FRANK W. OCKENFELS 3
J—I like the wall full of just portraits.
F—The portrait wall is kind of funny. I probably should have put a little bit of a disclaimer or something on it. They’re all shot with the exact same camera, which is the Super D Graflex. They’re all 4 x 5 portraits, type 55 Polaroid negative or 4 x 5 colour film on the same camera and it’s my obsession with the face, which was always there. If I had to or not, when I photographed the person, the first thing I did was photograph the face.
J—Kind of like a warm up.
F—…and a lot of the time I’m like, “Why are we doing this? What’s the point
of it?”
J—That’s the first thing you do, when you show up on set?
F—Yeah, usually.
J—That’s cool.
F—I mean, I think portrait photography is kind of lost. I don’t think there are anymore portrait photographers. It’s kind of weird to say that. You know, Irving Penn was the last of our portrait photographers. He truly said to someone, “You’re coming for a sitting,” and the sitting could be, you know, 6 hours. Nowadays you do someone’s portrait and you have 10 minutes and it’s on their terms and sometimes you can corral them to do a little more. So I guess, to shoot someone’s face where there’s no props, it’s not about the background, it’s just about the person, looking into their eyes, is such a need of mine to have that with each person I photograph.
J—What’s more interesting than a face? Well, I think it’s time to get into some of the good stuff. Where did you grow up?
F—I grew up in Lockport, New York, which is a suburb of Niagara Falls, right on the Canadian border.
J—What was your first real big gig?
F—First real big gig was for Rolling Stone magazine.
J—How did that happen?
F—I had gone to school with Jodi Peckman, who was one of the photo editors of Rolling Stone. She hired me to shoot Buster Poindexter on New Years’ Eve, a quarter page picture. But the bigger part of it was, after I did this, they hired me to do a quarter page picture of Tracy Chapman.
J—Amazing! Love her dearly. Where did you do that?
F—In Boston. It was a quarter page image for her album, her first album had just come out and no one had any idea who she was and by the time I got back with the pictures, she blew up…
J—Lucky for you.
F—Yeah. All of a sudden it went from a quarter page to being a full page. And that was totally the catalyst, of the, “Who is this guy? He’s got a full page in Rolling Stone.” “No one knows who Frank Ockenfels is and does he have an agent?” All of a sudden I had people calling me, “Who handles your resale?” then I had people saying, “Do you have representation?” and it just kind of took off. And that’s when I met Carol, my agent.
J—Wow. You guys have been together for a long time.
F— Yeah. It’s a rare thing in this industry.
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