Watson's Walk on the Wild Side

Photographer Albert Watson has always been hard to pigeonhole, but his newest project is a surprise departure even for him — an unabashed romp into kitsch and kink in Vegas.

The Scottish-born Watson has put together a one-man show called Miss Beehayving, running at Hamiltons Gallery London through March 15. Culled from Watson's forthcoming big book project Shot in Vegas, this exhibition focuses on a single model, a dominatrix and burlesque performer called Breaunna (her online moniker is the show's title). "She lives in an exotic, erotic world, and that 's what fascinated me," says the photographer.

I once had the pleasure of visiting Watson's 13,000-square-foot studio in Manhattan's meat-packing district, which covers several floors and is humongous by New York standards. Throughout the space, prints of Watson's work were on display and stacked in organized piles, thousands of photographs running the gamut from fashion to celebrities to fine art to journalistic moments. "In 99 percent of art, recognizability is a comfortable factor," he said at the time. "My recognizability is going to have to be in the diversity."

Like other masters of the formal portrait (Timothy Greenfield-Sanders comes to mind), Watson has now taken it upon himself to formalize the fringe-dwellers — in particular, one mysterious erotic entertainer that he befriended at a Rock-A-Billy Convention in 2000. Breunna (seen here in a pair of contrasting views) is described as a "chameleon-like" figure who reflects the qualities of the places where she works, in various degrees of seediness, but the pictures themselves retain Watson's elegant eye for composition, mood lighting, and evocative textures.

In this fine-art foray into an underground world, Watson continues to march to his own peculiar beat. "Albert Watson shoots what is interesting to him, and he makes it interesting to everyone else," opines graphic designer Cheryl Heller, a frequent collaborator on commercial projects. "Everytime I pick up a camera it's a different thing," Watson says. "But I'm always trying to make art."
— Jack Crager