From the course: Douglas Kirkland on Photography: Shooting with a Medium-Format Camera

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Meet Douglas Kirkland

Meet Douglas Kirkland

(music playing) I grew up in a small town in Canada, only 7,000 people. The first picture I ever took was taken with a box camera, a Brownie box camera, and I remember pushing it into my chest, ten years of age at the time, and pushing that device down, and it went clunk. I got the buzz right then and it's never stopped since. Now Speed Graphic was the camera of the time, and if you had this in your hand, as a young man, I have to tell you, you really felt you were hot. Turn this way, that way. I mean that was a charge like nothing else. I got a call from Look magazine, and I was basically hired to shoot fashion, and I was the new generation. I was in my mid-20s. The year was 1960. And then my boss in New York called me and he said, "We'd like you to go Las Vegas with our movie editor because Elizabeth Taylor, who hasn't been photographed or had a story done on her for about two or three years now, has said she will give us an interview." I sat quietly in the back of the room as the…

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