Portraits and Behind the Scenes with Bill Burr for GQ

How we discussed magic, Beatles and being Ukrainian.

Mar 14, 2025

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My taste in comedy skews towards what some people would call “offensive" — George Carlin, Dave Chappelle, Eddie Murphy, Frankie Boyle, and Jimmy Carr. If it doesn’t bite, I get bored. When I got the assignment to photograph Bill Burr for GQ, I prepared myself by watching (for the first time) three of his specials, and my abs hurt from laughing the following day. My favorite was Paper Tiger, with a mix of razor-sharp jabs and moments of vulnerability. I had a feeling that in person, Bill Burr would be the same character he was in the specials, so I anticipated an interesting shoot, and he didn’t disappoint. I had more than an hour for the portraits in the Palace Theater, a luxury of time, and I was able to get an emotional spectrum ranging from pensive to farcical.

As usual, I was working with Shane Cobalt, and he got to show Bill magic. “How disappointed were your parents?” was Bill’s first question to Shane upon hearing he is a professional magician. “And how disappointed were you that you became a comedian?” was the response. They seemed to get along immediately, and that’s when we started having fun.

Everyone reacts to magic in their own, idiosyncratic way, and it was fascinating to see Bill go from boisterous to quiet and puzzled. I like to incorporate magic in the first part of the shoot because no matter how guarded the subject tries to be, the fourth wall melts away after watching objects appear and disappear right in front of your eyes.

The portrait from the magic session turned out to be one of my favorites from the whole shoot. The stunned silence of watching pure sleight of hand is a uniquely personal experience that makes me able to get really close to the subject, and it’s something that cannot be recreated with prompts.

I rarely get to banter with my subjects, especially if they are celebrities, hence both busy and important, and often the shoot is over in 10 minutes. Since there was quite a bit of time, we were able to discuss many subjects, from politics to the Beatles. Bill turned out to be a passionate Beatles fan, and the excitement of talking about the music picked up the energy of the shoot.

As expected, Bill was impromptu comedic gold, and I spent most of the shoot laughing.

”You are Ukrainian, you are tougher than me. I’m a soft American. I grew up on plastic and junk food.”

I like to keep moving during a shoot, never staying at one location for more than a few minutes. In my last post about film photography, I mentioned that I like to overshoot to give myself many options when editing. I occasionally see photographers create a firing squad with their shutter button, firing hundreds of photos at once, sometimes of a stationary object or person. To clarify, that's not what I do; I consider that to be a terrible practice. All the shots taken are intended to be unique and different, switching something up from light to the effects used every time I press the shutter.