What makes a great photographer? An artist usually needs to have special skills or unique concepts, but a photographer in a well-lit studio with the right equipment and beautiful models can get by even without good timing if he uses enough film and then selects the best images.
What is it then that makes a good photographer? Perhaps it is the ability to be evasive or unconcerned about one's art. Marc Hispard, whose work is now showing at the Bunkamura Gallery, falls into this category.
Perhaps his insouciance rubbed off during a career photographing that notoriously shallow creature, the glamour model, for the fashion world. Asked perfectly reasonable questions such as why he shoots mainly in monochrome but sometimes switches to color, he is literally lost for words or drops meaningless paradoxes into the conversation, like, "Beauty can be really ugly and ugliness can be really beautiful."