The Talks

Bryan Adams: “It’s like mining for diamonds”
Mr. Adams, is rock music dead?
I said that once as a joke, but these days rock music is as big as ever in concert, so in some ways it is doing just fine. It doesn’t get played on the radio like it used to, and the youngsters don’t have the kinds of guitar heroes I had growing up, so as result kids aren’t going for guitars like they used to. Computers changed rock. To be a musician nowadays, you don’t need to play an instrument like you used to, and the same goes for singers. Everything is either already in the computer, or the signal gets processed through a computer. We’ve changed how we make everything.
How about your love of or hope for rock — has that changed too?
I love making music, that’s never changed. My former manager called me one day to ask me what I was doing and I said I was writing songs, to which he replied, “Why bother? No one cares about new music.” I don’t believe that! I don’t despair over the future of rock, because like I said, in some ways it’s better than ever and the gigs are so great. Kids find the songs through the Internet, whereas I remember driving around with my mother listening to AM radio and The Beatles. Of course that opened the door to pretty much all of the seventies rock artists, some I was lucky to see live like Led Zeppelin and T.Rex, and others I got to tour with, like Bowie and Tina Turner...

Pelle Cass: “I never fabricate”
Mr. Cass, your unique style of time-lapse photography results in exciting, lively, and busy tableaus. Is the photo-taking process equally as exciting?
No, in general, my photo-taking process is very boring. I'm just standing there. Even my recent New York Magazine shoot was boring in its own way, because I was standing up on the roof of a building, above everybody with just a couple people helping me! The most interesting thing I do in a day is really what I get out through photoshopping, when I take all the images I’ve shot and superimpose them to create one photo. When it starts to come together as something, that’s when it gets interesting. My photos honestly look like garbage at first — like most projects when you start them, they aren't anything. It's terrible. And then all of a sudden, it starts to gel. And that's always the most important and interesting part of my day.
That particular shoot was certainly more structured than the street photography you’re known for, where you photograph everyday people walking across the frame and then photoshop them together to make one photo.
Oh, yes. I've come to think of what happens out in front of the camera as a kind of drawing, things are moving in the space and I'm recording these shapes that people are making. Lately I've also been doing shoots with objects or balls that I toss, and it really feels like I'm letting the objects draw in space! In the case of the New York Magazine cover, we had 72 famous people coming in to do the shoot, so there was a lot of scheduling, but that was handled by the magazine’s team. They also choreographed a few paths that they could walk. It was interesting to have that grid set out because if it had been up to me, I would have just let people wander around.

Małgorzata Szumowska: “It’s so unpredictable”

Jennifer Lame: “I loved the puzzle of the process”

Bronwyn Katz: “How I can extend the object’s life?”

Lyn Paolo: “I love creating those worlds”

Simon de Pury: “Curiosity is my engine”

Mads Mikkelsen: “That’s how we defined it”

Ayesha Harruna Attah: “I’m in constant conversation”

Stephen Frears: “Failure is where you learn”
