PHOTO ESSAY

Buck Shot

The portrait photography of Chris Buck

By Matthew McKinnon

March 21, 2006

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Martin Amis, NOW, 1995.

Buck plans a handful of options for every shoot, ranging from the safe to the strange. Sometimes he deploys creative props to enhance his portraits. He put a crown on Chris Farley, and had Gary Oldman eat a pie with his face. In 1995, he consulted his list of ideas and selected a novelty backscratcher for a shoot with Martin Amis. “I couldn’t use it with someone who was inherently odd or funny. It needed to be with someone who was serious. Martin Amis made sense, because he’s a serious literary writer.”

Amis, though, wanted no part of the prop. He explained that he would not do anything different from the actions of his ordinary life. Buck asked Amis if he sat and stood. Amis could not deny that he did. The photographer got a chair and put the writer to work. He shot three rolls before Amis made him quit.

“He looks good, but he also looks odd. That’s key to a lot of my pictures that are like this. If he looked bad or he looked stupid, the picture wouldn’t work. It would take away from the seriousness of it,” Buck says.