Kate Bosworth Talks Leicas as a Metaphor for Life During Coachella
The path of most resistance is really where it’s at for Kate Bosworth.
The actress sat down with WWD on Saturday at the Ace Hotel & Swim Club just before she was set to go onstage and deliver an inspiring keynote address about her personal journey at Create & Cultivate’s first-ever conference around the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which it put on in partnership with Mini Cooper.
“I always try to be very honest and open on panels like this and what [Create & Cultivate founder] Jaclyn [Johnson] has done was create a really amazing forum to be able to speak like that,” Bosworth said. “I’m in my 30s now and it’s a great decade because you have enough experience in your life where you can say, ‘I did this and I was successful in this area, but this didn’t work for me. How do I learn and grow from that hindsight?’ I found the 20s to be very frustrating only because I wanted to know more than I did just because the amount of days on the planet. I was like a horse at the gate.”
As an aside, Bosworth said as an equestrian growing up, she never chose the push-button horse — in other words, the easy one. She always wanted the young, untamed more challenging ride, which she called a metaphor for her life.
Bosworth said she finally feels as though she’s hit her stride and has also found herself interested in a variety of things. That ranges from her love for fashion to film and acting. She’s also subtle in some of her messages, pointing to the Doen dress she wore for the conference, which she said was selected intentionally in a bid to highlight a female founded and run enterprise. She’s taken a more serious interest in producing, including on the film “Nona” that her husband Michael Polish wrote, directed and shot. The movie aims to bring greater awareness to the human trafficking epidemic, Bosworth said.
“My husband’s a filmmaker and he’s been teaching me the Leica camera, which is a very difficult camera to shoot,” she said. “It’s all manual, so the focus, the exposure, the ISO — everything is your decision. There’s nothing automatic about it. You have to really understand what it is that you want to see and, in that sense, it’s a true reflection of your vision. I suppose what I’m saying is I find myself taking on challenging things.”
Her immediate reaction, she said, when her husband offered her the Leica was to send it back to him.
“I was afraid I wasn’t going to be good enough,” she said. “I was afraid that I didn’t know what I was doing. I was afraid that it would be too difficult. I think women in particular have the kind of innate desire to be perfect at things, and I think what’s great about these discussions is to say, ’Let’s toss aside the idea of perfection and just work hard and learn as much as possible and dig deep down and think.’ My husband’s a great mentor for me because he says, ‘You don’t need to worry about what I think because every artist has their own perspective. Your photos are going to look different from my photos and that’s great because that’s having a unique vision.’”
It’s only after five years of shooting that Bosworth said she’ll finally have some of her photographs published. She also said she’s been able to shoot during the Coachella weekend, motioning for her husband to show their Leica. He snapped a portrait of her to show what it’s able to capture.
“This is a metaphor for the most challenging horse in the race so wouldn’t I want to take this one on rather than a point-and-shoot [camera]? And so I did and I love this camera,” she said. “When you see that camera strapped around someone’s neck, you know what kind of person they are.”
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