The ‘Saturday Night Live’ Photographer Who Has Captured Every Host Since 2000

Mary Ellen Matthews was trying to make the cast of “Saturday Night Live” look funny. Bouncing around a studio in Lower Manhattan in cowboy boots last week, she lobbed suggestions at four cast members like the leader of an improv troupe.

“Group hug!”

“How about a trust fall?”

“You guys are all about to start a race: ready, set, go!”

Her camera clicked away as James Austin Johnson squatted on a stool and flapped his arms like a duck. He bit into an everything bagel, while Ego Nwodim tossed her bagel (cinnamon raisin) overhead.

Since 2000, Ms. Matthews has been the official photographer for “S.N.L.,” where she is responsible for visually sumptuous and conceptually nutty images that manage to transmit the show’s sense of humor without the luxury of dialogue.

Her signature contribution is called a bumper: TV jargon for the portraits of “S.N.L.” hosts and musical guests that bookend the show’s commercial breaks. She is the reason anyone has ever seen Edward Norton inserted into an Edward Hopper painting, or a tableau of six Larrys David attempting to screw in a lightbulb.

But that day she was working on a promotional photo shoot for an apparel company, one of several brands that have been eager to collaborate with the show for its 50th-anniversary celebrations. She could tell things were going well when some crew members gathered around a monitor to giggle at its display.

“Oh, that’s hilarious,” she said, reviewing a series of images of Devon Walker and Michael Longfellow being wheeled around like freight on a green metal dolly. “Good job.”

If the 50th-anniversary hoopla for “S.N.L.” is foregrounding many of its flashiest stars, Ms. Matthews is among the team members whose impact far surpasses their name recognition. By her count, about 4,000 of her bumper photographs have made it to air since she took over the job from her mentor, Edie Baskin.

She will release 272 pages’ worth of them in a book, “The Art of the SNL Portrait,” out March 4 from Abrams. It documents the depth of effort that goes into images that viewers glimpse for exactly three seconds each. And it showcases Ms. Matthews’s ability to capture some of the world’s most photographed people looking hammier, freakier and generally looser than they tend to appear anywhere else.

How does she manage that? “Her whimsy is infectious,” said Scarlett Johansson, who, each of the six times she has hosted “S.N.L.,” has been photographed by Ms. Matthews. According to the actress, Ms. Matthews exhibits an ease on set that tends to spread to her subject.

“I think that’s why she’s so successful at her job, and getting the best out of some of the most famous people in the world,” Ms. Johansson said. “There’s so many different types of personalities that she’s photographed, and she’s always able to coax the playful side out of them.”

Wrestling With Alligators (and Presidents)

The next day, Ms. Matthews offered an annotated tour of Studio 8H, whose tight hallways are lined with her portraits. We passed images of Timothée Chalamet, who asked to be photographed in Central Park (“That was a lot of security”), and Maya Rudolph, who recreated several images of her mother, the singer Minnie Riperton (“I’m going to cry, I love Maya so much”).

Ms. Matthews had little trouble getting Kim Kardashian to pose in head-to-toe fuchsia while standing in a plexiglass display case. But she confessed to being surprised when Helen Mirren was game to squeeze a taxidermy alligator into a headlock.

“She got down on the ground and wrestled that alligator,” Ms. Matthews said.

Capturing these images is portraiture’s equivalent of the 100-meter dash. As soon as Ms. Matthews finds out who is hosting an episode, she reads their most recent interviews to brainstorm visual vignettes that either extend or subvert the way they present themselves to the world. She draws inspiration from famous photographs, paintings and album covers: One famous bumper places Amy Poehler and Tina Fey on the cover of “Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.”

She then enlists colleagues from the prop and costume departments to procure the necessary umbrellas, Mozart wigs, rubber chickens or live poodles.

“The day before, or the morning of, I’m like: ‘Can I add this? Can I do this?’” she said. “‘I wanted to put Justin Timberlake in a Renaissance painting,’ or something like that.”

On Thursday afternoon, she gets about an hour and a half to photograph each subject at Studio 8H, often over the din of a band rehearsing nearby. She takes several hundred photographs with the help of three assistants and then narrows them down to six or seven final selections in her office. (She makes the final picks herself.) She uses Photoshop for any necessary tweaks, like the unicorn horn she added to a white horse that was carrying Dwayne Johnson.

The final bumpers are sometimes ready as little as 15 minutes before air. Some are straightforward shots of a celebrity looking glamorous or pensive. Others play on the subject’s public perception.

“This one was a challenge,” Ms. Matthews said, indicating a picture of Donald J. Trump from when he hosted “S.N.L.” in 2015, during his first bid for the presidency.

She photographed him spritzing his famous bouffant with a bottle of Trump-branded hair spray. “I kind of had to push him into that,” she said. “I was like, ‘Just give me one spray,’ and we got it.”

Stepping Into the Pressure Cooker

That hair spray bottle is among the keepsakes in Ms. Matthews’s office on the 17th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, alongside a thank-you note from Stevie Nicks and a large framed photo of the rapper Jack Harlow with a stick-on mustache.

This is not where Ms. Matthews ever expected herself to be sitting. She picked up photography as a child from her father, who worked in marketing but kept a darkroom in their basement in Madison, N.J. He held photography competitions among Ms. Matthews and her four older siblings; she remembers winning one with a picture of a flagpole.

After college at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, she moved to New York and worked as a publicist for TVT Records, an independent label. “I was taking pictures of bands like crazy, and I wasn’t really doing my job that well,” she said. She either got fired or quit — she says she can’t quite remember — but that same day got a voice mail message about a job as the assistant to Ms. Baskin, the original photographer for “Saturday Night.”

She got the job in 1993. Ms. Baskin taught her how to produce striking images within the pressure cooker of “S.N.L.” and passed along in her signature vibrant, hand-tinted style. When Ms. Baskin departed the show around six years later, Ms. Matthews said, she was initially nervous to graduate to the top job.

“I didn’t know what my visual language was going to be,” she said, or how it would differ from Ms. Baskin’s.

She settled into an approach that scans as a richly colored fever dream, mixing poppy lighting and surrealist elements with greasy pepperoni slices and other quotidian signifiers of New York City. She tweaks her setup from year to year, sometimes trying a slow shutter and color gels, other times experimenting with animations.

She nitpicked some details of her work even as she showed it off. An adage from Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and producer, helps keep her perfectionism at bay, she said: “It’s on air because it’s 11:30, not because it’s ready.”

Mr. Michaels keeps several of his favorite bumpers pinned to a board in his office on the ninth floor at 30 Rock. “The bumpers are probably the least appreciated part of the show,” he writes in the book’s foreword, “but anyone who knows the show knows how much they mean.”

Mr. Michaels, rumored to be stingy with praise, adds of Ms. Matthews, “Mary Ellen is both an artist and a star.”

Alligators Revisited

Ms. Matthews has long wanted to compile a book of her work, and the show’s 50th anniversary felt like the right occasion. In January of 2024, she visited her friend, the photographer and book editor Alison Castle, at her home in upstate New York, where the two printed out hundreds of photographs and sorted through them while drinking pinot grigio.

Painful cuts had to be made, Ms. Matthews said, including the Helen Mirren alligator-wrestling photo. (“A big disappointment,” she said.)

One section of the book shows off the bumpers that Ms. Matthews took during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. (Instead of a celebrity host, she photographed her dog, Daphne, wearing a shower cap in the bathtub of the apartment they share in the East Village.) In another, John Mulaney reflects on the experience of being dressed up by Ms. Matthews as Nancy Reagan, Lou Reed and Patti Smith.

Her subjects seem to agree that she has a knack for making others comfortable, especially while taking cast members’ head shots shortly after they are hired. She captures each young comedian for posterity at what is probably the most anxious moment of their professional lives. (The photo never changes during a cast member’s tenure, despite many requests to the contrary.)

“She’s digging us out of the trash, and putting us in this new space,” Mr. Johnson, known for his impersonation of Mr. Trump, said.

Only occasionally is it Ms. Matthews who needs to be calmed down. She said she had gotten jittery when photographing Paul McCartney in 2010.

“He must have sensed something, because I was getting my camera ready and he said, ‘You know, my wife was a photographer,’” she said. Ms. Matthews relaxed a little as they chatted about Linda McCartney, who died in 1998.

The resulting image is one of the quietest in the book, and also one of the most arresting. Mr. McCartney is pictured in black and white and looking directly into the camera, his hand raised in a simple peace sign.