Recently a friend sent me an invite to a photography exhibit (Career Retrospective) in the Woodstock Sim by RL photographer Kim Gottlieb-Walker.. As soon as things began to rezz I realized I recognized some of the pictures I was seeing on the walls. kim was present for the openining and I asked her if she would like to do this interview.. she graciously agreed . I then toured her permanent exhibit at her gallery in Push XI http://slurl.com/secondlife/Plush%20Xi/212/29/23.
I finally caught up with her at the park on the roof of her gallery. (Which incidentally is a a great place for dates...very romantic animations).
Delinda Dyrssen: Second Life. What brought you here?
KimLenswomanPhotographer Writer: My husband, who is a marketing genius (named one of the 50 smartest people in Hollywood by Entertainment Weekly) told me about SL...and since reggae, for example, is generally more popular around the world than in the USA, I decided to see if I could display and market some of my reggae photos here. So I did a search in world under reggae and found Destroy, Inc...a reggae headshop, custom dreadlocks store...and went there to find out if the owners might like to offer a few of my photos for sale and at first they were wary, wanted to know about copyright issues, etc...which I was very pleased about...and I directed them to my website and emailed them from my website to verify my identity and my ownership of the photos I'd taken and I said, so will you display a few? They said no...we will build you a GALLERY! So my first gallery here was built by Tom Eagle and Wullie Craig at Destroy Inc. After several months, I decided to buy the land adjacent to their store and build a gallery big enough to display much more of my work.
KimLenswomanPhotographer Writer: My husband, who is a marketing genius (named one of the 50 smartest people in Hollywood by Entertainment Weekly) told me about SL...and since reggae, for example, is generally more popular around the world than in the USA, I decided to see if I could display and market some of my reggae photos here. So I did a search in world under reggae and found Destroy, Inc...a reggae headshop, custom dreadlocks store...and went there to find out if the owners might like to offer a few of my photos for sale and at first they were wary, wanted to know about copyright issues, etc...which I was very pleased about...and I directed them to my website and emailed them from my website to verify my identity and my ownership of the photos I'd taken and I said, so will you display a few? They said no...we will build you a GALLERY! So my first gallery here was built by Tom Eagle and Wullie Craig at Destroy Inc. After several months, I decided to buy the land adjacent to their store and build a gallery big enough to display much more of my work.
DD: I see this tree we are sitting in was created by you. You've caught the SL building bug? KW: LOL...actually, I only built the trunk...I purchased the climbing branches. But I do all my own "framing" LOL. I may learn to do more...I'd love to have a "hippie" shop with clothes more appropriate to the late 60s and early 70s available here.
DD: That would be awesome .. especially since a good portion of the demographic in SL would remember the late 60's and 70's. Lets talk about the woman behind the avatar. Your currently showing you career retrospective exhibit in Woodstock Sim. Your professional career started in the 60's and is still going strong. How did you get into photography in the first place?
KW: When I left to go to Berkeley for my freshman year of college, my mother gave me her little fixed lens camera to take along. That was the year of the Free Speech Movement...and I photographed Joan Baez singing to a crowd of striking students. I was a psychology major at first...but rat psychology wasn't really my calling and I took the only film class offered there at that time and loved it so I decided to transfer to UCLA to try their motion picture major and ended up graduating there and being a teaching assistant in the film department. While there, I started shooting 35 mm film with an old Pentax and working on the light show for a traveling rock club (the head of the lightshow was one of my teachers from UCLA) and "The Doors" performed there regularly. I began to shoot for the Free Press and other "underground" papers...concerts, interviews including the interview with Jimi Hendrix out by the pool at a motel on the Sunset Strip. Those portraits were done when I was 20.
DD: You did a lot of work in Jamaica photographing reggae artists. As a matter of fact I read somewhere on the Internet that many of the most famous reggae album covers where from photographs you took. Can you tell me about that?
DD: You did a lot of work in Jamaica photographing reggae artists. As a matter of fact I read somewhere on the Internet that many of the most famous reggae album covers where from photographs you took. Can you tell me about that?
KW: I met my husband over the formation of Music World Magazine...a free publication which lasted a year and featured people no one had heard of on the cover, like Tom Waits and Rick Wakeman and Jesse Colin Young...and when it folded, my husband went to work first for United Artists Records and then as the head of publicity for Island Records in the U.S. so I went to Jamaica to photograph many of the musicians who had never been off the Island. I photographed Bob Marley for People Magazine as well. My favorite of the Wailers was Peter Tosh...such a sweet man. I was relieved when Bunny Wailer allowed me to photograph him, because I had heard a story that once a photographer had asked to photograph him and he said "I don't let Dead Men take my Pictcha" and the man died a few weeks later. So I figured I would be around for awhile. When Bob Marley was in Los Angeles, I shot the cover of High Times magazine that became one of their most popular , ever. One of my favorite photos is from during that session, where Bob is laughing with my 2 1/2 year old son, Orion, who thought of himself as a Rasta. Orion had learned to read before he turned 3 so he could read the liner notes on Reggae albums! 20 some years later, I shot the production stills for Orion's feature film (that he wrote and directed) "Dean Quixote" It's a wonderful film...but has no distributor. sort of a cross between Woody Allen and David Lynch
DD: It sounds like some of your talent was passed on to your son! While touring your gallery I ran across a room about The Cinematographers Guild . What is your involvement with them?
KW: I joined the International Cinematographers Guild in 1980...having gotten my days on John Carpenters film Escape from NY...I now am the elected representative of the 300 professional still photographers who work on movies and TV in the USA.
DD: Yes you did a lot of work in Television and Film in the US.. Tell me about how you got into shooting TV/Movie stills and the Guild?
KW: My next door neighbor, briefly, was Robert Mitchum's daughter, who was a still photographer for movies...and she had been asked to shoot a little low budget musical/comedy, but she was not going to be available...so she asked the producer/director to look at my portfolio...and he hired me to do the film. It was an awful movie...starring Lane Caudell, Wolfman Jack and Deborah Raffin...I don't think it was ever released...but the script supervisor on it was Debra Hill...who went on to produce and co-write Halloween with John Carpenter...and THAT was really my first feature film. After a few films together, when they knew Escape from NY would be a union film, they signed a contract with me to do it, so the union had to honor the contract and I got my 30 days required to join.
DD: Fascinating how a film that was never released can still lead to such a great career. I'm about out of time so one final question. What do you love about SL?
KK: First of all, I LOVE having an avatar that looks like me 35 years and 20 pounds ago...LOL. SL is also a wonderful way to display my photos from throughout my career to people of all ages from all over the world. I literally have 100s of photos on display in my gallery...with some permanent and some changing exhibits. Like the photos from Comic-Con I shoot each year in San Diego, CA. It will be a good forum during the upcoming presidential election in The US...gotta get all the US citizens to register to vote! We need some MAJOR changes and if we get an honest vote count, it will happen this year.
I could talk to Kim for hours about her experiences in photography but I couldnt put it all here.If you would like to know more about Kim you can go to http://www.lenswoman.com/
By Delinda Dyrssen
