Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was infamous for his lack of patience with photoshoots, and another 40th anniversary of the Mac piece includes a story of how Apple hired a photographer for a week, flew him to Sweden, hired a helicopter – but he still didn’t get the photo because Steve changed his mind …
The Macworld piece starts with a shot photographer Will Mosgrove did manage to get: a photo of Steve with the original Macintosh, for the cover of the magazine.
He said that one wasn’t easy, but Steve at least gave them enough time to take it.
We did a couple of quick Polaroids and make sure everything was looking good, lighting-wise. Shot about five minutes or so, and he said, are we done? And I said, we can be, I’d like to try a couple of different things. And he said, well, I’d like to try something, too.
So, he started making this really kind of interesting, zany kind of symbols with his hands, and I kind of looked over to the people from Macworld and they were just kind of shaking their heads–don’t worry, we’re not going to use those. [Laughs.] We played along with it and shot some film, and it was literally over in probably 15 to 20 minutes.
But the funnier story is when Apple commissioned him to take a promo photo of Steve, went to a huge amount of trouble to set it up – but when they were actually in the helicopter, Steve decided he didn’t want any photos.
There was a university consortium going on, and at the end of this–it was in Lund, Sweden–Steve was going to fly in from Stockholm, and they wanted a photograph of him coming into this castle location, showing the landscape in the background, looking down at the castle, saying he’s going to this consortium of Macintosh users to kind of give him a look like a world leader. Here he is in a European country coming down to talk to university people […]
They said, okay, Steve’s flying in from Stockholm. Let’s go to the airport so you get a helicopter there. We’d like him to be looking out the window. If you can get the castle in the background, the beautiful landscape. I said, sure, let’s go […]
So, we take off, we get about an eight-minute ride to this, this dinner at the castle to close off the consortium.
And as I’m getting my camera out and ready to go, he said, you know, I don’t think I want any pictures. And I said, well, okay, you know, they flew me from California to Sweden to get this shot and you know, I’m here and I’m ready to do it. Can we just think about this?
He kind of grunted and I was looking through the camera again doing this. He goes, I don’t think I really want any photographs.
I said, well how about if we take some photographs and you take a look at them? If you don’t want to use them that’s fine with me, but you know, Tom Hughes (who was the artistic director) said can you get this shot, and I said, yeah, and I need to come back with something. And he goes, I don’t want any photographs.
There’s about 30 seconds of awkward silence. And, you know, I kind of was playing, I start picking up one more time. He goes, no fucking photos. So I went, okay, put the camera away. And his aide was kind of saying, you know, don’t, that’s it. We’re done.
Fortunately, Hughes heard about it, and laughed it off.
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