The F STOP hat ein schönes Interview mit einem meiner größten Fotovorbilder ever: Phillip Toledano

F STOP: You work in editorial and advertising and you’re also working on fine art projects now. What are the differences in working with editorial and ad clients versus with galleries?

Toledano: It’s interesting. There’s a sliding scale of freedom. Galleries there’s one hundred percent freedom. Editorial I’d say is probably about seventy percent; advertising is zero. Actually I think it’s about ten percent. So, I’ve been lucky for the most part with editorials in a sense, at least in the context of the conceptual stuff. People will just call me up and say, “what can you think of?” I have to say recently a few weeks I worked with some magazines and they haven’t gone that way. They’ll ask me to think of something and I’ll do it, but then they’ll start changing it after I’ve done it, and I get all pissed off. If you’re going to ask me to do the thing I do, then let me do that thing, or ask someone else. Gallery work is amazing because either the work is great or it isn’t great. And it’s just a question of picking out the pictures that they want to show. Advertising is also great but it’s different. I’ll have input in terms of whatever I think about doing it this way, or shooting it that way, or this kind of lighting or that kind of lighting. But the idea’s not mine, so I’m not going to try to make it mine