A Modern Form of Worship

A conversation with photographer Matthew Rolston (Harper’s Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Interview, more).

THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT COMMERCIAL TYPE AND FREEPORT PRESS.

Name the five photographers who, more than any others, defined the dramatic shift in the approach to magazine photography in the late eighties and early nineties. There’s Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel. Richard Avedon, of course. 

Who’s missing? I’m getting to that.

Today’s guest was discovered while still a student at ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles—by Andy Warhol no less—whose upstart (and budget-deficient) team at Interview couldn’t afford to send a crew to LA for a shoot. His first subject, newbie film director Steven Spielberg, launched his photography career, and soon he was shooting for every magazine you could imagine.

We’re talking, of course, about Matthew Rolston. He, along with his fellow rebels, changed everything by bringing both a sensuality and a sexuality to newsstands that big publishing hadn’t seen before. Readers ate it up. Ask him to explain this transformation and you’ll get a hot take that will completely change how you think about media and celebrity:

“I think glamour—and glamour photography—is a substitute for god and goddess worship. The altar is the photo studio. So the goddess comes to the dressing room like she would’ve come to the preparation chamber of a temple. She’s anointed with oils and potions—that would be the hair and makeup team. She’s dressed in symbolic raiment—that would be the styling. And she’s led to the altar where the adherents kneel before her—that would be me on the floor with my camera. It is really the same thing. It’s just a modern, twisted version of the same impulses that we have to idolize people and worship them.”
 

Just this year ArtCenter, his alma mater, presented the photographer, director, author, artist, and educator with its prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, honoring both his creative legacy and his role as a mentor to the next generation. It’s the perfect moment to look back on his remarkable career, and to hear directly from Rolston himself.

Our Anne Quito caught up with Matthew in the lead up to the premiere of an evocative new body of work, Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, a site-specific installation at ArtCenter, which premieres this weekend.

 

Harper’s Bazaar, March 1990. Tatjana Patitz photographed by Matthew Rolston

 

Anne Quito: Matthew, it’s a delight to be with you today. I know you’re on the precipice of preparing for a couple of important events in your life, and I really appreciate your time. You have done an astounding amount of things in your career but in the magazine world, to the theme of this podcast, you are primarily known as a fashion photographer or the fashion photographer.

Matthew Rolston: I don’t think of myself as a fashion photographer. Not at all. I’m primarily a portrait photographer. And I’ve used fashion and style as part of my portraiture. I came into magazines through highly stylized portraiture at a time when models were starting to go away from the scene and celebrities were starting to take over. This is in the eighties and nineties.

So the period that I entered into magazines, models weren’t on the cover of magazines. Actors, actresses, singers, entertainers. That’s who commandeered the covers of magazines and cosmetics campaigns. If it was a model, it was because he or she was themself a superstar and a celebrity.

But unknown models, as in the years past the great years of fashion photography, that’s not something that I ever really did. And fashion people are a breed apart. It’s adjacent, but it’s not the same thing. 

Anne Quito: All right. May I redo that and ask you about being known as a portrait photographer ?

Matthew Rolston: Yes. Of course! You use that distinction. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Many people have made that assumption about me. It’s very common, so it’s good to correct it. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

Anne Quito: It’s wonderful to clarify. I’ve read a lot of bios about you that kind of describe you as a fashion photographer, so I think this is a moment to clarify this nuance. No? 

Matthew Rolston: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. 

Anne Quito: So you have done an astounding array of things in your career, but in the magazine world you are best known as a photographer—portrait photographer—and maybe the one to bring back this idea of Hollywood glamour. Before I dive into glamour, which is I think a topic of interest to many, could we discuss maybe a little nuance about being a portrait photographer and a fashion photographer?

Matthew Rolston: The area of practice, and I have explored quite a few areas in my career, is a kind of combination of portraiture and fashion and glamour, because those assignments came about at a time when models were being replaced by celebrities.

There was a celebrity obsession in our culture. Still is. And there have been different inflection points throughout our history. Certainly the fan magazines of the twenties and thirties focused a great deal on Hollywood stars, glamour, and portraiture—that’s an area I’m pretty interested in by the way.

So I would say my magazine years have a lot to do with the intersection of style, fashion, and celebrity—and very beautiful, talented, celebrated people. That’s what I did back then. 

Anne Quito: Where did this interest in glamour begin?

Matthew Rolston: I grew up in Los Angeles in a neighborhood called Hancock Park. My grandfather was a doctor in private practice, and his patients were Metro stars. Metro is what they used to call MGM. And MGM was the top studio of Hollywood in the thirties, forties, and fifties.

And so his private patients were an illustrious group of very talented and gorgeous people. And when I would visit his office with my mom as a child, I saw a great many photographs from the studio photo department, that were given to the doctor as gifts, with huge, flourishing signatures of the stars to Dr. Hoffman thanking him. 

They were framed and sitting on tables all around his private office—like faces next to orchids in black and white with flawless skin, and that glamour lighting. I didn’t know it at the time, but these were the photographs of George Hurrell, who ran the photo studio at MGM. That started the interest, I think, for me.

I came of age in an era of magazines. I grew up in mid-century America. Our house was full of magazines. And my mom, although far from a fashionista, she loved Harper’s Bazaar. And she had collected them since her teenage years.

So she had completely the thirties, forties, fifties, into the sixties. And that’s when I came along and started to put my nose in them. I was deeply immersed in Harper’s Bazaar, particularly under the editorship of Carmel Snow. And later on, Nancy White, who succeeded her in the late fifties.

Anne Quito: That’s wonderful. I’ve spoken to you a few times and I’ve listened to a few interviews. You strike me as someone who is so well read. One who metabolizes experience. What else did you read? The references coalesce in the photographs you create or the vignettes you create. Apart from Harper’s Bazaar, could you tell us your childhood reading list? What other magazines came to your household?

Matthew Rolston: We had National Geographic, Look, Life, all the big picture magazines. And Vogue but I was more fixated on Bazaar. Especially in a place like Los Angeles. Uh, your mom would drive you to soccer practice or whatever. For me it was art lessons and music lessons and dance lessons, starting at age six. Other kids knew about athletes, and their batting averages, and their games and such. I knew by heart the masthead of Harper’s Bazaar, and every photographer—even at eight, 10 years old.

I read at, maybe six or seven, a book of Charles Addams cartoons from The New Yorker. Charles Addams cartoons had a huge influence on me because of the dark humor. The character Morticia is terrifying and glamorous, and really appealed to me.

So I think you could say I am a product of my upbringing. Art Lessons, dance, and music, Harper’s Bazaar, George Hurrell, and Charles Addams. That’s the perfect portrait. 

Anne Quito: What a wonderful set of influences. I’m going to leap to your first professional photo shoot. You were discovered no less than Andy Warhol himself! There are worse magazines to start in than Interview magazine. I read that your first sitter was Steven Spielberg. Is that right? 

Matthew Rolston: That is true.

Anne Quito: Could you tell me, do you have recollections about that time? You were then a student at ArtCenter. How was that?

Matthew Rolston: I was going to ArtCenter in Los Angeles and I was dreaming of working for magazines in New York. LA, the era that I grew up in, had really no culture in this area. There was no photography scene, there was no fine art photography, there was no fashion. It was really a backwater if a New York magazine was coming to Los Angeles to do a story, they would send an entire crew right down to the manicurist. They wouldn’t trust anybody in Los Angeles, like they were going to the Wild West.

I was dreaming of getting out of LA. I hated Los Angeles. What kid doesn’t hate their hometown for a while? Now I love it, of course. And I was dreaming of New York or Paris. I had big dreams to go to New York and be published in magazines.

So starting with my first semester at ArtCenter, every time there was a break from school, I would go to New York and stay with my older brother, Dean. Dean was very much involved in the downtown art scene, the burgeoning of Soho in the late seventies and early eighties. He had a small upstart gallery called 56 Bleecker, which is somewhat legendary today. They were the first people to ever show artists like Ross Bleckner before they were even known.

And as a result of all that socializing, Dean was very close with the crowd around Andy Warhol. Andy at that time was operating from his Factory on Union Square. This is not The Factory of the sixties covered in aluminum foil. This is a much more sophisticated operation later in his career filled with art deco furniture, all kinds of odd collections.

Andy was famously interested in many things, but among them very attractive young men. And my brother was one of those people, and so were his friends. So they got invited to be among Andy’s entourage at The Factory, at the Interview magazine offices, which were in The Factory, and on many social occasions.

So I got to hang out with my older brother and his friends as they followed Andy around New York. I got to go to Studio 54—even though I was the last person in the entourage, the person that sweeps up after the elephant at the parade. I got to see a lot of things that were very interesting to me at that time, and very glamorous.

Anyway, back in LA I’m going to ArtCenter and there was an assignment to be shot in Los Angeles and Interview magazine did not have the budget of Bazaar or the big magazines. They couldn’t send a whole photo crew to Los Angeles. They had to find somebody in Los Angeles they had zero budget. And there was a photographer that they were working with who happened to be a recent graduate of ArtCenter and he turned down an assignment they gave him. He had a tiff with the art director who had cropped one of his pictures and so he refused.

So we had a mutual friend and that friend called me up and said, “This photographer refuses to do this assignment. I think you should do it. And I think you know the people at the magazine and they know who you are.”

And they did. They knew I was Dean’s little brother. So they just randomly gave me a chance because they needed something to be done quickly. And that chance was a portrait of then- Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, who wasn’t that famous at the time, he wasn’t how we regard him today.

And the people at the magazine took a chance on me because they’d met me and they knew who I was. I’d met Robert Hayes, the art director, and Bob Colacello, then the editor-in-chief of the magazine who worked directly with Andy. So they had some comfort just knowing it was a person that they could relate to and they liked the picture.

And then one thing led to another, and over the next few years, I shot a great many stories for them. Lots of covers. Some really interesting people that I’m introduced to for the first time because of Andy’s social status. Michael Jackson and Madonna became my very first entertainment clients. And I had a big career in entertainment promotion and photography. That really set things in motion.

Just to give a little background, there weren’t so many magazines or media outlets at that time—obviously decades before the internet. And in the world of print magazines it was a very established order, the big titles like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Interview was an upstart. Interview was printed on overscale pages and really highlighted photography. That got much more attention than any one magazine would get today. 

 

All photographs ©Matthew Rolston, Courtesy Fahey_Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Glamour and glamour photography is a substitute for god and goddess worship today. The altar is the photo studio.

Anne Quito: That assignment basically was to take a portrait. Were you already then committed to the face, to portraiture, when you were a student? Or did that sort of set it in motion?

Matthew Rolston: I was always interested in faces. Faces first. Style, number two. Bodies, number three. 

Anne Quito: In your upcoming exhibition, what is it about the face that continues to fascinate you all these years? 

Matthew Rolston: Wow, that’s a hard one. What is it about the face? It tells us everything about a personality and it is a canvas for a constructed identity. And that is a great playground. 

Anne Quito: When you meet someone, do you read their faces or do you think about it as a kind of canvas?

Matthew Rolston: Oh, both of those things. And many things more, of course. I read their faces, read their energy. I think of the opportunity as a blank canvas. Every single choice is a creative gesture, which lens, what light, what clothing, what colors, what contrast—all of it. The first step is always research. That’s the first step for any creative enterprise.

So I read a good deal about Mr. Spielberg, talked to some people. I went to a screening of one of his upcoming films, which happened to be Close Encounters. From that I formed an idea, which was to photograph him as if in the landing lights of a spacecraft. You don’t see a spacecraft, it’s very subtle, but you can see the lighting is coming from above and bouncing back.

And then as far as styling him, I decided not to. He came in a kind of beat up t-shirt. I didn’t want to impose any particular style on him other than that which I could achieve with a camera, the lens, and with lighting. But it was still conceptual in a way.

Anne Quito: It’s innocent and so fresh. I looked at it the other day, it’s wonderful. You must have an astounding collection of memorable shoots, like failures and disasters. wonder if you could share maybe just some of your favorites.

Matthew Rolston: I don’t have favorite shoots. It’s like having a favorite child. At least until very recently I really had a hard time looking backwards. To me, they were all failures. If I would’ve had more time. A more cooperative star. A more cooperative editor. Whatever. I only saw the things that you don’t see, which are the things I wanted to do, and I couldn’t live up to.

I don’t think of it that way now because it’s so long ago. It is a kind of acquaintance to me and I can look back on that person and forgive them for their lapses. But as far as favorites I would say not so much favorite shoots, but people that I just connected to and liked a lot.

I would say David Bowie, such an incredible person and generous and kind and very funny. He was just so funny. And there wasn’t a reference I could mention to him from Man Ray to Picasso that he didn’t already know lots about. I grew up just adoring his constructed identities—Ziggy Stardust—really, I was a kid that was already playing with ideas of gender display. And glam rock was the most incredible thing to me. Some of David’s early work crosses over into glam rock. He’s somebody that was just a great pleasure to meet and he was so down to earth.

Lenny Kravitz, I love that man. Beyoncé, an incredible person, just a golden human. Salma Hayek is a kick in the butt. She’s just the most outspoken, fabulous—nothing will put that woman down. She is so powerful. There’ve been a lot of personalities, and that’s the great fun of doing what I do. Not the result of the photographs, the lived experience of making a photograph. 

Anne Quito: You’ve taken Oprah’s portrait for her magazine the most out of any other photographer. What kind of rapport and trust have you established over that period? 

Matthew Rolston: It was just pure joy. This is one of the most intelligent people you’ll ever meet. She’s so quick. Really amazing in front of a camera, like a supermodel. She knows how to perform for the camera. She knows what to project, and she’s very good at it. It was just fun getting to know her and getting her trust. I photographed her at her home in Montecito, in many studios here in Los Angeles, also in New York, and other places.

One time she wanted to have a cover made on the beach. And it was really at the height of her fame. You couldn’t go to a public beach with Oprah Winfrey and take a photograph. That was impossible. So we built a set of a beach, a very elaborate set, and a gigantic tent on the back 40 of her mansion in Montecito. And it looked pretty real too. So that was, that was a bit of humor.

A few years later, I did actually photograph her on a beach and it was a private beach. At that time, I had a small beach house in Malibu. I photographed her on the beach in front of my house. I used the house as a dressing room. It was just convenient. It was open to the public legally, but not really accessible to the public unless you lived in one of those houses. So there was never anybody on the beach.

Doris Duke, who was one of the great American heiresses in the twenties and thirties, had a very famous house called Shangri La on the beach in Hawaii. And I remembered this story, somebody had told me that Ms. Duke, when she would go to the beach each morning for a swim, her staff would lay a path from the edge of her bed to the edge of the water in perfectly clean white towels so that she would never get any sand between her toes.

So I did that for Oprah. I built a path of immaculate white terrycloth towels from the edge of the dressing area to where she had to stand for the photograph. That was duly noted. She thought that was pretty hilarious. I told her the story and I remember afterwards she sent me some champagne and gifts. Very generous. I’m blessed to have gotten to know her in that context.

Anne Quito: I get this sense that your shoots are great fun. We have this imagination, like it’s been portrayed in movies and TV shows. How might you describe your set?

Matthew Rolston: I strive to project a warm and confident environment. It’s so hard to be on the hot seat, to be that person in front of the camera. So I have a lot of compassion for all the fear and expectation attached to that. You can’t confront people’s fears directly. You can’t say, “Oh, there now don’t be afraid. It’s all going to be fine.” That doesn’t work at all.

What you can do is be considerate, run things efficiently, be thoughtful, be prepared, be open, and be kind. And maybe not take yourself too seriously or the circumstances too seriously. This is all fun in a way. It is also, I would say, a modern form of worship. 

Anne Quito: Say more. 

Matthew Rolston: I think glamour and glamour photography is a substitute for god and goddess worship today. The altar is the photo studio. So the goddess comes to the dressing room like she would’ve come to the preparation chamber of a temple. She’s anointed with oils and rare unguents, that would be the hair and makeup team. She’s dressed in symbolic raiment, that would be the styling. And she’s led to the altar where the adherents kneel before her, that would be me on the floor with my camera. So it is really the same thing. It’s just a modern, twisted version of the same impulses that we have to idolize people and worship them. 

Anne Quito: I imagine everyone who sits for you is thinking about this version of glamour. And I’ve heard you speak about glamour in such a nuanced way. Are there bad expressions of glamour? The etymology is related to the idea of enchantment, right? Like a trick of the eye. Can some glamour photography go awry? Is there bad glamour, do you think?

Matthew Rolston: For me, the real codification of Hollywood glamour happened at Paramount Studios in the 1930s with the director of Josef Von Sternberg and six films that he made with Marlene Dietrich.

Of course, the 1920s was an incredibly glamorous period. The real codification of glamour is at Paramount in the thirties. They even call glamour lighting, to this day, “Paramount lighting.” Which was really what Von Sternberg brought. And the influence was early thirties Germany before the war and the cabaret culture of that era. And that’s where Marlene Dietrich came out of. Von Sternberg went to Germany and discovered her and brought her back to Hollywood to make these films.

So I would call the twenties pre-glamour. But it’s that centered spotlight in black shadows or eyelash shadows. When you think of the twenties, it’s a very pearly open lighting. There’s no shadows in the face. There’s a highlight of light from behind, like an aura of light. Everything is pearly and metallic, and that sharp glamour of dark shadows and mystery. This is Von Sternberg. Later George Hurrell, the photographer I spoke of earlier, was influenced by those films and by that Paramount lighting.

And I can tell you what Von Sternberg himself said about glamour. These are the words of Von Sternberg, he said. “Glamour is the result of the play of light on the landscape of the face creating mysterious shadows in the eyes. It is the indecipherable magic of the cinema, the substance of the dreams of a generation.”

Well that’s pretty sexy. Do I believe that? Yes and no. Part of it’s absolutely true. It’s tied back to goddess worship. But in some ways, the idea of Hollywood glamour is related or certainly closely adjacent to the concept of camp, which is the kind of hidden language of the gay world.

It’s highly ironic. It employs glamour. It’s a kind of a part of the gay world devoted to style. And I’m specifically saying the “gay world” because queer as an identity didn’t really exist in the period that I’m talking about.

Anne Quito: That’s right. Wonderful. I want to ask this question for the non-celebrity listeners, maybe. Can anyone appear glamorous? I came across this kind of wonderful article in the LA Times basically telling people how to light themselves in Zoom meetings. This is all pre-COVID. Before our lives were ensnared in rectangles on the internet. But can anyone appear glamorous with the right light? 

Matthew Rolston: It’s entirely subjective. But why not? Glamour is related to an idealized state. Or a godlike state. There’s nothing natural about it. It radiates light—it lives in a nimbus of light, I should say, speaking as a photographer. Hollywood glamour has everything to do with constructed identity. It’s completely false. And it’s important to remember that there is no objectivity in a photograph. There is no truth in a photograph. My camera is a fabulous liar.

Richard Avedon famously said. “All photographs are factual. None of them are the truth.” There is no objective reality in any human experience, let alone photograph. It’s important to remember that about glamour. It’s a falsehood.

There’s nothing comfortable about the cosmetic aspects of beauty, what we do to our bodies, our faces, our diets, our regimens, our surgery, our makeup, our filters. There’s nothing real about it and there’s nothing comfortable about it. And so you could rail against the idea of glamour as a falsehood. Or you could say, on the other hand, that without it life would be boring. There’s no real good or bad. It’s something open to interpretation.

Anne Quito: Do you think this idea of sprezzatura, you’ve heard about that term, to mask all effort—like a swan paddling beneath the waters, but appearing to glide. Do you think sprezzatura, or masking the effort, is part of glamour? 

Matthew Rolston: I think it’s part of great art. I have a series of dictums that I call “Rolston’s Rules of Engagement.” Number five speaks to this exactly: “The art that conceals the art is the greater art.” If you’re aware of how the magic trick works, it’s not magic. To make it seem effortless takes a great deal of time, effort, and preparation and a great deal of skill. It’s sophisticated practice.

 

All photographs ©Matthew Rolston, Courtesy Fahey_Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

There is no truth in a photograph. My camera is a fabulous liar.

Anne Quito: You mentioned, earlier on, the influence of Carmel Snow in your upbringing. What do you think a good editor enables? 

Matthew Rolston: First of all, just to frame this, I would say “print is dead, long live print.” It’s changed and it may become more niche—we can get into that in a minute—but it is not gone. It is changing though, tremendously.

Well, a great editor is someone who can see around the corner. They can perceive the future. It’s been said that Diana Vreeland, who was certainly a great editor, didn’t give people what they wanted. She gave them what they didn’t know they wanted yet. So that ability to prognosticate, to think forward, comes from culture, education, having your finger on the pulse of modern media and the past.

It’s not about hiring a fashion editor, or a stylist, or a makeup artist. It’s having an actual style based on education, knowledge, and intuition. Also understanding of the artists that they’re commissioning, both strengths and weaknesses. Pushing those creatives a little bit out of their comfort zone to get something fresh. Allowing some freedom within some defined limitations. Artists need some limitations to play off of.

I worked for so many different editors in a very formative period, I would say Gael Love, who was the editor of Interview for a few years, was one of those people. Bob Colacello was one of those people before Gael. After Gael at Interview was Ingrid Sichy, who was a great intellectual about photography, and a dear friend. I’m so sorry she’s not with us anymore.

So I’ve been gifted to work with visionary editors who gave me freedom and limitations and pushed me to do things that I didn’t think I could do and understood what I was good at and might give me an assignment to do the exact opposite of that thing to challenge me because everything and its opposite are related.

In American magazine culture, which to me really got started full-throttle in the 1930s, Snow’s Bazaar set the stage for everything we see in publishing today. And the people in publishing today may not even know who she was, or know the circle around her. But they’re living the legacy, there’s no doubt about it.

So Mrs. Snow referred to her version of Bazaar, “A magazine for well-dressed women with well-dressed minds.” The idea was that a fashion magazine could elevate and engage style and intellect. Mrs. Snow is the first one to have discovered the great and seminal art director, designer, Alexey Brodovitch, the fashion editor Diana Vreeland was an assistant that she brought in.

Mrs. Snow set the bar very high for American fashion publishing, which at the time was the world’s leader, I would say from the thirties to the fifties. Every publication that’s come after in the fashion and style area owes a debt to the DNA of Mrs. Snow’s Harper’s Bazaar.

Anne Quito: I loved your essay about her. Utterly engrossing. 

Matthew Rolston: Mrs. Snow was among the first to print some of the greatest photographers in the history of fashion and photography. Among them, Edward Steichen, Baron de Meyer, George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst, Martin Munkácsi, Erwin Blumenfeld, Cecil Beaton, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and of course the greatest American fashion portrait photographer of all time—in my opinion—Richard Avedon.

He said, “Carmel Snow taught me everything that I know.” And in terms of the intellect, she was the first to publish, some for the very first time, significant writers in Bazaar of both fact and fiction: Anita Loos, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Isak Dinesen, Janet Flanner, Jane Bowles, Susan Sontag, Truman Capote … the list goes on. So the level of quality, the level of elevation of her magazine was without parallel then or now. 

Anne Quito: Would it be accurate to say that you have a mini-obsession on Carmel Snow?

Matthew Rolston: I have a mini-obsession, not just with Carmel Snow but with Harper’s Bazaar as a publication. 

Anne Quito: If it was possible to sit across from her today, what might you ask her? 

Matthew Rolston: “Why did you ruin your career by being an alcoholic?” It’s a very sad ending. Her ending is tragic, really. She just fell apart. That was a facetious answer, but a serious question would be, “What is the relationship between spirituality—she was a devout Catholic—and your love of fashion and style?” That would be an interesting question.

Anne Quito: Wow.

Matthew Rolston: I’d like to know the answer to that if I could sit down with her. I was lucky enough that after working for Interview and Andy, along came Jann Wenner. Jann Wenner was the founder of Rolling Stone and he was trying to elevate his magazine.

At that time anything that Andy did or liked, he wanted—he copied Andy. So Andy was innovating all these great photographers at Interview in the late seventies, and he was trying to elevate Rolling Stone’s beyond reportage to set-up photography, portrait sittings. And they hired me.

Soon after starting to work for Interview and then Rolling Stone, along came Bazaar. I actually got to work my dream job, and did quite a few covers and quite a few assignments. And that’s the period that you’re referring to I think when you say I’m a fashion photographer, because I did do fashion stories with models from time to time, but almost always the covers were somebody very famous.

If it was a model, it would be a superstar model, say Tatjana Patitz, who is known beyond the modeling circles. But I photographed lots and lots of incredible actresses, the most beautiful women in the world—Isabella Rosselini, Sean Young. At that time, Isabella was the most beautiful girl in the world, people said. I really got to satisfy my obsession as a young person fairly quickly. 

Anne Quito: I imagine the pace of things was quite hectic during this heyday of magazines. The “golden era” as they say. You seem to have such crystallized thoughts about what happened then. Were you processing every shoot, every wild encounter? Or did that come later? 

Matthew Rolston: I mean, I think I am reflective now. Back then I was so busy there wasn’t so much time for reflection. It was just time for action, reaction. At that time I was based in Los Angeles, I had an apartment in New York, and I was what I called “tri-coastal.” I traveled on a circuit between LA, New York, and Paris on a regular basis working for the magazines, and ad agencies, and movie studios, and cosmetic companies, et cetera.

I was on a plane going somewhere every three or four days to those three places back and forth. And then I started to become a music video director. So that made things even more complicated and very interesting. So I was a pretty busy guy running around the world. And don’t think I slept for about 10 years. There was a lot of reacting and not a lot of reflection. Reflection came later and led to my fine art projects, which we can talk about which are all an outgrowth of what came before the experience that came before.

Anne Quito: We are talking in 2025, while leaks from the shoot of The Devil Wears Prada populate the media outlets. What do you think is the most accurate depiction of a fashion magazine—cinematic version of a fashion magazine do you think? 

Matthew Rolston: In some ways I really like the portrayal of the fashion photographer played by David Hemmings in Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie from the sixties. It’s a character based on the photographer David Bailey, somewhat loosely. But the depiction of his photo shoots, his predatory nature—which is very much of that era—sleeping with the models and taking advantage of them.

Anne Quito: Yeah. Okay, now we’re still talking about magazines. We were swimming in the heyday, but we’ve got to talk about the moment when you had an inkling that maybe things were changing. Maybe the decline is something to talk about too. 

Matthew Rolston: Absolutely. I was very lucky. We didn’t know the end was coming, but I entered the magazine world in the late seventies. Throughout the eighties, nineties, and 2000s, magazines and their influence were really at a peak. This is way before the internet. That was the first cut, then the smartphone. That was cut number two. And then of course, TikTok and Instagram pretty much finished off the print industry as we know it.

I was talking to a friend of mine, one of my former clients at L’Oreal. I did a great deal of cosmetics advertising for companies like L’Oreal and Revlon. With my interest in faces and glamour, you can see why that would be a natural fit. This executive who ran all the North American advertising for L’Oreal for a 20-year period said the following to me: “Matthew, the period that we worked together was a high point in branding. Branding is lost.

“We don’t want to enforce branding. If an influencer is pushing our product, if we give them the brand codes, the colors, a jingle, ‘because I’m worth it,’ that’s antithetical to what we’re doing with influencers, which is the illusion of peer-to-peer recommendation. So branding and the concept of brand, we don’t want that at all. We want it to appear that person, that influencer that is promoting that product sincerely believes in that product.”

Everybody knows that’s false. Everybody knows those people are compensated, but they still buy into the illusion. It’s just a different illusion now. I feel the same way about work as a portrait and glamour photographer. Influencers do this for themselves. Why does Kim Kardashian need a photographer to define her or redefine her the way I did, say, for Madonna, when she can do that herself? And have full control over her own image, including filters and retouching.

There’s not a single image put out on Instagram of Kim Kardashian that is not mediated in the same way that one of my photographs would be. It’s just all self created. I felt irrelevant at that point, and I just also felt... “been there, done that.” I didn’t want to do it anymore. It didn’t feel relevant anymore. It seemed incredibly fake, but it’s just being traded for a new kind of fake that has the illusion of authenticity. And it’s anything but.

Anne Quito: I was reading Richard Avedon’s biography. I think I shared with you that I had the delight of writing his medalist essay for AIGA, and towards the end of his career he talked about a kind of disenchantment with all the glamour stuff, all the veneered stuff. And I wondered if you felt that too at some point?

Matthew Rolston: Absolutely. Avedon—I got to meet him a few times, which was wonderful—he was very kind, and very funny, and charming. But watching his career my whole life—he’s really a cultural hero to me. I watched him, in the seventies, turn to a series of what people said were very cruel portraits. They were really intense and very simply-produced portraits. 

He threw away the rulebook—the rulebook that he invented—and went into another kind of truth. Equally non-objective, because there is no objectivity, this made me realize that everything is related to the thing that it is not. And it’s called the “unity of opposites.” This is an actual codified concept that humans are by their nature binary in their ability to describe a thing.

So nothing is complete without its opposite—there is no tall without short, whether it’s a building or a person, there’s no black without white, there’s no light without dark. That’s illumination. And in terms of how things look, you can’t have beauty without that which is not beautiful: the grotesque. And so Avedon turned from the beauty to the grotesque as part of his maturing process as an artist.

That was a big clue to me. And I want to just back up and say my very first semester as a photo student at ArtCenter—like literally walking in the door—and there was Richard Avedon mounting an exhibition of his rather cruel portraits of the seventies in the gallery at ArtCenter and speaking to all of us. And that was just a revelation. So that had a huge influence on me to this day.

Anne Quito: We’ll get back to your own expression in a minute. Before that—we’re still in magazines—so this was a decline. But you hinted that print is not dead. How might we revive print? What does this reincarnation look like? 

Matthew Rolston: I have to go back a little bit on that question. The reincarnation of magazines, the elevation of magazines began in 1991 with the establishment of Visionaire. Visionaire magazine, which was founded in ’91 by Cecilia Dean, James Kaliardos, and Stephen Gan, was a revelation. I’m a magazine collector, by the way. I have almost all Visionaires in a collection. I also have all of the Harper’s Bazaars from 1929 until today. 

Anne Quito: Where do you keep them?

Matthew Rolston: They’re in storage. Carefully cataloged. But I think that was the beginning of saying magazines can be this precious object and not just a thing that you read and throw away. I will go back a little ways now and remind all of us of a very important magazine that perhaps paved the way for something like Visionaire, which is a woman named Fleur Cowles’ magazine called Flair. There are only 12 famous issues from 1950.

This is an exquisite magazine of art, and culture, and writing, with contributors like Salvador Dalí, W.H. Auden, Simone de Beauvoir—incredible. It was not a fashion magazine, designed so beautifully, so luxuriously created with die-cuts and incredible printing effects. They just couldn’t really sustain it for more than a year. So I think that maybe—I’m just going to guess—was an inspiration for people like Cecilia Dean and Steven Gan for Visionaire.

Self Service, which was co-founded by the Parisian creative director Ezra Petronio, with his colleague Suzanne Koller in 1994 is an incredibly directional magazine. I would seize on Self Service to say this is probably the future of actual printed magazines. It comes out quarterly. It costs $50 or a hundred dollars. It’s luxuriously printed. It is for collectors, aficionados, and connoisseurs of style.

And incidentally Ezra did an experiment during COVID where he created a video version of the magazine, which was incredible. It’s a short film. And instead of a table of contents with page numbers, he had time codes. It brought magazines to life in three dimensions on film—with music, sound design, and editing. It’s just superb. And then we are now seeing the advent of what are being called niche fashion magazines. I’m talking about titles like Cultured, Polyester, The Gentlewoman.

Anne Quito: That’s right. 

Matthew Rolston: There’s one that I like very much called Notes on Beauty. AFM, Heroinethese magazines have small readerships. Cultured is based in Los Angeles. It was founded by Sarah Harrelson, she’s their editor-in-chief. This is a very important magazine—small readership, luxuriously printed. Of course there’s a web and social media equivalent.

That’s an important development. There is a new life for magazines as a very exclusive connoisseur/collector’s object. I believe that the middle of publishing, even big titles like Vogue or Bazaar that you see in the supermarket, are going to go away. They have no relevance. 

Anne Quito: Wow, that’s huge.

Matthew Rolston: And so if those titles go on, they will be as web experiences, or social media experiences, or maybe live events like Vogue World or the Met Gala. But the actual printed magazine at this point is completely irrelevant—and actually rather sad to me.

Those publications—if I was in charge of one of those publications—I would cease publishing the main issue immediately. I would really focus on web and experiential and social media, and then I would produce, once or twice a year, an incredibly luxurious and exclusive magazine that was really up there—with only advertising by the most incredible brands. Which is essentially what Self Service is, with incredibly well-edited, gorgeous, amazing conceptual photography, and the crossroads between fashion, culture, art, architecture, design. As far as a mainstream publication at an affordable price on a newsstand, that’s over.

 

All photographs ©Matthew Rolston, Courtesy Fahey_Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

AI is us. It’s not not us. We made it.

Anne Quito: Wow. Wow! First of all, my notebook is full of notes on magazines to check out, thank you. Incredible. I’m quite hopeful for this future scenario for magazines. Now you’ve told me that you’ve retired from assignments. What kind of assignment might lure you out of retirement and maybe shoot for one of these magazines? 

Matthew Rolston: There’s not much that would make me want to do that. 

Anne Quito: No? 

Matthew Rolston: No, not really. Every once in a while—of course there are amazing people that I never photographed or met I would love to meet. But I just want to concentrate—you know what? I earned my freedom. I felt very hemmed in by being commissioned and I didn’t want to be told what to do by people who knew less than I did.

And so it wouldn’t bring me the joy that it did, and I did it for a great deal of time. I certainly had my turn, and now I want to do things that are self-commissioned, that are personal, where I am my client. I don’t answer to anyone.

Anne Quito: I spoke to two of your students who had a caboodle of questions for you. I know you studied at ArtCenter. And now you’re teaching there. You teach a class called “Power of Pleasure” and you have another class called “Conscious Communication.” What does teaching give you? 

Matthew Rolston: I’ve gone to ArtCenter my entire life. I started taking drawing and painting classes there as a little kid, ages eight and 10. They had Wednesday evening classes after school. Then there was a thing called Saturday High, and then I went there as a full-time photo student.

I had a successful career and came back because I was being asked to direct music videos. I didn’t know how. I went back and re-enrolled as a film major for a year. I would be in Paris shooting Bazaar and fly home on Monday night, so I could go to school on Tuesday and Wednesday, every week for a year trying to balance my successful career and learning a skill.

And then I started into my, what, my “MTV era.” And then I created the Matthew Rolston Scholarship for Film and Creative Direction at ArtCenter, which I still support. I remember after the first year or two, my dad said, “So how’s that going with ArtCenter and the scholarship?”

I’m like, “It’s not that interesting. They have to write me proforma letters thanking me and sending me a couple of pictures that they took or something. And it’s really boring and I don’t really feel connected to it at all.”

He said, “You need to get involved, Matthew. Become a mentor. Offer mentorship to whoever receives the scholarship. They don’t have to take it, but if they do, they can follow you around. They can go to your sets, they can listen to you, write down everything you say. Whatever you want them to do.”

And so I did that and it was incredibly successful. And those students taught me a lot. I taught them a lot. It was a great relationship. That went on for a few years and the college kept calling me and saying, “Hey, you’re doing great with the scholarship and your mentees. Could you turn what you know into a class?”

And the answer was always, “No.” Because I was much too busy and much too self-involved to even want to do that. But came a time when I was becoming disillusioned with the commercial world. I wanted to step away from that and I thought, It’s time to pass on what I know—closely-guarded creative secrets and techniques that I would never share with anybody. Now I’m generously sharing them with a very exclusive group of students.

I knew for sure that I did not want to teach photography. I wanted nothing to do with that. I wanted to teach a communication technique that revolves around fashion media, luxury—particularly fragrance. And that is a practice that involves, holistically, a great many techniques.

So I wrote this class called “The Power of Pleasure.” It is philosophically somewhat deep in the sense that yes, we invoke the experience of pleasure through imagery to persuade people in advertising—that’s the outward expression of the power of pleasure.

The inward is what do we as communicators and artists feel about what we’re doing? And if we feel deeply and we really take great pleasure in the practice of creating imagery and communication. That joy is in the work. We’re channeling that to others who then accept that work and see it. And we have a responsibility if we’re mass communicators, to model something positive rather than reinforce negative behaviors.

So it’s pretty complicated, but it’s a great class. I’ve been doing it for more than 10 years. I do it all throughout the year, only eight students at a time, only seniors and grad students. They do incredible work. We do mock spots for fragrances for the world’s greatest brands.

The role play of the class is that we’re an ad agency specializing in fragrance. I’m its founder and chief creative officer, and they are my makers. They don’t work together in teams. They work individually, producing their projects that I assign them. And they work with me as their boss, very much like professional practice. And they do the most amazing things.

Anne Quito: And I heard from one of your students that one time you insisted that they use artificial intelligence. There was a debate in academia about what is the stance for generative AI, but you ask them to dance with the tools to be acquainted with the tools instead of fearing this sort of curiosity.

Matthew Rolston: I’m always interested in innovation and love great imagery. I don’t care how it’s created. And I will say that great image makers make great images regardless of the tools. And this is the most powerful tool to come along—maybe in human history, certainly in my lifetime—and I have seen incredible results.

But you have to be literate, visually literate, and creatively literate. You need to know your history. Here’s the thing about AI: It’s a paradox. It raises the bar and lowers the bar at the same time. Anybody can make a pretty decent image with very few prompts. But it’s going to be generic. It’s going to be like something you’ve seen before. It’s going to be very plastic, right?

To really master that with some consistency of style takes a great deal of effort. It’s not easy at all. And to control the tool is not easy. The sophistication of the prompts, of the many iterations that these things go through is a practice that I want my students to experience because I think we have to get to a point where we say it’s not photography anymore. That’s a very limiting definition. 

Anne Quito: Yeah. 

Matthew Rolston: I would prefer to call it lens-based art.

Anne Quito: Lens-based art. 

Matthew Rolston: Yes. There’s a very particular quality to something that actually came through a lens. That includes photography, organic photography, AI, photo-realist painting, and lots of other techniques. So why not recognize it?

I say this to my students, and many of my students are against AI. It’s so interesting. I’m an older person, I’m for the new. They’re young and they’re reacting like old fogies. They say it’s all appropriation. I’m like, “Have you ever heard of Andy Warhol?”

If you think that Raphael didn’t borrow from Michelangelo, then you don’t know your art history. We build on the shoulders of the greats before. That is what all human culture is. Yes, people make leaps with imagination, they combine things that no one would ever have thought putting together conceptually, and create a new thing. It’s called synthesis. But to ignore or pretend that everything arrives completely original from the mind of a creator is ignorant, okay? So that’s number one, all right?

Secondly, this tool, this powerful tool, is neutral. It is neither good, mediocre, nor evil. It is all of those things. It can be used for the good, it can be used for evil. It can be used to create unspeakable, horrible falsehoods. It can be used to create things of incredible beauty. And I’m seeing amazing artists created using AI all the time. So I want my students to have this experience because it’s going to be their future. But let’s remember: AI is us. It’s not, not us. We made it. 

Anne Quito: We are speaking just a few weeks before you receive ArtCenter’s highest honor, previously bestowed to some illustrious artists. You say, you’ve been going to ArtCenter as a font, right, for all these years since your childhood. What does it mean to you at this point in your life? 

Matthew Rolston: ArtCenter as a place is an organism that is constantly changing. Many hands and many hearts have made ArtCenter. It’s just like your body’s cells reproduce and changed throughout your life.

It is not the ArtCenter that I went to. It is not the ArtCenter that was created in the 1930s. It is the ArtCenter of today. But it still stands for something. It stands for rigor, for excellence, for responsible communication and design. And so much more. Craftsmanship. So many things that I admire. That is not lost.

The DNA in ArtCenter is very much intact. I’m really proud to represent them through receiving this award. It’s the Lifetime Achievement Award. I don’t feel that I’m anywhere near the end of my creative life, but it is nice to be recognized among my peers. The last three people to receive this award in the photography and art space were Hiroshi Sugimoto last year, two years before that Doug Aitkin, and before that Lee Friedlander—all very different. Each practice couldn’t be more unique.

And here I am. So it’s just a great honor and it happens to coincide, by accident, with the release of a project over 10 years in the making called Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits. It’s a very deep project. It’s a capstone project. It’s my late-in-life, long-hair examination of the big questions, which there are no answers to:

Where are we going? Where do we come from? Why are we here? It is an existential question. And I was ready to take that on at this age. So it’s just great to be able to debut this project at ArtCenter at the same time as this award is taking place. 

 

Rolston on location in the desert

 

Anne Quito: A full circle. And a little bit about Vanitas—a word that means what we know as vanitas, but also means memento mori, right? A remembrance that our life is finite. Can you talk about the genesis of this project? 

Matthew Rolston: I couldn’t have arrived at the Vanitas project without self-reflection. And that had a lot to do with my practice as a Hollywood photographer, creating incredibly idealized, constructed identities of very beautiful and talented people. Everything about Hollywood glamour, everything about Hollywood imagery, inherently denies death and aging—retouching, lighting, makeup, all the tricks. Beauty is a performance. Youth is a performance.

The obsession with youth and beauty is in itself a denial of death. The stars never die. There’s no eternity, that doesn’t exist. That’s just an idea, okay? And I had to really think hard about that. And I thought, okay, I’ve denied death and aging—which is part of death—in my practice for decades. I’m going to go the opposite direction. I’m going to learn from Avedon. I’m going to turn to the grotesque. And I’m going to go look at death, nose to nose, the real thing. Because if Americans in Western culture and its pinnacle of excess is Hollywood denying death, I’m going to go look at the real thing.

So I went around the world and looked at several subjects. I discarded a few of them until I found the famous crypt in Palermo, Sicily. And I walked in there on my scouting trip and started to cry and realized I had found the perfect subject. And then I had a few more twists and surprises. Because I discovered that these mummies who are upright in their finest clothing, prepared for the day of judgment, are there because they believed, in their vanity, that crypt brought them closer to heaven than anybody else. They’re going to be first in line in their Sunday best to enter the kingdom of heaven. That’s denial of death right there.

So I looked at that nose to nose, and I had a big surprise. And I decided to portray that in the most heated way I could. The most provocative thing I thought I could do was bring an impossible level of beauty to a subject that is terrifying.

So it is a collision, this project, of that which is grotesque and that which is gorgeous. It is the most beautiful, complicated lighting I’ve ever done on subjects that are truly grotesque. And that is something that provokes in the audience a condition called cognitive dissonance . It is beautiful and horrifying and gorgeous and seductive and revolting all but at the same time.

That’s a powerful reaction. I want to encourage that reaction and create a lot of interest through this controversial approach and through this heated imagery to begin a discourse about interconnectedness and interdependence. Because we accept religion, which is a completely imagined human condition, as our way to fend off the fear of the unknown, of death.

Anne Quito: Is the timing—you mentioned you worked on this for over 10 years—is the timing intentional? 2025. Why is this launching now?

Matthew Rolston: Well, I think I’m of a certain age, which is why I’m probably receiving this award. And I have a certain maturity at this point, an ability to reflect back and react to my earlier work. Again, learning a great deal from the greats, like Avedon. Irving Penn is another one who, you know, turned to the grotesque later in his career as a photographer, as an artist. Think of the garbage pictures, the cigarette butts and things.

Finding beauty in that which is not inherently beautiful. That’s just a flowering of maturity. This is my “requiem,” shall we say. I am not Mozart. But Mozart wrote his famous Requiem at the end of his life. And I’m not at the end of my life, but I’m at that point where it’s time to take on something weightier and more serious. That’s what I want to do.

Anne Quito: Why do we make art, Matthew? 

Matthew Rolston: Before I do that, I just want to plug. I want to say if you would like to see these projects it is called Matthew Rolston: Art People, and Vanitas is at vanitasproject.com. And my class is thepowerofpleasure.com. And you could see the student work. So it would be great to encourage people to take a look at those things.

So the question of why do people make art? And here are some of the reasons I think that they do to seek personal enjoyment and satisfaction:

  • To express personal thoughts and feelings. 

  • To communicate with others. 

  • To make others see us more clearly. 

  • To provide us with new visual experiences. 

  • To record a time, a place, a person, or object. 

  • To reinforce cultural ties or traditions. 

  • To affect social change.

  • To tell stories. 

  • Even to heal the sick. 

  • To adorn ourselves to explain the unknown as an act of worship.

And of course, many artists make art to earn a livelihood. I think the big question is, Is there an evolutionary purpose to art making? 

Anne Quito: Is there? What’s your hunch? 

Matthew Rolston: Absolutely. We live in a world of ideas and imagination. And everything builds on what came before. This is the evolution. This has led us to create AI—which is us.


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