I took Steve Jobs’ favourite ever portrait – it was all about the preparation

When Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc walked into the studio in 2006, photographer Albert Watson knew immediately what the problem was.‘ He looked around, and I knew straight away what he was thinking: you’re not ready,’ Watson recalls.

Jobs was known for his hypersensitivity to detail and impatience with imprecision. Watson understood that before a word was said. ‘With somebody like that, you have to be completely buttoned up,’ he says. Watson had done his research. There was no elaborate lighting or theatricals. Watson waited for his moments and offered a single instruction. ‘I said to him, ‘Imagine you’re sitting across a boardroom table and everybody on the other side is disagreeing with you but you know you’re right.’ Then click!

The resulting portrait shot on film is stark, frontal, almost confrontational in its simplicity. It has become one of the most recognisable images of Jobs ever made. It was used on the cover of Jobs’ biography and Apple’s tribute, with Jobs later calling it his favourite photo. It looks effortless but was all in the preparation.

Watson is talking to me via WhatsApp from his New York studio. Thanksgiving has just passed. His son and daughter-in-law cooked a beautiful meal. After more than five decades behind the camera, Watson insists that preparation over spontaneity, is the foundation of his legacy. Whether photographing cultural icons or anonymous subjects, he believes authority is established before the shutter is released. ‘You don’t just say, Oh yeah, he’s the head of Apple, I’ll take the picture tomorrow. You have to know who you’re dealing with. That knowledge becomes part of the communication.’

It’s not just about psychology. It’s technical, spatial and physical. Watson is famously precise about lighting, but rejects rigid setups. He explains, ‘I need a few minutes to adjust because I don’t really know how a person is going to react to the light.’ He’s scathing about being formulaic. ‘I walk past rental studios and see the same big umbrella in the same position for three days. The light never moves. Faces are landscapes, noses are mountains, lips have depth. You have to respond to that.’

The challenge, he says, is to do this while maintaining a human connection. ‘You can’t just say, ‘Stand there, don’t move, don’t talk.’ You have to talk to the person and analyse what the light is doing at the same time.’ An analogy he often returns to in interviews is like driving a car. ‘At first it’s impossible. Then it becomes automatic. Eventually, you’re driving, watching traffic, having a conversation all at once. Photography should get to that point.’

Thinking in rectangles

If there’s a single thread running through Watson’s vast and eclectic body of work, from fashion and portraiture to still life, reportage and landscape, it is graphic thinking. ‘I was trained as a graphic designer before anything else. Everything about photography is what you put in the rectangle. Every photographer is dealing with a rectangle,’ he says with a soft Scottish lilt.

That training explains the coherence behind what might otherwise appear chaotic. His book KAOS was first released in 2017. The new edition is smaller, unsigned and more affordably priced. It jumps between subjects with little warning: Elvis Presley’s Gold Lamé Suit, a monkey with a gun, a NASA spacesuit, a Scottish landscape, a Benin beach. The connection is visual, not thematic. ‘I like the mix. You never know what’s on the next page,’ he says.

Watson traces his approach back to the photography auction catalogues he collected decades ago. ‘You’d see Victorian photographs, then Walker Evans, then Avedon. That unpredictability kept you looking.’ Watson was sequencing images this way long before social media. ‘Now people scroll from India to China to Birmingham to Los Angeles in seconds. It makes sense to me.’

Memorability

Watson recalls that he was only a couple of years into his career when he was commissioned to photograph film director Alfred Hitchcock. The resulting portrait of Hitchcock holding a plucked goose was surprisingly strong, hinting at the graphic clarity and memorability that would come to define his later work along with the image of Mick Jagger as a Leopard, a naked Kate Moss and Mike Tyson’s neck.

When I mention the word ‘iconic’ I sense Watson bristles a little but he’s clear about what matters. ‘What you’re really looking for, is a secret formula of memorability,’ he says and offers a simple test. ‘If I say Mike Tyson, you can sketch the picture from memory. That’s what you’re aiming for.’ Memorability, he insists, is sometimes about restraint, not the same as complexity or perfection which the Jobs portrait illustrates: ‘Very simple. Well lit. But it has a certain air to it.’

That quality in KAOS may be difficult to define but is impossible to fake. Not all of Watson’s images have endured and admits that some of his most commercially successful fashion work didn’t survive the transition to the book page. ‘It worked brilliantly for magazines but when I went to make books, it just wasn’t heavy enough.’

Thinking big

Watson thinks of photographs beyond being reproduced on a printed page. He is always aware of scale. ‘When I photographed Elvis’s possessions at Graceland, I wanted them shot very straight, almost like passport photographs but of such high quality that they could be printed incredibly large,’ he explains.

That mindset has been constant whether photographing Tutankhamun’s golden glove in Cairo or landscapes on the Isle of Skye, Watson often has the final presentation already in mind. ‘Shooting for eight-foot prints is a different discipline. You’re thinking about detail, texture, how the eye moves across the surface.’ This concern with scale isn’t about spectacle for its own sake. It’s about presence. ‘Some pictures can take it. Others fall apart. You find out very quickly which ones were really resolved,’ he says.

For Watson, books, exhibitions and commissions are not separate worlds but interconnected ones. Images that survive the jump from magazine page to gallery wall earn their longevity. He explains, ’You can’t only think about where the picture appears tomorrow. You have to think about whether it will still hold your attention in ten years.’

Regret, luck and missed pictures

Watson may have a reputation for control but is candid about chance and about occasional missed opportunities. One image in KAOS still surprises him. It shows a young couple kissing in a car, caught almost accidentally as Watson was photographing nearby. ‘I just swung the camera sideways and took the picture. When I look at it now, I wish I’d expanded that. I don’t do that kind of picture enough,’ he says with a sigh, adding, ‘You have to work that muscle. Seeing quickly, pushing in that direction, it takes time. Even now.’ Unsurprisingly, after decades of experience, Watson says he sees possibilities faster than ever. That doesn’t mean they’re easy to realise. ‘People think you go out for three days and make ten great pictures. No chance. It takes much longer than that.’

Tools

Watson has witnessed major technological shifts in photography, from darkrooms to digital workflows to the current debates around artificial intelligence. His position is pragmatic rather than doctrinaire. ‘The computer is the best thing that’s happened to photographers since photography,’ he says with conviction. Having spent decades printing his own work, he embraced digital post-production early, bringing everything in-house, opening up many doors. Film still matters to him, aesthetically and emotionally, but he rejects nostalgia. ‘Young photographers sometimes think film will automatically make the picture better. It won’t.’

Watson is cautious but curious about AI. He’s uninterested in images generated wholesale by machines, but intrigued by accidents, by unexpected visual errors that can be repurposed by an artist’s eye. ‘It’s how you use it. That’s always been the job. To recognise something interesting and decide what to do with it,’ he says.

With the scale of Watson’s archive, it would be easy to slip into sentimentality but he remains cutthroat, insisting editing is where photographers reveal their seriousness. ‘You have to be brutal. Just because something was difficult to make doesn’t mean it deserves to live,’ he says. That philosophy translates into KAOS, the book resists chronology in favour of instinct. ‘I don’t want people to feel comfortable flipping through. I want them to stop, then reset, then look again,’ is Watson’s goal.

Thinking in pictures

Now in his eighties, does Watson plan to slow things down? No chance. Preparation, he says, still consumes most of his time. New projects are always forming: abstractions that aren’t abstract, large-scale prints, possible museum commissions in Italy. He says simply, ‘I am a worker.’ That’s probably the Scottish Presbyterian background.

His father once described fashion photography as “funny work for a man” but the work ethic stuck and laughs at the memory. ‘I’ve been thinking photographs every day for over half a century,’ he says. Asked what keeps him going, Watson doesn’t mention legacy or reputation. He returns instead to discipline – like going to the gym: ‘You don’t stop because you’ve been before.’ That’s the real lesson behind the images in KAOS we think we know so well. The memorability, the authority, the apparent ease, all of it rests on the same foundation. Being prepared.

Albert Watson. Kaos is published by TASCHEN. £125. Hardcover in slipcase, 27.8 x 37.4 cm, 5.51 kg, 408 pages.