Skrebneski:
What Next?

WORDS | CLIFFORD THURLOW

It would be foolish to ask Victor Skrebneski if he believed in destiny. He would give one of his characteristic shrugs and, as a man of few words, would no doubt say nothing at all. His feet are planted firmly on the ground. His maxim is NEXT, as in what next? What needs to be done? No star-gazing. No crystal balls. He decides exactly what he wants to do and gets on with it.

That's what Victor Skrebneski has been doing for the last fifty years and still at the age of seventy his unresting, all-seeing gaze focuses ahead to the future, not back at a past that can be neither altered nor improved.

Yet the sequence of events that made Skrebneski the celebrated photographer he is today certainly appear to have been guided by a divine hand.

Track back sixty odd years and we see a six year old caught in the rain running through the gardens to the clubhouse where his family are waiting. Someone in their haste has left a black camera on a bench and the observant boy snatches it up and hands it in to the club secretary. She tells him if no one claims it in two weeks, the camera will be his.

From this small act of boyhood honesty Victor came by his first camera. Two weeks later, with his first film, he is shooting with such energy he didn't think to hold the camera still when he hit the shutter. No one had told him to do so and at six years old he discovered the impressionistic style of blurring shots that he would revisit and make his leitmotiv.

The major influence on Skrebneski's life during the next decade was the ruthless regime of the nuns at Catholic School who instilled in him, whether he realised it or not, a sense of discipline and the capacity for hard work; that sense of what next? If you want to make something happen you make it happen yourself. There are 24 hours in a day, he says. There's always time to do what needs to be done.

Victor Skrebneski grew up in the 1950s, that post-war period when doors began to open and people started to believe they could do anything, be anything, that the world was there for them to mould into their own image. With uncanny good fortune, living in the coach house behind the Skrebneski family home in Chicago was the eccentric actress Dorothy Bates. She was a counterpoint to the despotic regime conducted by the nuns and introduced Victor to her elegiac world of art and theatre.

His first love was painting and sculpture. Skrebneski studied at the Art Institute in Chicago before attending the Maholy-Nagy Institute of Design. It was there at this esteemed establishment where he first came across the idiosyncratic images created by the Hungarian-born artist Láslò Maholy-Nagy, a self-taught artist who had pioneered experimental photography and whose work began to haunt Victor Skrebneski.

It was at this time that destiny, or whatever we want to call it, came calling once again. A friend who had once wanted to be a photographer quit and gave Victor his darkroom equipment. What was he going to do with all this stuff? He was into surrealism, cubism, dada. Could he synthesise these disciplines? Explore a new landscape? Ideas were swirling through his mind like a negative developing. He mixed the chemicals according to the instructions and went to work enlarging and cropping the photographs he'd been taking since the secretary at his father's clubhouse had presented him with that fold-out box camera as a child.

He played with shapes, trimming the shots like a sculptor with his chisel. He was a blind man learning to see. He was feeling his way in the dark and showed some images of his sister, Jennie, and some cityscapes to Harry Callahan, the photography instructor who had stepped into the shoes of Maholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design.

What Callahan found when he leafed through Skrebneski's first set of prints was an original mind at work. He had never seen cropping like this before and urged Skrebneski to take his portfolio to the magazine editors in New York. Skrebneski followed Callahan's advice and could hardly believe his luck when he walked into the Esquire office and the picture editor gave him the chance to go out and do a shoot for the magazine.

More jobs followed. The way to get work is to get working. He returned to Chicago to pack his gear and move to New York, but while he was home he got a call from Marshall Field's, one of the city's big departmental stores. They had seen his photographs and, taking a chance on a virtual unknown, commissioned him to do a fashion assignment. This is what he wanted. Fashion was changing. Photography was changing. He was 23 years old. He was ready to ride the wave and help shape those changes.

If you sift through Victor Skrebneski's press reviews today, with the benefit of forty years of studied comments, the word 'timeless' crops up again and again to describe his work whether in fashion, nudes, landscapes or portraits. You could say the same about Greek statuary, the paintings by Goya, the clean line of Le Corbusier. This is not coincidence. It is the combination of ingredients, an innate gift, mastery of the medium and a soupcon of chance - which is not the mere accident of good fortunate, but that place where preparation meets opportunity.

His first big opportunity came in 1962 when Skrebneski was made the exclusive photographer for Estée Lauder. For almost three decades his flawless images of models such as Karen Graham, Willow Bay and Paulina Porizkova made his name synonymous with beauty, elegance and perfection; three graces of timelessness.

Skrebneski shot pictures of iconic figures from literature, art, show business: Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, Raquel Welch, and in these reductive portraits he portrays a compelling sense of drama, as if the individual has been caught unawares in a moment of reflection, even innocence. In a shot of Iman with David Bowie we can visualise the Madonna, Iman a maternal goddess and David her child; Francois Truffaut, the critic turned director who pioneered film noir smokes his Gauloises with spectral smoke coiling like thought streams from his mouth and nose.

It is Skrebneski's ability to crop a portrait that captures the essence of his sitter; he slices the top from Orson Welles's head as if it is a boiled egg and draws us into those mysterious hooded eyes. One critic has written that Skebneski may see clearly in the light, but it is the shadow that he really knows. It is a sage comment. Before a study gets to the jaws of the guillotine, it has been painted with light and shadow. Though he does work in colour when it is called for, the spectrum of greys through the arc from pure white to velvety blackness is what makes his work distinctive and instantly familiar.

At the age of six, Skrebneski blurred his photographs moving the lens. A blurred image is the opposite of what we think of as a good photograph. But Skrebneski stood this prosaic premise on its head. In his blurred images through the 1990s we get a sense of the decline and uncertainty at the end of a dying century. He was fascinated with the disturbing canvases of Francis Bacon and in Skrebneski's striking blurred triptych of actor Dennis Hopper we find the perfect symbol of our collective insecurity in the age of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Great artists in touch with their own era cannot help but create work others will recognise as significant. Skrebneski is one of the most significant photographers of the last half century.

Retrospectives of his work: Skrebneski: The First Fifty Years, have been staged in Los Angeles and Chicago. There are permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

Skrebneski is at home in Paris and New York, those bridge supports of the art world, but after receiving that call from Marshall Field's he built his studio in his Chicago, where he is still based today. In fact, the city honoured their native son naming one of the streets Victor Skrebneski Way. It's in the same quarter as Goethe Street and Schiller Street. "I'm in good company," he says modestly.

While fellow photographers and critics look back in awe, Skrebneski is looking ahead. A year ago, he was asked to contribute to a sculpture exhibit in Chicago and sat down to make a sculpture, a skill acquired in college and which continues to inform his work. More recently he shot 33 portraits of the Steppenwolf actors for a book commemorating the Chicago theatre company's 25th anniversary. The book's out. The reviews described the work as timeless, classic Skrebneski. He doesn't think about what others are preparing or achieving. He doesn't dwell on the past. He focuses his energy on what he is doing at that moment.

"In my studio we use the four letter word NEXT," he says. "If you want to make something happen you find time to make it happen."