Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (born 1952) is an American portrait photographer known for his strikingly intimate portraits of world leaders and major cultural figures. The majority of his work is shot in large format, 11x14 inch black and white film and 8x10 color film. His images are widely published and he is a contributing photographer to Vanity Fair.

Greenfield-Sanders received a B.A. degree in Art History from Columbia University in 1974 and a M.F.A. degree from the American Film Institute in 1977 in film. While studying film at A.F.I. he became interested in portraiture after the school asked him to photograph visiting dignitaries for the archive. Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Billy Wilder and Bette Davis all gave the young student tips. Davis scolded him saying, "What the fuck are you doing shooting from below. Don't you know it's not flattering"? The two became friends and Greenfield-Sanders drove her around Hollywood getting advice on lighting and life.

Greenfield-Sanders has photographed such diverse figures as Orson Welles, Monica Lewinsky, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Madeleine Albright, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 1999, he exhibited "Art World" at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York City. This show was the culmination of his 20 year career, depicting over 700 portraits.

Greenfield-Sanders gained much attention for his 2004 book XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits (ISBN 0-8212-7754-5). His 2006 portrait series of injured soldiers and marines back from the war in Iraq, has been reproduced and exhibited worldwide, from the Bjorn Wetterling Gallery in Sweden to the Donnell Library across from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Greenfield-Sanders also makes films, including Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart about the musician Lou Reed, which won the 1999 Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video, as well as one on performance artist Karen Finley and for HBO, Thinking XXX about the making of his porn actor portrait book. Greenfield-Sanders' 2007 project, The Black List, is a collaboration with Elvis Mitchell of interviews and portraits of leading African Americans in the U.S. The film component of the project premiered at The Sundance Film Festival in January 2008 and the portraits opened in July 2008 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Black List: Volume 2 aired on HBO in February 2009.

Greenfield-Sanders is represented by Stockland Martel.

Career

Art World

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders started out photographing artists. Through his father-in-law, Abstract Expressionist painter Joop Sanders he met the leading figures of the "Ab Ex School", including Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Milton Resnick, Lee Krasner and Robert Motherwell among others. In those early years he also started to photograph the emerging artists of his own generation, Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Richard Prince and Peter Halley for example. His art world obsession continued and he added art critics, art dealers, art collectors and art curators to his archive. Greenfield-Sanders' first one-man exhibition was in 1981 at The Marcuse Pfeiffer Gallery. Titled, "New York Artists of the Fifties in the Eighties", the show consisted of 40 portraits of the leading figures of the Fifties who were still alive. The exhibition was reviewed in the New York Times by Hilton Kramer, the chief art critic for the newspaper. Kramer said, "Mr. Greenfield-Sanders has a wonderful eye for faces and a subtle understanding of how their characteristic attributes may best be translated into the language of the photographic print. Even if we did not know who his subjects are, this would be a very affecting exhibition. But since the subjects are who they are, this show is also something of a historic event-and a moving one, too, for anyone who has lived through the period that it recalls". This significant review in the Times gave the photographer an important career boost. Years later, in 1999, Greenfield-Sanders exhibited all the art world subjects who had sat for his camera over a 20 year period. There were 700 images in this show at The Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Full editions of all 700 images are now in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

XXX

Greenfield-Sanders got the idea for the XXX project after watching the film Boogie Nights, which dramatized the American porn industry in the 1970s. "In general, I found porn stars much more comfortable nude than clothed. They're energized, and more in control. My goal however was to humanize them, to show them as people, not objects". XXX included pictures of porn stars both clothed and nude in the same pose, a conceit inspired by the Spanish artist Goya. The thirty stars in the project were Sunrise Adams, Briana Banks, Belladonna, Seymour Butts, Christy Canyon, Chloe, Nina Hartley, Jason Hawke, Chad Hunt, Heather Hunter, Jenna Jameson (who is on the front cover of the book), Jesse Jane, Janine Lindemulder, Ron Jeremy, Jeremy Jordan, Kira Kener, Reina Leone, Michael Lucas, Gina Lynn, Ginger Lynn, Sean Michaels, Peter North, Tera Patrick, Mari Possa, Lukas Ridgeston, Tawny Roberts, Savanna Samson, Aiden Shaw, Lexington Steele, and May Ling Su. The book also featured essays from Gore Vidal, Salman Rushdie, John Malkovich, Francine du Plessix Gray, Karen Finley, Nancy Friday, Nina Hartley, A.M. Homes, Richard Johnson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, JT Leroy, Lou Reed, Whitley Strieber, John Waters and Faye Wattleton.

Greenfield-Sanders produced and directed Thinking XXX, a film for HBO which chronicled the making of the book. It was released on DVD in the summer of 2006. Thinking XXX was edited by Lukas Hauser.

Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq

In late 2006, Greenfield-Sanders photographed 13 severely injured soldiers and marines for the HBO documentary Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq. The images were initially used to promote the airing of the film but have subsequently become widely viewed and discussed. In the September 27, 2007 issue of the New York Time, Peter Applebome wrote, "Mr. Greenfield-Sanders' photographs have quickly become part of the visual landscape of the war..." Nicolaus Mills, an American Studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College wrote in Dissent Magazine Online, "...when it comes to arguing that the time has come to bring the Iraq War to a close, nobody has made the case in a way more likely to convince the undecided than Greenfield-Sanders. His visual politics forecloses debate."^{[volume & issue needed]}

The Black List Project

In the summer of 2008, Greenfield-Sanders, Elvis Mitchell and Freemind Ventures launched The Black List Project, starting with an exhibition at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston of Greenfield-Sanders' 25 large-scale portraits of leading African Americans. The images include Bill T. Jones, Chris Rock, Colin Powell, Dawn Staley, Faye Wattleton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Lorna Simpson, Louis Gossett, Jr., Mahlon Duckett, Marc Morial, Rev. Al Sharpton, Richard D. Parsons, Russell Simmons, Sean Combs, Serena Williams, Slash, Steve Stoute, Susan Rice, Suzan-Lori Parks, Thelma Golden, Toni Morrison, Vernon Jordan, William Rice, and Zane and will travel to other museums nationwide including Brooklyn Museum in fall 2008. On August 25, 2008, the film The Black List: Volume 1 aired on HBO and on September 16, 2008, Simon and Schuster's Atria published The Black List with an introduction by Elvis Mitchell, as well as all of Greenfield-Sanders' portraits from the project. A slideshow of the images can be seen on Greenfield-Sanders' website.^[1]

After the success of Volume 1, HBO commissioned The Black List: Volume 2, which included Angela Davis, Bishop Barbara Harris, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Charley Pride, Dr. Valerie Montgomery-Rice, Governor Deval Patrick, Kara Walker, Lawrence Fishburne, Majora Carter, Maya Rudolph, Melvin Van Peebles, Patrick Robinson, Rza, Suzanne De Passe, and Tyler Perry.

Bibliography

• "The Black List", Atria, 2008 ISBN 1416594191
• "Movie Stars", Skira, 2007 ISBN 8861305229
• "Look: Portraits Backstage at Olympus Fashion Week", Powerhouse, 2006 ISBN 9781 5768 7352 6
• "Face To Face", Rizzoli, 2006 ISBN 9788876245428
• "XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits" Bulfinch Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8212-7754-5
• "Timothy Greenfield-Sanders" Alberico Cetti Serbelloni Editore 2001 ISBN 9788 8880 9801 2
• "Art World" Fotofolio, 1999 ISBN 9781584180104
• "After Andy: Soho in the Eighties", Schwartz Publishing Pty, Limited, 1996 ISBN 9781 8639 5049 7

Filmography

• The Black List: Volume 2, Freemind Ventures and Perfect Day Films, Inc. 2008
• The Black List: Volume 1, Freemind Ventures and Perfect Day Films, Inc. 2008
• Thinking XXX HBO, 2005
• Karen Finley, Perfect Day Films, Inc. 2004
• Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, American Masters Series, 1998 Grammy Award 1999 Premiered at Sundance and Berlin

Notes

References

• Chang. "The Black List: Volume One" Variety (magazine) January 24, 2008
• Peter Applebome. "Soldier Portraits Make the Costs of War More Visible" The New York Times September 27, 2007
• Nicolaus Mills. "Soldiers" Dissent Magazine November 22, 2007
• Sarah Valdez. "Timothy Greenfield-Sanders" Art in America April 2005
• Lynne Eodice. "The Elegant Portraiture of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders" Shutterbug March 2005
• David Rimanelli. "Double Exposure on Timothy Greenfield-Sanders". Artforum. September 1, 2004.
• Landi. "Working Habits". Artnews October 2004.
• Tompkins. "Unzipped". The New Yorker. November 11, 2004.
• Mel Gussow. "Photographing Celebrities, Even Those of an X-Rated World". New York Times. July 29, 2003. B1.

External links

• Official Site
• Stockland Martel photo agency
• IMDB
• Interview on 60 Minutes
• Red Cross Pro-bono work
• The Treatment, radio interview with Elvis Mitchell