John Baldessari
“AHA”.
Upon exiting the studios of artists, I felt like the great tenor, Enrico Caruso indelibly printed on a celluloid sheet manning the helm of Fitzcarraldo’s “Aida”. My personal dreamscape seemed like thousands of capillaries steering their way across avenues reaching from New York, Paris, London and Moscow. They obliged my temporary reverie as stand-ins for Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo’s” Peruvian Amazon. I was emboldened. Caruso bellowed, I bellowed, thousands of jungle species quivered; we all listened to Verdi’s Rigoletto.
My cameras have made portraits from Harlem, to the Lower East Side, across to Soho and TriBeCa. I have looked south from NYC’s 95th and 5th, west from Long Island City across the East River or across the Atlantic from trains heading south to north and east following west. Visceral thrills made a home inside my heart. I realize pictures in my mind every waking moment, and most often asleep with my dreams.
Richard Serra
My artist portrait series began, with two reins held like divining rods guiding me like parallel forces towards the most significant art world of my times. In one direction youthful brilliance artists like Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat stood before me with galvanizing energy ready to slash and cover canvases with tantalizing exuberance. In another direction aged artists: Moore, Masson, Miro, and hundreds of aged maestros fifty and sixty years my senior frailly looked to challenge their waning faculties unless they were lucky enough to take a bite from the heart of Picasso: “Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.”
My vanishing present/past seems to race towards a far horizon like the speed of two chickens feigning orgasms
When I was impressionable, I wanted to be on a page inside Joyce’s Ulysses and feel what it was like to dance the dance with Joyce’s imagination. I wanted to be on a page of Homer’s Odyssey sensationalizing epic adventures. I wanted to be on a page inside Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast, mingling among the interesting. I wanted be inside Proust’s mind while he remembered “A Remembrance of Things Past”. I wanted to be among those who told the stories about lives lived. Those factual fictions belong to others. I belonged more to the school of Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades”: Not a story but the Bible on seeing photography. The Parisian Arcades held stories of relics from our vanishing history. I realized my vanishing past too held stories of another history: The history of artists. I photographed a legacy of creators. I remember holding their hands. My camera held the stoic gaze of fantastical beings. They are vanishing. Their remains are hidden like whispers inside my archives.
Brice Marden
The archives define me to some degree. I rise every morning as if I am in a hurry to meet and welcome my friends past and present on the playground. Many had famous names: Miro, Johns, Warhol, Moore, Haring, Basquiat, de Kooning, Noguchi. Less famous: Pavia, Cavallon, McNeil, Tworkov, Pepper, Graves and thousands more are part of my history. The memories and images are my historical artifacts. I celebrate the living past in the kindest way.
I remember photographing Keith Haring. One half dozen images later I was done. There was an assembly line of photographers almost like paparazzi waiting for their turns. They sat with a dozen cameras and a thousand rolls of film. Nobody knew that Keith’s flame was about to be unexpectedly extinguished. While I was putting my equipment away, Keith asked if I was finished and do I need anything else? I looked at him, and the painting behind him. I took a quick two step to the canvas, and slid the back of my hand across the finished work…and sauntered out. The artist posed. I stole a surreptitious caress. It was the only way I could say goodbye to the day.
I have teetotal-led and exhaled a few cigarettes with thousands of people. I have become acquainted with what the last breath might look like. Yet I always snapped just the few needed frames and left the session behind me and marched forward like the ambitious misguided dreamer Fitzcarraldo.
The blank canvas was something the aged struggled with. I always thought of a blank canvas as euphemism for a rallying cry: something to challenge my day. My life has been imbued by life experiences. Shooting portraits produced indelible images that brandished my life’s visual sensibilities. I celebrate the fascinating chaos that it was, like surfers stepping into liquid.
Keith Haring