Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Courtesy Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

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As a student at the elite American Film Institute in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Greenfield-Sanders took an odd job photographing the filmmakers who gave talks there for the school archives. No one else wanted the job — his fellow students found it beneath them, he says — but it gave him direct access to masters such as Alfred Hitchcock (who told him he didn’t know how to light), and it wasn’t long before the aspiring director found the new work more interesting than film. “Filmmaking is so collaborative, so dependent on other people,” he says. Photography “was mine.”

After AFI, Greenfield-Sanders moved with his wife, Karin, to New York’s East Village and began applying his portrait-taking skills to the art world, to which he had special access first via his father-in-law, the Abstract Expressionist Joop Sanders, and later through the burgeoning East Village scene. In 1999, he showed 20 years’ worth of those images at Mary Boone: a total of 700 portraits, including 450 of artists.

Though he’s moved on to such diverse subjects as musicians, politicians, porn stars, and Iraq War veterans, the look of his work has changed little. His images are direct, clean, warm, and honest. Whether depicting First Lady Hillary Clinton or porn star Jenna Jameson, it’s clear that the image is a Greenfield-Sanders.

And while he’s made documentary films before — on Lou Reed (1998) and Karen Finley (2004) — none has so directly employed his trademark aesthetic as his latest, a collaboration with the critic and African and African-American studies professor Elvis Mitchell that essentially amounts to “an extension of my portraiture.” In The Black List, subjects ranging from Colin Powell to Al Sharpton to Serena Williams to Slash sit for penetrating interviews about “race, struggle, and achievement” that look like Greenfield-Sanders portraits come to life, and that present “black experiences” as diverse as the subjects themselves.

The 90-minute film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last January and on HBO in August, is screening as part of the exhibition “The Black List Project: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell,” which also includes 25 large-scale portraits of the film’s subjects, on view at the Brooklyn Museum from November 21 to March 29, 2009.

ARTINFO sat down with Greenfield-Sanders in his stunning rectory-turned-home-and-studio last week. We talked about The Black List, what elevates a photo to art, and doing what you’re good at.

Timothy, how did The Black List project come about?

I was sitting at this table with Toni Morrison about three years ago, and we were shooting portraits for her opera Margaret Garner. Toni thought we should do a book on black divas, which sounded pretty fabulous, though opera’s not something I’m in love with.

But it got me thinking about the black experience, and I thought, maybe that’s an interesting portrait show, or a book. So I called my neighbor Elvis Mitchell, a good friend for 10 years, and said let’s have lunch. By the end of lunch we had 150, 175 names on napkins and thought it could be a book, a movie, a portrait series — it was all these fantasies.

How did you envision the collaboration with Elvis Mitchell?

Elvis is a great interviewer, so obviously he would do that, and I saw the look of the film as an extension of my portraits — it would be very clean, very simple. I had also fortuitously become aware of this camera called the Inquisitor that allows a subject to look directly into the camera and talk to the interviewer.

How does it work?

It’s kind of like a Teleprompter, but as a subject you actually see Elvis’s face there from a video feed. So you look into this camera and it gives you that straight-into-camera look very naturally. And that, of course, is an extension of my portraiture — which is right to camera, very direct, very simple, one light, clean background — all the stuff that makes up a Timothy Greenfield-Sanders portrait.