The Julian Lennon Interview

by Amadour

In this conversation, I speak to Julian Lennon from his home in Monaco about his recent exhibition, ATMOSPHERIA, at William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica. These works capture magnificent aerial landscapes from the vantage point of an airplane. A fascinating, multi-hyphenate creator, Lennon shares his insights on photography, the curiosity behind his painterly images, and the world travels that cultivate his passion for humanity and the natural environment.

AMADOUR: Hi, Julian. Nice to meet you.

JULIAN LENNON: How are you, Amadour? Where are you at the moment?

AMADOUR: I am sitting in the Good Shepherd Church parking lot in Beverly Hills. Where are you now?

LENNON: I’m at home in Monaco.

AMADOUR: Oh, wow, you’re in Monaco? Like Monaco, Monaco?

LENNON: Like Beverly Hills, Beverly Hills.

AMADOUR: [laugh]

LENNON: This is where I’ve lived for about 20 years. I only became a resident five years ago, maybe a little longer than that. I used to live in Los Angeles directly before moving here. I was out there for a good eight years and loved it. I went to London to see a film premiere and met a friend of a friend who was an English line producer who asked if I liked Grand Prixes. And I said, “They’re okay.” He said, “Well, it’s the Monaco Grand Prix this weekend. What are you doing? Would you like to come down?” He said he had an apartment down there with a spare room. At the time I was done with LA and asked myself, “What will I do? Go back to LA and be numb?” So I said, “Okay, I’ll come down.” It was back in the day, and they didn’t have all the stands with hundreds of thousands of people. They only had the chicken-wire fence. So you’d be eating a prawn cocktail and there’s a car coming at you about a 180 miles an hour. It was way scarier back in the day, being in the audience. But it was terrific, and I had one of the best summers of my life, and I just said, “Why go back?” I had a bungalow on Mulholland Drive facing the valley, and I just said to my caretaker, “pack it up, sell the house. I’m not coming back.” And then I found an apartment here and eventually moved here. It’s just been a great hub because it’s a beautiful area. You’ve got the South of France here, and Italy is 20 minutes away. I can’t complain about that. You’ve got Malibu there.

AMADOUR: Having Italy an arm’s length away is so casual.

LENNON: Everywhere is central for Europe, and it’s easy. It’s been a great location and a great base. But I spend a lot of time working around the world, so I’m here less than I should be, but it’s an excellent place to come home to.

AMADOUR: It sounds heavenly, much like your photography. These photographs are incredible. Where were these taken?

Julian Lennon, Painted Rainbows, 2023 (Mediterranean storm)

LENNON: The majority were taken on a plane. A lot of people ask me how I am taking these photographs. And are they imagining me going up in a balloon or wearing a winged suit? I learned very quickly, as most people would, that you cannot just shoot out of an airplane through the window. There’s too much light reflection and many scratches and marks on the windows. There always needs to be a clear picture. Yeah. So you always have to shoot through that, you know, it’s pretty straightforward.

AMADOUR: What is your history with the medium?

LENNON: I traveled internationally from about 11 when I went to see Dad [John Lennon] in America when he moved away. I had always been anxious but excited. Long-haul flights didn’t have wifi or lots of movies like you do today. There was sometimes one dodgy movie on the screen at the front, and that was it. I was always too twitchy and too excited about where I was going, and while most people were asleep, I was staring out the window. I always found that that was a place I could think about things for the future and think about everything in life, in general — or think about absolutely nothing at all, and drift and float away in the clouds. I just realized that everything in life, as we know, only happens once in a split second, and that’s it. A cloud may look stagnant as it’s drifting by, but it’s constantly changing, constantly moving.

AMADOUR: I can relate to looking out from the airplane window at the horizon. When did this theme take hold?

LENNON: The first exhibition I had in New York at the old CBGB — The Morrison Hotel Gallery, at that time in the Bowery District — was about clouds, called Timeless. I was petrified because I thought I would get crucified by the critics, wondering, “What does this musician think he’s doing taking pictures?” I’ve answered that in recent years by saying, “Listen, I’m a creative human being.” You can’t pigeonhole me by just saying I’m a musician. It doesn’t work like that.

AMADOUR: You are preaching to the choir. I totally agree.

LENNON: Although, you know, they do try. The clouds are painterly, soft, beautiful images. And many people couldn’t tell if they were actual paintings or photographs. So I dug that and went, all right, I like that. I’ll still do the rock and roll stuff, and a few other things, and street photography — you know, guerilla stuff — but my forte initially was always clouds. So yeah, when I had the opportunity to create ATMOSPHERIA, I thought of Timeless, where I did one black-and-white piece, a centerpiece printed on aluminum of a tunnel road, and I always wanted to go back to that. And then I had an opportunity this time to reinvent the clouds, but in a much more significant edition than I’d ever done before. I was working on the show from Monaco, and I wasn’t in America at the time. When I walked into the gallery the day before, the photos took my breath away.

AMADOUR: What kind of cameras and equipment do you use to capture these images, especially when you’re in the air, too?

LENNON: To me, it doesn’t matter what the instrument is in the reality of the situation. I always go with my gut. Dare I say an iPhone? But that was heavily frowned upon not so long ago. I have a few favorite cameras at the moment. The first one is the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. And I had a great time with that. Canon suited me well earlier, but I’ve always been looking for smaller, better, quicker, more high-powered, more megabytes, et cetera. So I fell in love with the Sony A7R. I learned about this camera while I was at a gig that was being filmed in Montreal about Leonard Cohen. The crew filming was excellent, and they were on stage with the Sony A7R. They showed me the footage quality afterward, and my mind was blown. My new baby is the Leica M11, especially for portraiture and close-ups. I’ve never been a film guy with cameras. It’s always been digital for me. I don’t think I have the patience for film. I did an exhibition in Amsterdam with several other British artists about the British Invasion, and critics thought they were film photographs.

Julian Lennon, Midnight Smoke, 2012 (Hills of S. France)

AMADOUR: Do you use filters or editing in your process?

LENNON: I try not to screw around with the images. On many occasions, even outside the cloud images, I like maintaining the original, even when I profiled U2 or other landscape photography. Each collection has a vibe. I’ve created work with Princess Charlene of Monaco. They’re all desaturated to some degree, but each collection is its color. The only thing about ATMOSPHERIA is that they were cropped to perfection to allow them to shine as best as the image can.

AAMADOUR: I’m curious about the White Feather Foundation and your conservation projects and how that influences the creation of the work.

LENNON: I became more involved in photography because I hadn’t gone to different countries on behalf of the White Feather Foundation. I was invited by Charity: Water, an incredible organization, to go to Ethiopia to look at different scenarios where people had no clean water. They showed me where they were building wells and where they had finished the wells.

AMADOUR: Wow, that’s phenomenal.

LENNON: I took the camera with me, and it culminated in my exhibition called Horizon in New York. I also did a photo collection around the South China Sea called Cycle, recalling the cycle of life of all the people that lived in different communities in the South China Sea. I also was in Kenya and South America in Colombia.

AMADOUR: No way. My family’s from Colombia.

LENNON: Are you serious? I was in the Sierra Nevada at the top of the mountains.

AMADOUR: Ah, close to Santa Marta?

LENNON: Yes. There you go. Yeah, yeah, there you go. I was there for a few days with the Koji Tribe. There is an organization called the Amazon Conservation Team, one we worked with, and it was about buying back the land the Koji people had lost on the waterfront. We were able to help out, and we went through several incredible ceremonies with them. And one of the most captivating days and nights of my life so far was walking down from the mountains where they lived, down to the coast where they did a sunset ceremony at the end of the day. As the sun went down, we sat on these big tree trunks on the beach with nobody for miles. It was just the palm trees, the Koji people, and I looked out at the waves. We couldn’t speak to each other. There were no phones or computers. We lit a fire and sat quietly on the beach, smiling at each other in peace. I cannot even really describe that. I’m sure you’ve had moments where you’ve just been in the middle of nowhere, and it’s been silent and beautiful, and you go, wow.

AMADOUR: What is your hope for the audience to get from your images?

LENNON: It’s just to remember the beauty surrounding us, and that we need to do what we can to protect nature and everyone, how beautiful this world we live in is, and how bloody lucky we are.

Julian Lennon, Sultan Sun, 2023 (Singapore/S. China Sea)

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Featured Image: Julian Lennon, Boom!, 2023

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Amadour is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles and New York City. Amadour investigates landscape, architectural forms, and our relationship as humans to built and natural environments. They received dual BA degrees in studio art and art history from the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture in 2018. For more information visit: www.amadour.com