Bob Peterson Interview
The Supreme Court
The next big poster we did was “ The Supreme Court ,” which we shot in Reno . There were dark clouds in the sky behind the players , and you could see the white sneakers peeking out under their robes . This was back in the day , so I rented the robes myself and my wife took the hems out . “ The Supreme Court ” was the last thing I did with John Brown and Denny Strickland . Shortly after that poster , Peter Moore chose Wieden + Kennedy as Nike ’ s agency . Dan Wieden and David Kennedy had just left their jobs to form their own agency , and Peter gave them the Nike account . The rest is history .
For the second “ Supreme Court ” poster , we went to Washington DC . We thought we could shoot at the actual Supreme Court building , but when we showed up , they told us to go away . They didn ’ t allow any sort of commercial photography , so we went and found another similar looking building and posed the guys there . The art director and I decided to go back to the Supreme Court without the entourage and photographed the building . Now remember , this is before Photoshop . Today you could do this so easily , but at the time I had to shoot the Supreme Court building with the same lens that I shot the guys with and on the same angle . I also defocused the background so it was just a tiny bit soft . Today you would do that all digitally , but we had to manually put that image together .
Look , Up In The Air .
Nike would send me down to shoot when Joe Pytka was filming commercials . He was really a master with lighting . Whenever he finished filming , I would get two minutes to shoot , and I became very good at it . For the Jordan shoot , we went to Raleigh-Durham , North Carolina . Joe Pytka was set to do a big commercial shoot with him , and they decided they didn ’ t want to allow any time to do stills . Peter Moore had to pay them to come in one day early to light the gym . Michael arrived that day in his own car . Later on , the athletes wanted their own trailer and a personal sushi chef and a limo to pick them up from the airport . Michael wasn ’ t like that . He was just a regular guy .
The first time I met him , he held up ten fingers and said ,
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