Gregory Watermann | Photographer and Video Director
Watermann is the photographer bands keep. He learned the the business assisting some of New York's biggest fashion photographers, and spent the 1990s shooting portraits and fashion for Elle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Rolling Stone/ Late 1991 Gregory flew to Phoenix on a one-day assignment that produced Nirvana's first major magazine cover. That session is the exception in his career in music. Almost everything since has come from the opposite arrangement, working directly with the recording artists. He has photographed System of a Down since the early 2000s — tours, side projects, weddings, the births of their children — and was Linkin Park's photographer from 2003 to 2010, shooting the entire Meteora touring cycle for the band's book From the Inside. Since 2011 he has traveled with Pitbull through more than twenty countries. The access is in the pictures: these are photographs made from inside the group rather than from the pit, and Watermann shot them on film long past the point most photographers switched to digital — a Nikon F3, fast primes, no zoom, and never a flash, which he treats as an intrusion on the moment. His work has been shown at A&I Gallery and at Eye For Sound in Los Angeles, where a 2024 retrospective drew on twenty years of his System of a Down archive and was viewed by standing room only crowds for two full weeks.