You may have heard the sad news that Andy Williams passed earlier this week. I had the pleasure to shoot Andy in the late 80’s and early 90’s. He was a consumate gentleman… creative, professional, and a pleasure to work with. We broke bread at his home in Hollywood a couple of times where he shared stories related to his love of fine art, wine, politics and romance too. I remember he sent flowers to my wife during a shoot when I mentioned she was home alone sick with the flu.
The last shot we did together was for a country music album he cut with Curb Records in 1990-91. I dug this CD out of my archives to share here. There are also some production notes I noticed I had with the images referencing issues I had with the final reproduction I thought might be interesting.
Andy Williams / Nashville CD Art © Christopher Barr 1991
We had originally conceived this album having a gritty, retro kind of “adobe” feel to the portraiture. The AD and I came up with the idea to use a polaroid transfer process, projecting a medium format chrome onto 8×10 color negative polaroids and then transferring the negative image immediately to water color paper for the texture and aesthetic we were looking for. It is a head spinner to me remembering how expensive and laborious this work was relative to how easy it is now with a simple PS plug in. Each transfer was handmade and one of kind. The emulsion would rarely transfer perfectly and that was part of the beauty and excitement of the process. The AD and I and even our crew happily took turns experimenting with it. We had a blast. We must have had 75 to 100 sheets of paper all over the studio drying on towels on the floor. The look was, by it very nature suppose to be soft allowing the texture of the watercolor paper to do a lot of talking. Out of the box, the images looked great and the transfer process was everything we wanted. I remember this shoot well because it was the last time I allowed a record label to complete facial retouching without my participation and approval. This was at a time when retouching was done via air brushing on a large print or (as in this case) on 8×10 or 11×14 transparencies with bleach and dyes…. difficult, tedious and challenging work even for the best retouchers of the day. Andy had a well known penchant of wanting add’l sharpening and saturation done on his eyes….When the album was released, sure enough…it was clear that the label completed add’l retouching and unfortunately the work done was pretty obvious. The funny thing is, this habit of over hitting the eyes is probably even more common today.
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