Magnetic is the word that comes to mind upon first introduction to San Francisco photographer Jock McDonald. It’s easy to understand why he still receives letters from some of the villagers who sheltered him on his travels for Rurals, a series of portraits of people who live far from the maddening crowds of modern life. With his shock of gray-tinged hair, and silver earrings McDonald is a bit like Johnny Depp in a swashbuckling role. His enthusiasm and energy are contagious; he engages his photographic subjects in a magical way and it shows in the honest and open portraits he achieves for a stellar list of clients from Absolut Vodka and Apple to Xerox Corporation and Yahoo, with a lot of Fortune 500 companies in between.
Magnetic is the word that comes to mind upon first introduction to San Francisco photographer Jock McDonald. It’s easy to understand why he still receives letters from some of the villagers who sheltered him on his travels for Rurals, a series of portraits of people who live far from the maddening crowds of modern life. With his shock of gray-tinged hair, and silver earrings McDonald is a bit like Johnny Depp in a swashbuckling role. His enthusiasm and energy are contagious; he engages his photographic subjects in a magical way and it shows in the honest and open portraits he achieves for a stellar list of clients from Absolut Vodka and Apple to Xerox Corporation and Yahoo, with a lot of Fortune 500 companies in between.
“Whenever you work with Jock there is an energy that ignites the studio, everyone feels it; he’s an electric wire,” says San Francisco Pentagram partner Kit Hinrichs. “With many photographers that would be the sign to walk, no run, to the next shooter. But not with our Canadian friend, he’s just saying ‘Hello, get comfortable, we’re going for one of the best photography experiences of your life.’ Often, energy is used in place of professional rigor, but Jock is one of the most buttoned-down, God-is-in-the-details kind of guys. He’s done his and your homework for the shoot and may have the best eye for talent in the field bar none.”
Browse Projects
OH, CANADA
McDonald was born in Vancouver, B.C. in 1962. His mother Veronica was an artist and his father, Kieth McDonald, a heating and cooling engineer for high rises and mines. His early years were spent in typical childhood pursuits until at twelve, in an effort to help with his dyslexia and his mother’s new marriage, he was sent away to boarding school. “The apron strings are macheted at that point,” he says wryly. As he neared the end of high school he decided to concentrate on photography. Though he had received a good education, the experience had soured him on college. When McDonald confided his plan to become a photographer to his best friend, he was shocked that his friend would “kick” his dream by asking, “How the hell are you going to do that?”
On long school vacations he would visit his mother and stepfather, Rene di Rosa (the eccentric art collector who founded the di Rosa Preserve) in the Napa Valley and work in their vineyards. When he discussed his career plans in California, he received encouragement; people would tell him, “That’s great. I know a photographer you should meet.” That openness and support in helping with his dream were invaluable. That was the moment he decided to leave Canada and live in the U.S. His mother helped; she was able to get him a Green Card as she had legal custody, and he was still a minor.
“When I first entered photography in 1980, the idea was you had to have your own studio to operate out of; it was a very specific way you had to do business,” McDonald remembers. “The model was assist, get studio, get clients.” And he did just that.
He is self-educated, although he prefers to say that he has been well mentored. “I have had the benefit of serious mentors in my life,” says McDonald. “My mother was one, sculptor Al Farrow, Harrison Sheppard, who is my lawyer, and David Tise. I went from third assistant to running David’s studio over a six-year period—that’s really where I learned photography.”
Hinrichs who has often worked with McDonald says, “Jock’s real talent, of course, is on the set. He can tame the nastiest five-year-old and bring life to the dullest CEO and he is fearless with celebrities.”
That fearlessness helped him gain success with his playful and offbeat portraits of San Francisco celebrities including Robin Williams, director Roman Coppola, food luminaries MFK Fisher and Alice Waters, and in 1998 he purchased an 8,000 square-foot studio with a crane and cyclorama in San Francisco’s Mission District. In addition to his work for Levi Strauss, Lucasfilm Ltd., Target, etc., he would rent it out to other photographers or for parties. McDonald had attained the professional studio with all the trappings, but something was missing. “I ended up being the concierge,” he says, and adds, modulating his voice, “Where are the drinking straws?” “Oh, we need some more C stands.” “We need a puppy!” His producer of sixteen years, Andrea Potts, dealt with most of those details but still it became clear he needed a change. He sold the studio and his home in the city, purchased an 1863 farmhouse on five acres in Sonoma Valley and moved his family, wife Annaliese, and daughters Veronica, five, and Bay, three, to a more rural environment.
For the present, McDonald works out of a 2,000 square-foot studio in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood that he acquired when he downsized. In the waiting area there is a large commissioned painting by Nicholas Wilton, among work from a variety of artists, including a life-size polyurethane hula girl that performs at the touch of a button (by pal Kevin Ancell from the 2000 exhibition Surf Trip at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts). Sharing one long studio wall, hung gallery style is the work of photo heroes Jim Marshall, Jack Welpott, Raul Corrales, Norma Quintana and others. Etta James, his gleaming Harley Davidson, is parked in a corner of the studio promising escape.
Antonio Navas, creative director/art director at San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, has frequently worked with McDonald and recently helped him redesign his portfolio. Navas offers, “Jock McDonald is perhaps the only photographer who while capturing the unadulterated truth in people, is able to dig so deep into our souls we discover we actually have a remote place in our hearts that mimics his, a place so full of joy it makes us all say in a very low voice or sometimes [with] uncontrollable laughter, ‘Life is going to be OK.’” Illustrator and former art director of San Francisco Focus magazine, Mark Ulriksen agrees, “Jock’s ever-present smile, confidence and playful attitude were usually in evidence on the shoots he managed as well as with the photos he produced. The guy is fun to be around and knows how to have fun. He’s like a kid making a run of the candy store.”
A STRANGER IN STRANGE LANDS
In 1991 McDonald traveled to the former Soviet Republic for his first fine-art photography exhibition in Leningrad. And between assignments for a range of clients, he kept traveling—to México, China, the Ukraine, Russia, Nicaragua, Moldova and Cuba—visiting some places half-a-dozen times or more for the Rurals series. “Even if I didn’t do any more commercial work ever again, which is not my intention, there’s not enough time,” he says wistfully.
“The rurals, the people that actually do farming, are very connected to the land and very humble,” McDonald says. “It’s their humility that I find to be so appealing, and that they have such a lack of fear of the stranger.” His willingness to do chores and blend into village life earned him respect (and a few wedding proposals) while visiting the Carpathians. It also made him reassess the meaning of the term friendship. “Looking at these people as a way of living has been profound for me,” he says.
Play is one of the themes at the center of McDonald’s work. “My intention is to remember the kid,” he claims. “I don’t remember there being a lot of silliness in photography.” He changed all that with his use of repetition and exaggeration to suggest the absurdity of certain actions and situations. He returns over and over to the themes of play, friendship and place in his work. That idea of place or home also helped drive his recent move to build a studio in the barn on his land in Sonoma. His career has entered a new phase where he has decided to give up his San Francisco studio. “You do something until you realize you don’t like it and then you go and do something else,” his artist mother advised him, when he was dissatisfied with his first job. Now, McDonald is doing most of the construction work drawing on the experience he derived from that first job out of high school. The irony is not lost on him, but then he seems to find humor in most life situations.
After he bought the Sonoma property his mother’s best friend told him: “You spent the first half of your life running from your past, and the second half trying to get it back.” He pauses, and admits, “I think there’s actually some truth to that,” describing how his grandfather raised pigs and fruit in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. “That way if you got bad fruit you fed it to the pigs and you got great hogs; it’s this symbiotic kind of relationship,” McDonald relates with a chuckle. In Sonoma he enjoys growing his own food and relishes the fact he will lose a commute that can take up to three hours, driving south 48 miles each way, and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Although he did put his commute to artistic use by producing a somewhat surreal series of photographs of drowsy cows, blurred landscapes and car headlights, an homage of sorts to his mother, who would often point out to her young son the beauty of a cow’s silhouette against the landscape.
A PEOPLE PERSON
“I love the expression ‘they don’t build one-seater sports cars.’ Someone has to be there shouting out ‘Whoo-hoo’ or participating,” McDonald states with a big grin, and adds, “Friendships are one of the finest things on the planet.” Clearly, this people person found his calling in a field where he is required to relate to a variety of subjects, and draw out their inner essence, or in the case of Robin Williams, their inner child.
“It’s all about the casting. I’m a people photographer. It’s about the story in someone’s face. It’s the crooked smile. It’s all those things that we from birth have been genetically predisposed to read,” McDonald explains. “Body language, proximity, eye contact, how I face you or don’t, speaks volumes of comfort level.” In high school he encountered a book about body language that he studied and began to apply to his work. “I’m sure that’s all ended up in my photography, but I push it to the absurd,” he says. “Photography continues to be fascinating to me, that the frozen image can be so powerful.”
His mission has always been to capture our common humanity, the kid inside each of us, a celebration of character. Whether for client or for museum, family is what Jock McDonald has captured on film for the last twenty years—the family of man. ca
