To celebrate 20 years of Design Matters, Debbie Millman revisits standout moments from past conversations with photographers Catherine Opie, Albert Watson, Pete Souza, Lynn Goldsmith, and Mary Ellen Matthews. These excerpts explore how they approach craft, capture truth, and use the camera to tell the stories that define us.
Pete Souza:
As a photojournalist, you always hope to have a subject like that.
Lynn Goldsmith:
I took a picture of their feet.
Albert Watson:
I’m always ready for a surprise, something that doesn’t work.
Curtis Fox:
From a TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, we’ll hear from some of the photographers Debbie has interviewed over the years.
Catherine Opie:
I wish everybody had that education in some ways.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
I had to leave because I wasn’t really doing my job.
Debbie Millman:
Susan Sontag once wrote, “To photograph people is to violate them by seeing them as they never see themselves.” She went on to say, “Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun. To photograph someone, a subliminal murder.” Very dramatic. I’m not so sure about that.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve interviewed some of the most celebrated photographers of our time, and they all happen to be very nice, very interesting people, not a murderer among them. On this episode, I want to play some excerpts from several of those interviews. Catherine Opie’s portraits of queer communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco brought her fame and recognition in the 1990s. When I interviewed her in 2021, I wanted to get into those early days of her career.
You began to contribute photographs to lesbian magazines you mentioned on our backs, whose name was a response to the anti-pornography feminist journal off our backs.
Catherine Opie:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
How did you first discover the magazine?
Catherine Opie:
Well, living in San Francisco, you’re basically embedded in, at that point, Valencia Street in San Francisco was the kind of lesbian area. The Castro was for the boys. Valencia Street was for the women. We had Artemis Cafe, we had Osento bathhouse. We had Amelia’s, which was the seven day a week lesbian bar.
So you had all of this happening all at once. And I’ll tell you, the women who would go to Amelia’s were also the women who were being photographed by wonderful photographers like Jill Posner and Susie Bright, and all of the kind of sex-positive in terms of starting “On Our Backs” was right there at that time. And so I just decided, like, “Well, I want a picture, not our backs. I’m a photographer, I’m a lesbian. Why shouldn’t I try to actually do that as well?”
Debbie Millman:
Those magazines introduced me to my own sort of private realization that I was gay at the time, although it was another 25 years before I publicly came out. But other magazines that I have in my collection that I thought you’d enjoy, I’m sure you know this one.
Catherine Opie:
Oh, The Attitude?
Debbie Millman:
The Attitude. And then Caught Looking, which was just an extraordinary publication. At the time, you also joined a women’s S&M society called The Outcasts, which was co-founded by the activist and academic, Gayle Rubin. But you said that S&M was never sexual for you and have described it as the scariest, most violent secret impulses that could be followed and validated and made almost cozy in an atmosphere where you could always say no. And you go on to say that you needed to push yourself to get over the enormous amount of fear you had around your body. Where do you think that fear came from? What was that fear about?
Catherine Opie:
Well, it’s personal, and it’s not on the record in terms of personal, but there was some childhood trauma on my part. And I think that there was an enormous amount of healing that this community brought to me in relationship to trauma. And you’ve never read this in an interview, so I’m saying it right now for the first time. It’s been very hard in a certain way to be quiet about this during the #MeToo movement, but there’s reasons. And the reasons are is when you make self-portraits that I made, people easily equate that to, “Oh, well, that’s why she made that. She was traumatized as a child.”
And I tried to very hard, again, though that kind of compartments that I put things in. In this society, we’re very easily to connote things and to take things and blow them out of proportion in a way that’s not authentic to one’s own experience. So my authenticity to my own experience and in my childhood was definitely worked out on an emotional level, very much so through the leather community. But at the same time, the publicness of that is not necessarily something that I feel I need to have completely spelled out in the world.
Debbie Millman:
I completely understand. For years, I was in the closet and also would not disclose my own early childhood trauma with sexual abuse, primarily because I never wanted anybody to say that anything I did was because of that or that I was damaged in some way because of it, or that I would be judged because of my own inner homophobia in those decades. But I know that the kink community essentially saved the life of my wife, Roxane Gay. She’s very public about the fact that if it weren’t for the kink community, she wouldn’t be alive today.
Catherine Opie:
Yeah. No, and I feel very, very much the same without having to lay out all the details of my past, but what an amazing place to be able to work out so much.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you for feeling that you could trust me with this. That sense of community that both you talk about, that Roxane has experienced, that seems to be the most important aspect of being involved in the BDSM scene, and that it was also political. It was as political, as much as it was sexual, as much as it was community, and I read that you often talked philosophy in the dungeons.
Catherine Opie:
Well, Gayle Rubin is great to talk to. I mean, I remember at one point asking Gayle for coffee and just wanting to talk about the kind of amazing experiences of the transition of so many butch, dykes transitioning to male in the … And I wanted to have a real philosophical conversation with her in relationship to AIDS and the kind of work that she did in relationship to the gay male leather sex club south of Market.
And so when you have actual role models and brilliant people that were surrounded me at that time period and very sex positive people, there was really interesting, deep discourse in relationship to what we were doing and what we were holding, and also consensuality. And I mean, I wish everybody had that education in some ways.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, yes. Some of your early work for “On Our Backs” included photos of your sex toy and leather collection is a beautiful image of a woman standing while urinating. And in 1987, you created a self-portrait titled Cathy, which is a black and white image of yourself wearing a strap-on, dressed in a negligee, astride a bed. And at that time, you vowed you’d never be a voyeur within your own community. But I’m wondering, did you ever feel shy about sharing this part of yourself in such a public way?
Catherine Opie:
Not anymore.
Debbie Millman:
Did you at that point?
Catherine Opie:
Yeah, I think that I did. I think that I was still protecting my parents and my family. Yeah. I think that it takes a long time to figure out how you should be as a person and what is okay to be out in the world in relationship to also this kind of weird protective bubble one puts around their biological family.
And at a certain point, I just realized that my family is my chosen family. That even though I have a profound sense of love for my parents, that it was also not going to remain in the closet, and that was not a healthy position for me. And so I just decided to go for it. But I didn’t put that image out, actually, until the 2000s. I mean, that’s the thing is I went back into the archive.
And I also probably thought that some of the black and white work from girlfriends that I did, it was maybe too close to Mapplethorpe, and I needed to create my own identity within the leather community as a woman that was separate from Mapplethorpe, because we both also have similar aesthetics. We really like to highly aestheticize our material in a visual kind of classical way. And so that work in the 2000s was fine to pull out, where in the ’80s, when Robert didn’t pass away from AIDS until 1989, it was too close.
Debbie Millman:
Is that why you stayed away from using a square format?
Catherine Opie:
Well, I used a square format a lot in all that private work. I mean, it was all shot Hasselblad. Yeah, no. And the archive has that because it’s a camera that I really enjoyed using, including in the new Feiden book. You’ll see an image of me with my grandfather’s Rolleiflexes as self-portrait on one of the beginning pages where it was like 1983 or ’84, and I’m in New York City and it’s a self-portrait with my grandfather’s fedora with a big overcoat holding a twin reflex.
So that work existed, and it was going on, and I was making it. But when I decided to make work of my own community, I felt that I needed to create a different way of thinking about documentary. And so with being and having, which was the first studio photographs of mine with the women with fake mustaches, my friends with fake mustaches, and looking straight into the camera, using that yellow background consistently with a consistent framing, created a conceptual positioning to portraiture that I felt was a way to shift from necessarily a comparison to Mapplethorpe.
Debbie Millman:
That work being and having really shot you to fame. What made you decide to shoot them all on a golden yellow background?
Catherine Opie:
Well, it was in my living room in Silver Lake. I lived on Sanborn Ave. How I made all my early portraits was in my living room. I didn’t have a studio. Yellow is kind of a hard color in relationship to skin tone, but the other thing is in terms of diversity of skin tone of my friends in relationship to inclusion, yellow was the best to kind of make it pop.
And I would often have all my friends get their mustaches, and we would kind of make the portraits, since I was shooting with a 4×5 camera, and we’d make the portraits, and then we’d just hang out afterwards. So it was also in a small living room in Silver Lake. I didn’t have the ability to change over all different colors of seamless, nor was I thinking about seamless in that way at that point.
It wasn’t until I started making the portraits the year after, which began first as a collaboration with my good friend from CalArts, Richard Hawkins, who’s a fellow artist, where we started making portraits of our mutual friends at that point. And then he realized that it was my body of work, and he just said, “This is yours, go with it.” But he introduced me really thinking about Holbein and what nobility is.
Catherine Opie:
… really thinking about Holbein and what nobility is and what that is within our community. We had amazing extensive conversations about that. And Richard is a very brilliant person who I felt just helped lead a pathway for me in terms of continuing to photograph the community after I made “Being and Having.”
Debbie Millman:
I understand that the title of the show “Being and Having” was a play on psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s idea that men have the phallus, while women, as the embodiment of erotic desire and art, are the phallus. And when I was reading this, I’m like, was this dude serious?
Catherine Opie:
So this is serious. And I’ll have to tell you that the title came from the woman with her arms crossed over her chest peeing in on our backs. So she is an amazing philosopher from Toronto, Canada by the name of Anna Murray-Smith. And she was one of the head kind of political philosophers and teachers at Cornell, but she was my lover at the time, and met her in Canada at a bar, and she had been making postcards with a friend that were really awesome erotic postcards from this collective in Canada. And I’m sorry I don’t remember the collective’s name anymore, but I was in the bar going, “Hey, do you know who made these?” And then the woman I was talking to said, yeah, myself and my next door neighbor did.
And then it started a very long friendship and love affair with Anna Murray-Smith, including the portrait that’s on the bed, the self-portraits on our bed. When she came to visit me in California while I was in grad school, that was a student’s installation in their studio, and they let us have it as a little private palace, so to speak, during her visit.
Debbie Millman:
Wow. Wow.
Catherine Opie:
So it all gets wrapped together. That’s the beautiful thing about community, right? Is you meet people and you’re in this kind of… In the eighties, you’re going through so much as a community, especially in relationship to politics and AIDS and visibility and just all of these inner weavings are really also a part of my ability to think and begin to figure out how to make work.
Debbie Millman:
Catherine Opie in 2021.
Albert Watson is a fashion celebrity and art photographer who has been prominent since the 1970s. He took the most iconic photograph of Steve Jobs ever taken, the first monkey in space, death row convicts in Louisiana, and hundreds of artists, celebrities, royalty, and cultural leaders. I interviewed him in 2018.
As one of the most accomplished photographers alive today, it might surprise some to learn that you were born without vision in your right eye, which is also why you titled a book of your work, Cyclops. And that is also the name of your company.
Albert Watson:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
An article I read from about 10 years ago said that the vision in your left eye is actually 20/20, but you wear glasses to protect it from hazards because you’re down to just one.
Albert Watson:
One eye.
Debbie Millman:
But it looks like you’re wearing bifocals now. So I’m wondering-
Albert Watson:
No, I’m wearing bifocals because a lot of times when I’m working and if I’m in a dark room working with negatives, or even sometimes when I’m working on a computer screen and I have to go close, I use a bifocal. It’s just more comfortable for me, and I don’t use it that often. And when I’m on a plane, I don’t really need them if I have good light on a book, but the one eye, a lot of time people ask me about that, I say, oh my God, a photographer with one eye.
But if you think about it and you watch a lot of photographers working, if they’re working with Canons or Nikons, and a lot of different cameras.` When they look through the camera, they only use one eye. They’re not using two eyes to look through a Nikon or a Canon or a Hasselblad. Nowadays, of course, photographers are working off of a screen anyway. They might frame through a camera, but you’re checking it on a monitor next year, that can be quite big. So times have changed for that, but it never really bothered me. And if I don’t think about my vision, then it seems normal to me. If I concentrate on my vision, I’m very aware that I don’t have sight on the right side. I can feel that, but somehow it didn’t bother me.
Debbie Millman:
You talked about the revelation that you felt when you first took that first picture and that sense of wanting to do it over and over and over again.
Albert Watson:
Sure.
Debbie Millman:
I believe that came when your wife bought you a Fuji automatic fixed-lens camera for your 21st birthday, is that correct?
Albert Watson:
That is correct. And we didn’t have two pennies really to rub together, and she had saved up for that. I think that we had kind of a three-egg omelette between four people for a while, and so she bought this little camera. I think that was like, I think $30 or something like that. But I used it and it became really… I learned to use that, maximize what it was capable of. And of course it was great. It was great to have my own camera; otherwise, you were only getting a camera from the school every third weekend. So it was pretty limited.
Debbie Millman:
When it came to picking up the art of photography, you’ve said that you were old school and felt a responsibility to learn the technical side of the craft, which was painful for you. And your advice to young photographers today is get the technical thing out of the way and become so fluent in it that there is no stress, and you’ve likened it to mastering driving. It’s overwhelming at first, but with all the gauges and gears. But once you’ve learned it’s muscle memory and you can focus on your destination. So I have two questions. Why was it painful at first?
Albert Watson:
Because I’m not really a technical person. I’m not somebody that is really going to go to camera shops and go through all the latest equipment and test out the latest programs and the latest software and digital world and so on. And in fact, I actually got very good… To speak about something technical. I actually got very good with Photoshop because when I was doing Photoshop, I found myself operating Photoshop at about five miles an hour. And when I then began employing a really good technician who could go at 80 miles an hour, then I found the most efficient way for me was to truly understand Photoshop and what it was possible of, but to have those people working with me in-house. The thing that didn’t work for me that a lot of photographers still do is they send their work out to a digital house, and the digital house does some work on it, sends it back, he makes a correction, sends it back.
It just didn’t work for me at all. To me, it was very important to be on the equipment with these very good technicians. So I sit between two technicians, going from a left screen to a right screen. It’s highly productive. Now I’m totally aware because I see them 8, 9, 10 hours a day operating Photoshop right in front of me. So I’m seeing what’s possible of, and therefore working with them is a great way of me sort of through their ability to control the image because I’m primarily interested, which I always have been interested in, is printing. Obviously, in the first years of my life, I was interested in darkroom, so what you’d call silver gelatin printing. And so I was used to traditional darkroom, and it gave me a great advantage with that knowledge moving into digital. So I was able to apply a lot of the philosophy of printmaking right into the digital world and into Photoshop.
So Photoshop became very good. But going back to the camera and your original question regarding technical things, I didn’t enjoy it. Unfortunately, photography attracts a lot of especially guys who love cameras. They just love the equipment. They love changing lenses and getting all the latest equipment software. I mean, I have a dentist who has every Leica camera ever made. He’s obsessed by it. He loves it. He said he can’t wait to finish at 6:00 every night, and he goes home and he works on his photos for seven hours when he gets home.
Debbie Millman:
I kind of love that you have a dentist who’s also a photographer.
Albert Watson:
Also a photographer. He’s obsessed. And of course, when my mouth is full of cotton wool and he’s trying to ask me questions about photography, it’s not so easy to communicate with him. But really, he loves the equipment, and he doesn’t enjoy taking pictures. It’s not fair of me to say that he’s 100% technical and never takes a picture, but the technical side, he has a love of that. Whereas I find a lot of the technical things a little bit annoying. But some of it, as you said, pointed out earlier, you have to learn that you should have a knowledge of that, so that what’s going on.
Debbie Millman:
Given that you’ve been working through so many different phases of technical requirements or technical advancements, how long did it take you to feel like you’ve mastered each phase of the technical skills of your craft?
Albert Watson:
Well, I think it took at least, remember I had a lot of training first, but you get training at school, but then you hit reality. You’re no longer just trial and error. You have to be doing the real thing. You can’t fake it anymore. You can’t say, Oh, I’ll try it again tomorrow. I mean, you have to do it on the day and get it right. But I think in the beginning, and I’ve given this analogy quite a lot, I think in the beginning. I would do a shot on a Monday that I would say is equivalent to the Sistine Chapel. And then on Tuesday, I would look at the contact sheet and think that it wasn’t as good as I remembered it. And then on Wednesday, you throw it out.
The idea was, how do I manage to break this down to not let that happen? But I think it began to take 10, 12, 14 years before I became really fluent, I felt, and comfortable. So when I saw a vision of something, I had a creative idea that I had the skills to carry out that idea. But I’m always learning, even to this day, I’m always ready for a surprise, something that doesn’t work.
Debbie Millman:
Albert Watson, in 2018.
Pete Souza was the chief official White House photographer during the Obama years, but he took his first pictures in the White House many years earlier. I spoke with Pete in 2022.
You’ve said that your personal politics didn’t exactly mesh with President Reagan’s. Did that worry you when you first joined the White House team?
Pete Souza:
Well, when Carol first called me, I told her I wasn’t interested because I thought things were going so well. And I didn’t really think that highly of Reagan at the time, but I thought, we all hope that our pictures live in history. And I thought, what better way to provide images for history and it be inside at the White House, and what difference does it make, whether the president was a Democrat or a Republican? And so I sort of put those thoughts aside and went to work there. And actually, I admired President Reagan. He was a decent human being. He respected other people from all walks of life. And to me, the policy part of it was not that significant in terms of what I was doing, which was photographing for the historic archive.
Debbie Millman:
Did you have to develop a certain objectivity or was that something that didn’t really come up in the kind of work you were doing?
Pete Souza:
I mean, I think I approached it as a photojournalist would, which is you’re trying to photograph and make authentic pictures that are true to what has taken place. And I don’t know how, I guess because you didn’t like his policies, you maybe got a picture of him picking his nose. I mean, it’s sort of like I never understood what that means, objective or non-objective. I mean, you’re documenting what’s happening, and policies are-
Pete Souza:
You’re documenting what’s happening, and policies really don’t affect the way you make a picture, I don’t think.
Debbie Millman:
After your tenure with Reagan. You became one of the first photographers to cover the war in Afghanistan, which you did for the Chicago Tribune. And while there, you traversed the 15,000-foot Hindu Kush mountain pass on horseback in three-feet of snow. You also saw the dark realities of war, death, destruction, devastation. How did that impact you?
Pete Souza:
Well, I mean, the thing that was interesting about Afghanistan was that it was the first war really where pictures, because of the advance of digital technology, you could transmit them back to the US hours later after you made them with your satellite phone. And so there was an immediate reaction from the readership of the Chicago Tribune.
Yeah. I went with a correspondent named Paul Salopek. Paul and I had a couple close calls with rocket-propelled grenades and sniper bullets and things like that. By the way, we were there before there were any US troops on the ground. The US had started their air campaign already, and we were usually hooked up with the local Northern Alliance, the soldiers that were fighting against the Taliban. And a couple times, we were right there on the front line with them.
I never considered myself a war photographer. I sort of ended up right on the front line also by mistake, and I realized that I was not that good at it because it takes a certain kind of person to be able to keep their shit together while really bad things are happening around you. And I realized that, that probably was not for me.
Debbie Millman:
I can’t imagine how anybody could keep their together in that kind of condition.
Pete Souza:
Well, there are people that can.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. In 2004, you were shooting Washington DC for the Chicago Tribune, and you were asked to cover the then Senator Barack Obama’s first year in the Senate. What did you think about that assignment? Had you ever heard of the Senator at that point, or did you have a big impression of him?
Pete Souza:
He had made this big speech in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention. And at the time, I was with the nominee, John Kerry, traveling with him for The Tribune. And the day that Barack Obama made that speech, Kerry was not yet at the convention. I think we were in Nantucket as a matter of fact. So I didn’t see the speech, but I heard about it after.
And then when he was elected to the Senate and Jeff Zeleny, a reporter, said, “Hey, we should do this. Look at his first year in the Senate.” I sort of read up on him a little more, and The New Yorker had published a long profile about him, which I read. I hadn’t seen him on video and to see what he looked like or how he interacted with people, until the day I met him, which was in early January.
Debbie Millman:
When he was sworn in.
Pete Souza:
Yeah, it was a few hours before I met him at his hotel, before he had gone up to the Capitol, which was the first time that I had met him.
Debbie Millman:
What was your first impression of him?
Pete Souza:
The first day of your Senate career is a ceremonial day. You’re sworn in, you get your office, you have some receptions, you meet with this person, with that person. Very ceremonial. His family, who stayed in Chicago, came to DC that day, both Sasha and Malia and Michelle, and a couple of things struck me. One, he was very at ease, even though I was taking pictures throughout the day. I’ve got this picture of him in his office with Sasha, Malia, and he’s biting into a big sandwich, and he’s got this big wad of food in his mouth. And Sasha, Malia just doing their thing. It’s as if I’m not even there. I mean, it’s such an intimate picture, and I had only known him for three hours.
And as a photojournalist, you always hope to have a subject like that one who isn’t subtly startled by the presence of a camera. And he sort of just went about his business as I went about my business, which was I thought unusual in a new national politician.
Then, over the next few weeks, to see the way he interacted with people, not only the way he spoke when he was giving a speech and seeing how people reacted to the spoken word, but then seeing how he would interact with people directly and was very respectful to every person he met. You could see the excitement in the faces of some of the young people, especially the young African-American kids. All of that was very noticeable just in the matter of the first few weeks I spent with him.
Debbie Millman:
Did you have any idea back then of what he was capable of and how far he might ascend in politics?
Pete Souza:
Yeah. I mean, I think he came in with a lot of hype. And then you never know, as people ask me, who’s going to be Democratic nominee in 2020? And I say, you never know who is going to do well under the glare of the national spotlight, but certainly I could see that he would at least someday run for a bigger position than Senator. I didn’t know if that would be governor or president. I sort of tried to keep that in the back of my mind. Having been in the White House with Reagan and noting what the presidential bubble is like.
Debbie Millman:
What do you mean by presidential bubble?
Pete Souza:
Well, I mean, there’s this apparatus around you, Secret Service, everything is stage-managed in terms of for security reasons. You can’t just leave the White House and go for a walk and go to Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts or whatever. You can’t do that when you’re president. You can do that when you’re a senator, especially you’re a freshman senator.
So I was trying to make pictures in my mind that I thought if he ever became president, these would be cooler pictures in 20 years. They would be timeless. But as you look back on, you’d see … I mean, some of my favorite pictures of John Kennedy are ones when he was running for president and nobody really knew that much about him, and there’s nobody else around. He’s the only one out on the airport tarmac, things like that.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you see the person?
Pete Souza:
Yeah. So I was trying to keep that in the back of my mind. I’ve got this series of pictures of President Obama in Russia. We went to Russia with him and Senator Lugar from Indiana on a congressional delegation. And I’ve got these pictures of him in Red Square, President Obama, where he’s walking through the Red Square, and nobody is looking at him, nobody knows who he is. And I knew that those pictures, when you look at those now, they’re really kind of cool to look at because here’s this guy that became this president, a national figure. Everybody knows who he is now. And at the time, he’s running around Moscow and not a soul recognizes him.
Debbie Millman:
Pete Souza in 2022.
Mary Ellen Matthews is best known for hundreds of celebrity portraits she has taken for Saturday Night Live where she’s chief photographer. How does one become chief photographer for SNL? That’s what I wanted to find out when I interviewed her in 2023.
So you also had a job in music publicity at a record label, I believe it was called TVT.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
TVT. Yep.
Debbie Millman:
And so was that the job that you had after MTV?
Mary Ellen Matthews:
After MTV, I also at the same time interned for K-Rock, which was a rock and roll radio station that had Howard Stern 92.3 back in those days. And I was an intern there, so I did two at once. I was in the city, I might as well go there to there and get all this experience. Well, this is the story.
Debbie Millman:
Excellent.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
When those two things were done, I had a resume now, which wasn’t too bad, having those two things on it, and I just wanted to work at a record label at that time. And I had to print them out, printed them out, and I had them in a folder, and I put on this suit, like you went to Strawberry or something and got-
Debbie Millman:
Dressbarn?
Mary Ellen Matthews:
The Dressbarn.
Debbie Millman:
Ross?
Mary Ellen Matthews:
And I got the blazer and a long skirt, and I had the thing. I was walking around to every record label in Midtown, and I saw this big movie set. I’ve never seen one before in my life, and I kind of walked up to the guy. There was a guy who had these kind of headsets on and a microphone thing, and he was kind of in charge behind these ropes. And I said, “What are you doing?” I kind of asked him what he did. He said, “How do you do that?” He’s like, “You got to know someone. Keep moving.” Did not want to have any conversation with me.
And then I hear, “Excuse me, miss, miss.” And it was Bill Murray in the middle of the cordoned off area, and he said, “Can you help me, or can you take a picture of me and my friends?” He had a little camera, and I said, “Well, sure.” Took a picture. And I said, “Can I have your autograph?” And I had my resume, and he was like, “Are you looking for a job?” I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “Do you want to work for me?” I was like, “Sure.” And he kind of put that into motion, took me aside, put me in somebody’s hands to say, “Start her tomorrow as a PA.” So that was a big whirlwind.
And then I was walking to a payphone to call my mom to tell her, as you do back then, you’d call on the payphone. And I’m telling her, and then Robert Plant and his band, I think, were The Honeydrippers at that time, were walking by looking super rock and roll. And this was on 42nd Street by the Grand Central.
Debbie Millman:
Grand Central?
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Grand Central, yeah. So they were walking to a souvenir shop, and I saw them walk in. I was like, “Got to go, click.” And I walked in and I asked him for his autograph, and he said, “You’re looking for a job?” And I said, “Yep.” And then he is like, “Well, go to Atlantic Records, talk to so-and-so, tell them I sent you.” So that didn’t pan out, but working on a movie that was called Quick Change did. And that’s how I became friends with Bill Murray, and it had nothing to do with SNL.
Debbie Millman:
Right. I mean, that’s the part that I think is so serendipitous that you ended up … I mean, he had to have come back as a guest host-
Mary Ellen Matthews:
He did.
Debbie Millman:
… in the time after, while you were working at Saturday Night Live.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Yeah, he did. He did.
Debbie Millman:
And what did he think of this sort of way in which your lives sort of intersected?
Mary Ellen Matthews:
I think I might have told him, left him a message, or something. I had a way to contact his people or something and just said, “Just so you know.” So it was pretty funny when he saw me there, but I think he knew a little bit, but yeah.
Debbie Millman:
After the movie with Bill Murray, I read that you then moved on to the camera department on other productions. What other movies did you work on back in those days?
Mary Ellen Matthews:
I worked on a TV show, I think it was called Emergency 9-1-1, and it was on NBC, and I was in the camera department. And they used to call me the camera tomato, which I thought was hilarious, but then probably wouldn’t go very far these days. And I was a film loader and I worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and then I think that was it. There might’ve been another one. And then I fell into TVT somehow. I don’t remember from there to there, but I think I just went back to going to the record company.
Debbie Millman:
What did you imagine? I mean, this was such sort of heady times, those late ’80s into the early ’90s in New York City, and the whole notion of the way music was evolving.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
It was so exciting.
Debbie Millman:
What did you envision your life was going to be like as an artist?
Mary Ellen Matthews:
I knew that I wanted to be a photographer, and I thought being at a record label could get me closer to the bands.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
… be a photographer, and I thought being at a record label could get me closer to the bands. Of course, everybody wanted to shoot the bands, and be at the show, and do the hang, and just get that creative push from all these amazing musical artists. So, I thought that was a good entree, and that’s what happened, is I got into TBT, and I was working… They had a thing called the Sullivan Years, and they bought the rights to the Ed Sullivan Show. So, me and another guy had to go through all of the audio and put them in categories, which was sort of fascinating-
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
… but very stationary. And then I would go out at night and shoot all the bands because you’d get all these invitations to do so. And being an independent label, there were so many bands you would get to see. So, that’s what I did, and then I had to leave because I wasn’t really doing my job, so…
Debbie Millman:
You were more interested in doing what you loved. Were you ever worried or afraid that you couldn’t make a living as a photographer?
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Sure.
Debbie Millman:
Those aren’t sort of slam-dunk careers.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Sure. And doing fashion and doing those big shoots seems so, so far away, at the top of the mountain, for sure, and you just wonder, how am I going to get there? How am I going to figure this out? And doing what I was doing at the label and working in music, got me very far into that world. But yeah, I had a job, thank God, at the time, but yeah. So, I left, and the reason I left was… I became a publicist, and we had Nine Inch Nails, and that was all very exciting, so that was a whole other part of it all. But the reason I left was because I think I was asked to leave, number one, and again, I went to, walked across the street, there was a payphone, and I went to check my answer machine, that’s what… Right? Do you remember doing that? Like, beep, beep, beep, beep-
Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. My dad was appalled that I had an answering machine. I got an answering machine in my first apartment, in 1983, and he couldn’t believe that he had raised a child that was so narcissistic that she needed to know who called her when she wasn’t home. He was like, “Can’t they just call you back?”
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Right, right, right, right.
Debbie Millman:
Dad, just get with the times.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Right. He’s not wrong, though, in a way.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Right. Yeah. So, then that happened, then you’d be like, okay, I got to check my answering machine, I got to check my answering machine. So, I checked my answering machine, and a friend of this other publicist, Jennifer Gross, who’s amazing, left me a message, saying, “I know you’re into photography, I’m leaving this job with Edie Baskin at Saturday Night Live, do you want to interview with her?” That was the same day, I walked across the street, I was like, bye, and then I changed… I did, so that was serendipitous also. So, I interviewed for the job, and then I ended up working for Edie Baskin.
Debbie Millman:
What was that like?
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Amazing. She was so wonderful to me, as a mentor, as to get to know what the show was, and what this job was, to be the photographer there, obviously, she’d set the tone with all her photographs and images.
Debbie Millman:
You joined Saturday Night Live as Edie Baskin’s assistant in 1993. Now, Edie was the photographer who created the bumper images that are seen before and after the show’s commercial breaks, that feature the episode’s host and also introduce the musical guest. Now, why is it called a bumper?
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Yes. Because it bumps into commercial, or it bumps into the show. There’s a reason for it, each local market, because it’s live television, has to have a place where it all meets to go back to the show.
Debbie Millman:
Interesting.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
And some linger longer, like in Kansas City, it may hang there for a minute, but sometimes in New York it goes boop, and it’s out. So, it just depends how it goes.
Debbie Millman:
Now, Edie initiated using her photography as a graphic element in the show; she used unusual techniques to bring the photos to life, that included hand coloring the photographs. Talk about what it was like to work with Edie at that time, at this moment when Saturday Night Live was also really in its heyday.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Yeah, in the 90s-
Debbie Millman:
Or second, sort of Saturday Night Live 2.0 after the original troop.
Mary Ellen Matthews:
Yep. And then the time it went through in the 80s when Lorne left for a little bit, and then he came back, and things started to change as far as the techniques that were becoming available. So, she was very experimental with that, Polaroid transfers, and all kinds of things. So, to be in the studio at that time when the cast was such a… They’re all heyday. But it was the Adam Sandler, and Phil Hartman, and just to know that time was amazing, when I first started. And see her work with the host, and the cast, and Lorne, and there’s no better way to get to know the show and what it means to everyone.
Debbie Millman:
Mary Ellen Matthews in 2023.
The last excerpt I want to play for you is one from my interview with Lynn Goldsmith, who took many, many iconic photos of the music scene in the 1980s. The excerpt is brief because the audio quality isn’t great, but I really wanted you to hear this amazing story. I spoke with Lynn via Zoom in 2023. On February 9th, 1964, the Beatles made their first live U.S. television appearance, and more than 70 million people watched these four young men from Liverpool make history on the Ed Sullivan Show. Lynn, you are the only person I’ve ever encountered who saw the Beatles perform live on that show that night. Can you talk a little bit about what that experience was like?
Lynn Goldsmith:
Yes. My stepfather, my mother remarried when I was about 14, so this is after 10 years of my mom being a single working mother and living in a household of three women in Detroit, when suddenly I’m told we’re moving to Miami Beach, and now I have this father. I wasn’t really receptive to that, I didn’t want to move, I was looking forward to starting at Mumford High School, so I really didn’t care for George, who was my new stepfather, and to move to this place, which was so different from where I had grown up. The world that I grew up in was racially diversified, Miami Beach was not, and it all looked so different to me, and now we were wealthy. My stepfather owned hotels in Miami Beach. And because he wanted me to love him, and to realize that he wanted to be a dad, he decided to get the opportunity for me to be in the lobby when the Beatles arrived at the Deauville Hotel before the show.
I also had tickets for the show, with him. I didn’t want to go, my mother said that… I said, “George has no idea who I am, I’m a rhythm and blues girl, I’m Detroit, I’m Motor City, I have no interest in these wimps, the Beatles.” My mother said, “Well, Lynn, if I have to choose between George and you, I’m choosing George, so you better get your act together and go with George.” And so, we went, and I had my camera because I had already had a tour of hotels and was just floored by what they looked like. When you come from Detroit, you go into the Fontainebleau or the Deauville, or any of the Eden Roc, it was like some magical world of color and light, and I’d never seen anything like that.
So, I went with my stepdad and my camera, and I was very happy photographing the carpets of the Deauville Hotel, that had these amazing designs, when the Beatles came through the door, I wasn’t as tall as the men that were there, it was all men photographers, and my stepfather kind of pushed me forward, and I took a picture of their feet on the carpet. But I didn’t want to really look at them; I somehow felt it would be a betrayal to the Rolling Stones. You chose.
Debbie Millman:
Right, back then, you had to choose.
Lynn Goldsmith:
Yeah, you chose. You were either a Stones fan or a Beatles fan. What I remember was John Lennon grabbing my arm, my forearm, and saying, “Don’t you want our faces?” And I just thought I had the cooties, like he touched me, ugh. And I just said, “No,” and I pulled my arm away. And it was seen by someone from the local newspaper who asked if they could process my film, and they ran a little story, and that was really my first published photograph.
Debbie Millman:
Lynn Goldsmith in 2023.
You can hear the full interviews and hundreds of other interviews with a wide range of designers, artists, musicians, writers, performers, and scientists on our website, Designmattersmedia.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll be back next week with another special episode [inaudible 00:49:05] from the many years I’ve been doing Design Matters. I hope you’re enjoying these special episodes because I’m really enjoying making them. Yes, this is the 20th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective, by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor in chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.