In conversation with Luis Sanchis

When you moved from Spain to New York in 94, you started your career as a professional photographer. I feel like that's a really big leap. And I wanted to ask you if it was a difficult decision to make as a newcomer. How did you perceive New York? How did it feel, like?

New York in the early 90s felt like a dream, like a movie. A different world... I came in 92 for the first time for a month to visit a friend who invited me, then I came back in 93 for another month. I was very impressed with the city. As I said it felt like a dream, yet at the same time it felt very real. It was overwhelming, so much going on and so intense: running in Central Park in the mornings, going downtown, going to Harlem, looking for jobs. I went everywhere. It was so new and different from what I had experienced before but also, it felt familiar, probably because of all the movies and photographs I saw. Until that point, I didn't travel much, mostly around Spain and once to Portugal and to the UK.  New York had a huge, huge impact on me. It really was another world where everything was possible and new to me.

I decided to move in '94 and go after photography. A friend told me that I could contact  model agencies and take photographs of their new faces and they would pay me for it so I went to all the agencies and offered to work, even though I didn't speak a word of English then. 

I didn't have the money to buy equipment. I just have my camera. I started taking pictures in my bedroom apartment because I had a window with natural light. That’s the only source of light I had. Slowly, I built up a portfolio. After moving around, eventually I got an agent, and a year and a half later I was doing Gucci. Everything happened very fast.

In the meantime, I wasn't doing only tests. I worked in different jobs to make extra money (garbage man, busboy, handyman, etc..) but my life was about the love of photos. I mean, I live for that. If I wasn't shooting, I was at the lab or working at a part time job.

I don't consider myself a fashion photographer. I see myself as an artist and a human being.

And also, you've been photographing for “The Face” since 1996. And I think that's a magazine recognized for challenging norms. Do you think today's fashion photography is more cautious to avoid controversy? And I don't know, are our creative decisions now driven more by social media trends than by personal vision? Because this is something that I really thought about a lot.

Growing up in Spain in the 70s and 80s was very difficult to find information from outside the country. You could find “The Face magazine” and other international magazines in a few stores in Madrid and they disappeared very fast because those magazines were sort of underground. They were more artistic and experimental and very different from the other fashion magazines. They were more about pop culture, music, fashion, photography, you know, things that were coming, the new wave.

When you work as a fashion photographer you work with a team of people, they all bring their own energy: the hair stylist, the makeup, the stylists, the models, everybody influences the image. I was pretty free with what I was doing, and the magazine liked it so I kept doing what I wanted. Back then, it wasn't easy to get to work for those magazines, anyone could submit a story but they were very selective and only a few people were allowed in. Now, there are many outlets to expose your work but it feels more confusing. There's so much information out there, and people rely a lot on social media. Before, you had to go out and make things happen for yourself.

Back then, there weren't many references available. I studied painting, fine art, watched a lot of movies, took my camera everywhere, it was hard to find and see other people's work. I worked in many jobs in Spain and eventually worked as a photographer assistant and got a hint of the industry. I experimented with different films and lights, and processed them in different ways. That's the difference between then and now. It's not better or worse, just different. With all this information available now at your desk, people can get a bit lazier.

Now it's easy to see other people's work online. Before, if you did a shoot, people had to wait six months to see your story in a magazine, and they had to buy it. The process was completely different. Today, you can shoot and share your work instantly, and everyone in the world can see it. Both ways have their positives and negatives. It doesn't mean the old way was better or worse. They're just different worlds.

Now there's an overload of information, tools, and media, and people often rely on them instead of just buying a film experiment and seeing what happens. The timing, the feeling of surprise, not knowing what you got on film, how to expose it.  Now, you can see results instantly, make corrections, and it's cheaper. Everyone has a camera nowadays, back then it was expensive. The technology and the tools are great, but in the end, they're just tools and it all depends on how one uses them.

And I also think that today's visual culture is less accepting of imperfection. And I wanted to ask you, what do you think we'll lose when we edit all these details away? I was really curious if you had a project that focused on imperfection. Because I also think it resonates with how the world used to be then and how it's now. And I think we really avoid imperfections, filter everything, and make everything look very clean and right.

I did a lot of experimenting in the darkroom and with cameras and lighting. I was never chasing perfection. I just wanted to create something that made me stop and think, ‘This is interesting, this is different, I really like this'. You don’t know if people are going to like it or not. You do what you like if people like it, good, if not is good too,  the problem now is that with so many tools, people get obsessed. You start retouching and just can’t stop. You keep cleaning up the image.

Now, you take a photograph and can change everything in postproduction ‘I don’t like this arm, this finger, this pimple, that background,’ and just keep changing things. It never ends, but I wouldn’t call that perfection. Before, you had to get it right on camera, it was all about how you exposed the film, the lighting, how you processed and printed. The photographer's style was more recognizable.

Sometimes, when I photographed celebrities, I had an airbrush artist to cover up mostly their pimples.

We didn’t have Photoshop. I had a guy who was a master at airbrushing. He could retouch the print so well you couldn’t even tell it had been done. He would mix the colors to match the exact skin tone and paint it by hand right onto the surface of the print. It was a completely different process, much more hands-on and more crafted to me.

I think it really paid the difference because I also had a look at what you shot for Gucci, and those campaigns had a really, really raw and sensual, and sometimes even aggressive feel. And I wanted to ask you, why do you think those images were missing today? 

Maybe it’s nostalgia for some people. Everyone is different, so I can’t say for sure. It’s funny, back then, people used to say that my pictures were too dark, too sexy, moody, edgy, even vulgar.  Recently, someone told me they were too commercial, which was new for me. LOL.

I’ve heard it all: too fashionable for fine art, too fine art for fashion people, there is always something. In the end, you can only please yourself. You have to do what you love. If someone likes it, that’s great. If not, that’s fine too. I’m not here to please you. Of course, when you work for a client, you have to deliver what they want but when you’re creating for yourself or for a magazine, it’s about pleasing yourself.  People will always have opinions, sometimes negative, sometimes positive. Those images from back then changed things. They were more raw and real to me.

The lighting, the mood, the darkness, and the sensuality took Gucci in a new direction. At the time, I got a lot of criticism because the images were controversial. Now, people say it was the best campaign. Back then many people didn’t like them, mostly in the industry.   A couple of images were banned and not published in the United States.

Some of the images were considered too strong, especially for such a big brand. Magazines like Vogue even censored a couple of them because they were too bold. For me, those photos felt very real, not forced. Sometimes, the first shot is the best one. If you try to repeat or perfect it, it gets too complicated. I used to shoot just three or four rolls per photo (50 frames), maybe 40 rolls per story while others shot hundreds.

I didn’t need to shoot a lot to get the image I wanted, I knew when I had it and it's still the same nowadays. If you keep shooting, it can become forced and rigid. In the darkroom, my printer and I experimented often. At times we made the (so-called mistake) but many times I liked it and wanted to keep it. Most of the time, the first version was the best; it was fresh, and you couldn’t recreate that image again. It was one of a kind.

Now, everything is digital, and you can just copy and paste. It’s a completely different process, and that sense of spontaneity is lost. I used to work with clients and use a Polaroid as a reference to check the lighting and composition. Sometimes you couldn't see anything on the Polaroid because it was so dark, but the client trusted me and the process. 

Now, instead of one client, you might have ten people all looking at the monitor and giving their opinions.  It's a very different process. It's not better or worse, just different. Some people might not like it, some people might prefer it, but those old pictures had more freedom. They were more spontaneous. You would go in with ideas and sometimes with some references and along the way things will happen and it is up to you what you pick on in every moment.

We're talking about a general aesthetic. Films from the early 90s had a distinctive look: blue lighting, darkness, and a moody atmosphere. This created a mysterious atmosphere. That blue lighting was characteristic of early 90s cinema and felt darker and more authentic. In contrast, today's “Netflix look” makes films and digital imagery feel controlled, especially with lighting.

Netflix movies are shot mostly on digital, the use of colors are simpler and more primary. They are more basic. When you see the blue, it's just this basic blue but it has to do with the lighting equipment they use as well. I prefer when it has more middle tones and more subtleness.

When you add more colors in between, for example, the blues of Gucci you were talking about, those blues have a bit of cyan (green and yellow) and also red. You might see it, you might not, but they are there (those are the middle tones) and you can feel them.  It has a wider range of color spectrum.

The Netflix look you were saying, is just blue.  It doesn’t have depth. The other day, someone asked me, how do you make your pictures look 3D, are you using AI? I thought it was funny.  I am just using film and sometimes digital but that 3D look you see is because of the way I use colors and light, the texture.  That mixture of tones makes the image feel deeper and more meaningful to me and that’s the way I see it but again each person sees what they see…

Psychologically it affects you differently than just seeing a flat primary blue.

It is like the old movies and the new ones, like everything in general but again we are living in different times and that's the look now and what they are promoting.

That's why I brought up the blue issue. You can really see how much the colors have changed over time.

Film still has more range (latitude of colors) than digital, it captures more middle tones. Digital doesn't have the same depth.  Film has emulsion, grain silver particles and the magic of the chemical process. The whole  process is very different. Film captures some things better, while digital picks up others that film might not, but a lot of it comes down to taste and trends, like the types of lights people use in each era. Basically digital is cheaper, faster, easier, safer and more convenient.

For example, I use all kinds of lights, depending on what I want to achieve.  Now many people use LED lights. Other lights, like incandescent bulbs, have a different texture and react differently with the skin and environment. That's probably one reason for those primary colors we were talking about. It's not just the lights but the cameras and the person doing the lighting and what and how he or she uses it and mixes it with.

I love DoPs from the old days, the pioneers. They were amazing craftspeople who really knew what they were doing. They could walk into a space and know exactly how to light it and create the atmosphere just by looking. They were both technical and creative, and they worked in different ways. It was just different. They came from different backgrounds, techniques, and approaches, leading to results that differ from what we see today. Sometimes, you just need a window with natural light or just one light source.  At the end it all comes down to your eye, your vision and how you see things. The studio is like life, like a canvas and it is up to you what you put on. I love to feel the space and improvise.

Leonardo Da Vinci once said, or (that’s what i read) “A painter should start a canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark, except where exposed by the light”

For example, in the 70s and 80s, Jaco Pastorius became known as one of the best bass players in the world. One day, he took a knife and removed the frets from his bass guitar, changing the sound completely. That's how you could recognize his style. In interviews, he said he just couldn't get the sound he wanted, so he made the change himself. It wasn't about copying anyone else; it just happened naturally. He was looking for a specific sound that he couldn’t get with his instrument. To me what he achieved was his sound, the sound of himself and he channelled through the bass guitar.

My approach is similar. The camera is a tool, an extension of myself to experiment. It's hard to explain, but it's like seeing a beautiful reflection in a window or a shadow on someone's face. The moonlight filtering through the trees at night. A moment still.  Observing nature...

I want to recreate that same feeling in the studio if I am shooting or wherever I am doing, cooking, painting but there is also inspiration, experience, ideas etc.. There's no set formula. You can't just add a certain amount of blue; sometimes you add several layers and mix them to see what happens. If you don't experiment, you won't discover things. Sometimes you only realize what looks right for you after you do it and see it or make a mistake. I learn by doing it, and that's the beauty of the process. Ultimately it is about the person and how he or she uses the tools and what's available. Many times the less you have the more creative you get.

Your portfolio covers everything from fashion to music to sports, celebrities, and film; a really huge range of subjects. Yet there's still a recognizable visual language that runs through it all. How did that happen? Did you choose this aesthetic from the beginning, or did it develop over time? Your visual language is so distinctive that I can recognize your work immediately. What's the key to this consistency?

What you see is really the result of many different influences. When I was a kid, I went to church with my parents and stared at the amazing paintings and frescoes on the ceilings in Valencia, my birth town in Spain. They were unreal. I was drawn to art and other worlds from a very young age; my mom painted when she was young. I got my first camera at 16. Much later on I watched a lot of movies, worked in production doing TV commercials, assisting photographers, dj, bartender, doorman, messenger, handyman and so on and learned from many different people I admired over the years. All of these experiences and influences shaped my style.

Then you just go out and do your work. I learn by doing it, self-taught, from the people I admire and my masters. In the beginning you might copy them and emulate them but eventually you have to find your own way. 

Your upbringing, your country, your family, what I see, photography, cinema, nature, all influenced me. All these experiences shaped me but don’t define me. I can change it at any time. As you work, you start to notice what is useful and what is not. You take parts of it from different places like a cocktail and you experiment and eventually you find your own voice and the so-called style. 

For example, I like certain colors and techniques, but I fluctuate and change them over time. Sometimes I used muted, pastel colors, then I went through a phase with more saturated tones, or the use of blues in my work, or certain lenses and later I stopped. There are no strict rules. You don’t have to stick to one thing forever. You keep experimenting and finding new ways. But if you can always recognize my photos, it’s because it is a reflection of me and I’m always the one behind them. 

Do you still shoot on film?

Yes, I shoot both on film and digitally.

Nowadays when I do personal projects, I usually use film and do the whole thing by myself. When I shoot digital, I have a digital technician and a retoucher, usually the same person. I am very involved in the process and the making of the final image, the lighting and everything else are really my work. A lot of young photographers hire a lighting technician or DoP to do the lighting, I like doing it myself with my assistants of course as much as possible. When you shoot a commercial video is a different story.

That's what a photographer does. These days, many young photographers rely on a movement director, lighting director, etc... but the photographer used to be the one who moved the models, did the lighting and created the whole scene, of course you need help. You have assistants and people who help you, and you listen to their ideas and input, but ultimately you are the one who brings it all together. That is probably why you see a consistent style in my work. You can tell it is me, even if I used a different printer 20 years ago or a new one now. The person behind the work is always the same person. The consistency, the eye and skills are always there, whether I use my iPhone a digital or an analog Hasselblad no matter what I use. Tools are just tools. It is up to you how to use them.

I still want to use film as much as I can. I still want to do things by hand, as much as possible. When we shot Robin Williams' album covers, I don't know if you saw it, but he's hanging upside down from a building.

People used to tell me that my pictures taken on location looked like they were done in a studio and the ones in the studio look like location. These days, we would probably do it in a studio with projections, backdrops or cgi, it is cheaper and more convenient but back then Robbie wanted to do it for real and so did I. We found the tallest building in downtown Los Angeles, there were about 30 of us on the rooftop.

The whole thing was put together by a movie crew, very skilled and technical people.  They put a bunch of mattresses on the ground, and he was right next to the edge of the building. It was a 52-story building. He was hanging upside down from the crane. I was on another platform above him to get the bird's eye view.  We waited for the perfect moment at sunset, with the sun going down behind the buildings in LA, that orange LA sunset look. I took five or six rolls of film and got the shot.

Now, you could do the same thing much easier and cheaper in a studio. People would say it's awesome, beautiful, great but the whole experience of doing it for real, the feeling…. I think it shows in the final picture, even if you don't notice it. You can feel the  intensity but again nowadays people don’t know anymore if it is done for real or it is AI.

And if we were talking to a young creative, for example, someone trying to find their voice, even though everyone is telling them to play it safe. Why would your advice be? What would you say to them?

You see, everyone is going to have opinions. Some people will like what you do, some people won't. Everyone wants to be famous, everyone wants to be great, but you have to put in the work. Things have become more available and maybe easier, but to really get good at any skill takes a lifetime. If you look at all the masters, like Kurosawa, he was making movies from the 1940s all the way until he died in the 1990s. His movies in the 1980s were beautiful, different from the movies he made in the 40s, 50s, and 60s but always had the Kurosawa signature style.

But, again, for me, he is an example of someone who did what he loved, absolute commitment to his craft and his work reflected the way he experienced life. Some people will like your work, some people won't. You might get recognized or you might not. You might get rich, you might not. There are probably thousands, if not millions, of artists throughout history that we don't even know about and who did amazing work. Their work might have been lost, destroyed, or kept hidden, who knows but there are probably amazing people out there who did and do things in their own way. You just have to do what you love and find your own unique way...

To me, you have to do it because you love it. Money might come later or not, but if you play it safe, you are just doing what everyone else is doing. That's the problem. The problem is that when someone is successful, everyone tries to copy it, thinking it will make them successful too. Imagine, you use blue light and become successful, then everyone uses it in the same way because they think it will work for them but that's already old. That's already been done. What you can do is to find a different way using the blue light or better use yellow or find a new one.

I don’t have a magic answer for what will be successful or what people will like. Some things are and some are not. The only person you need to please is yourself. Take photos for yourself, not for likes on Instagram. Take them because you enjoy them.  If I am doing it for my business and I want to show my work, I’ll post it.  If people like them, that’s great.  If not, that’s okay too.  This is what I love to do. That’s what matters. If you do it for others, you are doing it for the wrong reasons. The key is to keep surprising yourself, because you never really know what will happen.  Of course, it is different when you are working for a client and they want something specific.  Sometimes you have more freedom than others.

If I start painting now and someone comes along and says, 'Your paintings are amazing,' they might be amazing to him or to her, but not everyone will like it. That's just how it goes. There are so many movies that were trashed when they first came out, but later became classics. Take the original Blade Runner, for example. It was a failure at first, few people liked it, and it didn't make any money.

They criticized it, then it became a cult movie that inspired so many others, and now everyone thinks it's amazing.

The same happened with Dune by David Lynch. I think it's the same story.

If you are an artist you and your work will always be judged and criticised, or maybe people just weren't ready to understand it.  I remember watching Blue Velvet,  I was working in the north of Spain. I was actually working in a club. I was 20 years old and my friend told me, "Let's go see this movie," and I didn't know the director. I didn't know anything.

From the moment the movie started with the flowers and the truck passing and the fence, you remember, right? Blue sky, red flowers and a white fence. I was watching the movie, and I was like, wow! This is so strange…and it's so amazing. so different. I had never seen one of his movies. I didn't know anything about him, but I connected with those images, and when I saw them, I was like, wow, I love this. I had a similar feeling with many others when I first discovered them. Some impacted me, some I resonated with and some felt very familiar…

That's the thing, you watch something without knowing anything about it. You have no reference point or idea who the director or artist is. Sometimes, something just resonates with you.  I see a photo by someone I don’t know and I feel drawn to it while another photo might not appeal to me at all. That's how I started to notice the difference. The work of some people resonates differently than others, it doesn't matter if it is famous or known at all.

I noticed the difference between artists. One person's work really spoke to me, while another's didn't. I wanted to be as good as the artists I admired, not to copy them, but to reach that level of greatness in their craft. I could feel they have something else...  It is like a secret condiment.  They came before me, and I learned from them but I also learn from newcomers.  It was the same with Lynch. I didn't know who he was at first. When I first saw his work. There was something about the look, lighting, storytelling, acting, speed, and timing that stood out and was unique of him. You can often tell right away when a movie or anything has a signature.

One of my Masters said “People learn by imitation (copying) or contagion.  It's the same with art. With so much information online, it's easy to spend all your time looking at other people's work instead of actually doing something yourself and finding your way.

Time goes by, and you might end up just watching others and dreaming of being as good as them.  You have to pick up the camera and take pictures. That's how you start. Of course, there are technical things to learn and things you might need to study, but that's all part of the process. 

Back in the days if you wanted to be a photographer, a director or a painter, you had to work at a studio and start from the bottom up.  There were only a few schools and it was expensive, the internet didn’t exist. It is very different to learn by doing than learning from books. Books usually are memorized without understanding. You might read a lot of technical stuff, but real understanding comes from doing it, making mistakes and figuring out what works and what doesn't for you.  That's the big difference between then and now. Photography and Cinema are pretty new. I mean about 100 years old.

There were no books or just a few about the craft. People just have to go and do it and experiment, discover, understand the medium etc... the pioneers.

My favorite album covers are from the 70s, and 80s, they're incredible. Studios like Hipgnosis in England, who did all the Pink Floyd  album covers, created amazing artwork. Their studio had eight people or so, each one of them with a different set of skills and background, an airbrush artist, a painter, a photographer, a graphic designer, and an art director.  They all worked together on album covers, and the results are still stunning today. Even now, when you see their covers, you think, wow, that's amazing and the stories behind the execution of the pictures are very interesting as well.

Those album covers were special because people from different backgrounds came together, each bringing their own craft. Before that, album covers were more plain. They brought something different and new.

When you listen to interviews with Miles Davis or other great musicians, you can tell they've lived rich, intense lives. They truly love their craft. Miles Davis, for example, lived and breathed music. He invented new ways to play, and when he spoke, music was his life, it was in his head. That's the difference. He didn’t want to be anyone else. He was influenced by others and by the world he lived in, but he was just himself. He was the music.