PHOTO ESSAY

Buck Shot

The portrait photography of Chris Buck

By Matthew McKinnon

March 21, 2006

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Elvis Costello, Impact, 1994.

Buck moved from Toronto to New York City in 1990. (He now splits his time between residences in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Silverlake, Los Angeles.) The Big Apple probably has the highest concentration of pro photographers anywhere on earth, but also a wealth of opportunity for those among the horde who can distinguish themselves.

By ’94, Buck’s portraits had been published by Premiere, Details, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and other front-row titles. That winter, he accepted an assignment to shoot Elvis Costello. (It was for Impact, a since-deceased Canadian music mag.) A colleague warned Buck of a problem going in:

“He had gone to photograph [Costello] a couple days before me. So I called him to ask what the conditions were like, knowing that it was going to be in the same hotel and likely the same room. He talked about how bad it was. There was nothing of interest there, not even a patch of wall that had an interesting texture. The lighting was nothing of great interest.

“I took it as a challenge to see if I could find something in there that he couldn’t.... Sometimes when you’re given limitations, you can make something greater from it than if you’re given the whole city to work with.” Buck backed Costello into a corner (an ad hoc homage to Irving Penn’s mid-century masterpieces) and won.