He might be best known for that black-and-white portrait of Steve Jobs. It appeared on the cover of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, and is exceptional because the photograph was taken in a mere 20 minutes—to the tech mogul’s delight—and captures the man’s enigma in a simple, straight-on stare.
The Scottish photographer Albert Watson has been making portraits for 50 years, and these images—whether of Andy Warhol or Kate Moss or Jobs—reflect the enduring zeal of their maker. “From the first minute I picked up the camera,” Watson writes in the introduction to an eponymous new book of his photographs, “I’ve had that passion [for photography] and, while I was shooting last week, I still had that passion.”
In Albert Watson, his most famous shots are accompanied by tips for aspiring photographers (“Capture the geography of the face,” “Capture the face of the landscape”) and anecdotes—including one particularly charming one about Alfred Hitchcock and a cooked goose. If all of this doesn’t get you jazzed about picking up your camera, nothing will. —Julia Vitale