits Newton with guiding his career. After college graduation, he took off to Paris and Milan to take beauty and fashion photos. Back in the United States he set up a New York City studio.
He specialized in fashion and then fashion and portraits because "I love shooting beautiful women. I was always the one shooting the majorettes. And I found portraits, whether men or women, to be beautiful."
His work introduces him to some of the world's most beautiful people. He was on a 1991 fly fishing vacation in Montana when his agent called. Would Holz drive a couple of hours to photograph a relatively unknown actor named Brad Pitt?
"It was just him and his dog and his parents, and no one recognized him. He had not done a lot of fly fishing. I gave him tips on casting," Holz said. "I was in the river with him, taking shots."
Holz's black-and-white photo shows Pitt nearly waist-deep in running water, casting his fishing line. "That was a magical shoot that doesn't happen a lot. He was very relaxed; there weren't a lot of publicists and agents and not a huge entourage."
Holz likes to direct his subjects but he knows to be ready to adapt and expect the unexpected. He was photographing Kevin Spacey on a double-decker bus through Times Square one night when Spacey grabbed the bus microphone and began a stand-up comedy routine. "I was laughing so hard I almost couldn't take photos."
In 1998 he was photographing Angelina Jolie. "I was directing her but also letting her do her own thing. She had been a model, and she had so much energy and creative ideas." The two were walking into the kitchen where caterers were making lunch. Jolie suddenly grabbed a big knife; Holz took a shot. It hadn't been published until he selected it for "Holz Hollywood."
In 1999 he had 15 minutes to photograph Donald Trump in the businessman's New York office. "He is to me always an entertainer first and foremost. He was very professional. The photo was quick ... There was not a lot of personal warmth going on."
He asked Jack Nicholson to sit for extra shots after photographing him and Helen Hunt to promote their movie "As Good As It Gets." "Jack said, 'You have one roll.' That was only 10 shots. He was smoking Camel cigarettes in the studio. And I had the lighting set up and took some shots straight and some close. And in the last one he was profile. And he said, 'You got it, kid." I didn't know if I had it or not because it was film."
He got it. The photo shows Nicholson smiling and somewhat smug with the cigarette clenched between his teeth.
His photography, Holz said, relates to a matter of trust. His famous subjects "are human beings; they have good days and bad days … Sometimes you have a lot of time to get their trust. Sometimes you have very little time. They know you have been vetted; they have seen your work so you are past that first level.
"A lot of actors are used to being in front of the movie camera that is always moving. The still camera is capturing their souls for just a moment. They know that one shot, that one instant, is going to live forever. … It's very important that people know how you are dealing with them. They trust you and want to bare their soul, bare their bodies. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't."
not mine.credit and source: KNOX NEWS
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