The Halls of Science: The Nobel Laureates And More: Part One

March 04, 2021

#Darwin Centre: #Natural History Museum #CFMoller #architects

I remember many portrait sessions with scientists (Nobel laureates and more).Collectively they reminded me of a character from Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway. Dianne Wiest’s character would cushion her hands up against John Cusack’s character and whisper in quiet decibels “Don’t Speak, Don’t Speak”.

I always thought the scientists were afraid I would try to have a mano y mano about their work. I was obviously not up to the task. Dozens of scientists later, I realized I had been thrillingly enlightened through osmosis by my one on one experiences. My mind remembers those geniuses fondly, but mostly like an encounter with the whirling Taz (Tasmanian Devil from the Looney Tunes).

I remember one morning driving from Los Angeles to La Jolla. The dreamy California wave sets along the coast pushed my mind into a bit of the divine. It was a bit too early to see (even for me) the world through Hunter S.Thompsons’ kaleidoscope eyes. So I dreamed of dreams to come until I arrived at my destination.

I was nearing the Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman’s Neuroscience Institute.

I did imagine as I drove up the La Jolla hills seeing Patrick McGoohan from the television series “The Prisoner”. He seemed to be wildly waving “turn back!! danger!”.

His Sci-fi series was among the most visually enigmatic television series. This Neuroscience Institute reminded me of the “Prisoner”. It was mind popping beautiful and alluring like science fiction tv/movie sets all wrapped up in one.

My imagination conjures up the bizarre with the snap of a finger. I am sort of inexplicably a living “Walter Mitty”.

I received the V.I.P treatment from my host. Dr. Edelman was a prince. He was famous for (among other things) his discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. Yes of course, I was incapable of comprehending his achiements. But like the thousands of portraits I have made, it has always been about making a human map about people on the planet who had made a difference.

I think at first Edelman was a bit suspicious about how I was going to capture his portrait and his institute. I was very much in love with his surroundings. I did not at first let on, that the experience felt a bit like the movies “Ex Machina” meets “Frankenstein” meets “The Time Machine”.

I have always been excited by what may be hidden in plain sight in the “Halls of Science”I have photographed. There is so much mystery and excitement to behold. I think my camera was tickled with anticipation to create even more mystery. I kept Dianne Wiest in mind, and began to make some pictures that the Institutes’ architects (Billie Tsien and Tod Williams) and Dr Edelman would appreciate far beyond my enthusiasm.

#NeuroscienceInstitute #LaJolla #Architect #BillieTsien #TodWilliams

Later that afternoon, I drove down the hillside. When I got to the bottom I paused long enough to reflect on my day. I went for a quick swim at Black’s Beach. I saw my day as an accumulation of emotional layers bursting with excitement. I dove through the breaking waves relishing my decades of photography.

:::::::::

I remember one day, flying over Switzerland. I was on my way to photograph the scientist Carl Djerassi. He created the key ingredient for the Oral Contraceptive (The Pill).

I was pre-visualizing my portrait session. I began to think about my photography experiences. Every time I snap a picture all of my memories and ideas are compacted into one frame. In a visual way it is akin to the Swiss CERN’ (Large Hadron Collider). When ideas or atoms or any ingredients are combined, something greater comes from it. Maybe the above is a bit sophomoric thinking and silly, but why not run with the truth?

I drove with a bit of madness from Geneva to Djerassi’s hotel near the Swiss Alps. The dead of winter is not for the feint of heart. Slipping along the ice and skimming along the snowy banks was crazy. But I was late, and I had a limited time to capture what I needed to get. I knew if I accelerated, I would get to my destination a bit sooner. “Vroom”.

My arrival was a bit anti-climatic. I knew Djerassi was quite wealthy from his discovery and other investments. I was ushered in to a small hotel room. Carl sat under a single police interrogation styled light. He studied his watch and said, “you are late”. So without much ado we danced. Sometimes, I felt like Tevye on the rooftops. Sometimes I feel like dancing the Capoeira.

It seemed that we immediately built a friendship. I was traveling for photography. He was traveling to liberate his identity. When I met Carl, I could hear him moan like Marlon Brando , “I coulda been a contender”. It was something that pervaded the Djerassi’s session. He wore his burden on his forehead. He shoulda won the NOBEL! Carl was a fabulous session.

#CarlDjerassi #contaceptive #ThePill #Scientist

Somehow any conversation weighed down by the Nobel issue was eclipsed by something more euphoric. In a way he just wanted to engage in my life as I wished to do with him. The genius told me he had fifteen minutes when I arrived. But two hours later we agreed to say goodbye.

Many people have felt comfortable commissioning me because I don’t gossip. It is the acknowledged law of the land that you don’t reveal the intimate conversations.

Carl did share many stories about people we had in common. His tone was pure admiration.

It was the dark of night when I got back into my car. I realized that I had met Marlon Brandos “contender” from “On the Waterfront”. But more importantly, I met a great intellectual icon in the company of the Swiss Alps. I raced along the dangers of winter’s darkness back to my Geneva comforts. Is there a better way to reflect upon photography’s pleasures?

#Rosecenterforearthandspace #americanmuseumofnaturalhistory #neildeGrasse #polshek #ToddSchliemann #architects

Architecture’s Wings

February 17, 2021

Detail of AT&T Center, Chicago | Sitting outside my hotel room

When I was about twenty years of age, I was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles along California’s Highway One. Just south of Big Sur, a glint of something foreign caught my eye. I pulled over and grabbed my camera. I quickly realized this ramshackle shack sitting idly between two trees abutting the beckoning Pacific Ocean.

As I got within arms reach I found myself staring at thousands of Monarch Butterflies clinging to the trees and the shack facade. I could not distinguish between a Monarch Wanderer or the Tiger Monarch. I just knew that this Monarch phenomenon was a true color vision. It was a comical moment. They paused because of me and I because of them. It was like a movie western, who would draw first.

This rest stop in their migratory journey was an eye popping present to these young eyes. It was hallucinatory. I quickly took some snaps and proceeded to the cliff. A sunny gaze over the Pacific is one of life’s best treats. I made my way back to the cabin. I pushed open the front door. I stepped inside. My feet felt a wee bit of crackling. I froze. In every direction there were thousands of Monarchs like wallpaper covering every inch of space. From ceiling to floor, wall to wall, I was alone in this two room universe. My camera snapped wildly. I had recognized the sylvan charm that mysteriously entered my mind that day. It felt like a paramedic’s electrical jolt. My eyes espied untethered light streaking across the universe. My eyes imagined the northern auroras whispering secrets across the skies. Years later I discovered that those precious images have inconceivably disappeared. What has stayed with me till this day is that visual moments in photography are irreplaceable.

The above is obviously filled with a range of passions. Why not confess to the reasons photography has touched my heart. My cameras have been attached to my eyes for forty years. I have engaged the design of architecture from top to bottom. I have walked along side of its path, and caressed the veneer as if I was caressing a canvas. Magic sometimes hides in plain sight, you merely have to feel its pulse. You have not created a photograph until your mind finds itself in a tizzy.

A recent Tokyo commission from the fabulous Kengo Kuma allowed to to shoot his works, and commune where Japan’s modern architecture’s soul lived.

I raced afoot across Tokyo breathlessly (not unlike Godard’s Jean-Paul Belomondo).

I needed to freeze frame Kisho Kurokawa’s Capsule Tower before nightfall. I scattered hundreds of Japanese pedestrians in my path while racing against the descending shadows to capture the light before darkness on Kenzō Tange’s Yoyogi National Gymnasium. I remember the morning I realized that I would only have one opportunity to photograph Tange’s Sekiguchi Catholic Church sans people, I paid a taxi driver handsomely to arrive before Mass.

While on commission, I own “god’s” light. The time I take is the time I have to discover what the structure has to offer, what the architect might be suggesting. But while recording centuries of the built environment, sometimes the camera only has seconds.

Louis Kahn”s Bangladesh National Parliment

Commissions fortunately have enabled me to travel across continents. That is the way I have encountered greatness. I met Louis Kahn’s eyes in Bangladesh, Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil, and Frank Lloyd Wright in America and many more breathless design celebrations.

Oscar Niemeyer’ Casa das Canoas in Rio de Janeiro

When the need arises to capture history’s architectural moments, countless treasures, I pause merely to realize my good fortunes.

The untethered expressions brings me back full circle to the resting Monarchs. Because of that lasting California memory, I have wrapped my eyes around architecture the way they have wrapped their wings along the lowliest ramshackle shack. They too paused on their way to a greater moment.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum New York

Hollywood Beckoned: Celluloid Reveals The Lives of Others

February 10, 2021

#RobertRichardson #OnceUponATimeinHollywood #KillBill #platoon

I remember my college film class, sitting alone in darkness, critiquing dozens of movies with my light stylus pen.

I remember sitting in darkness for seventy-two hours straight watching a celebration of fifty years of Academy Award winners for Best Picture.

I remember sitting in a dark theater watching twenty-four hours of classic animated shorts.

I remember a thousand films and hundreds of movie theaters where I sat alone in the front row with my boxes of Chocolate Malted Milk Balls.

I don’t feel alone when I commune with the film gods who have given me a voice and shared a vision. I was happy.

Movies have always helped me to see the light, when I was alone. Movies became a feast of visual friends that spoke to me in a new and private language. I have utilized that intimate language into a companionship with all of my camera apparatus.

I have become like a gyroscope spinning atop cresting mid-ocean waves rhythmically tracking the lives of others across continents with my camera. It often seems like cinematic euphoria.

During my portrait years I had photographed hundreds of the collective Hollywood/Los Angeles cultural cognoscenti. My cars and motorcycles carried me from Malibu to Pasadena and surprising stops in between. Every sojourn through the hundreds of cities my camera has seen offered me the opportunity to see more than was intended. I felt like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne taking their weekend Los Angeles discovery drives.

#BillyWilder #SABRINA #Witnessfortheproscecution #Thesevenyearitch

One of my great mornings that turned into an afternoon delight was spent with the brilliant movie director Billy Wilder. We spent our session never once speaking about his movies. He shared stories about art collecting passions. He shared stories about introducing the likes of Kirk Douglas and more to the art of collecting.

After a few hours into the afternoon we shared a beer and a few sandwiches. We stood in front of a collection of Giacometti, Kirchner, Picasso and more. I felt I was part of a travel adventure into the art collecting world equivalent of Tolkien’s Hobbit. His intimate narratives were about worlds that are long gone. His compelling stories left me breathless and passionate for more stories, more art.

My Eyes On Fire: I Met Hollywood Gentle Magicians

The Hollywood experience that set me afire was a call from a Los Angeles magazine. They asked me if I could/would photograph five contemporary cinematographers; Robby Müller, Robert Richardson, Frederick Elmes, Barry Sonnenfeld and Jan Kiesser.

#FrederickElmes #BLUEVELVET #ICESTORM #Riversedge

I never speak for my subjects; for me the challenging experiences were life changing. It is difficult to just be yourself when you are trying to impress the film makers who would collectively influence thirty-years and more of movie making. These are cinematographers who have worked with/for Wim Wenders, Tarantino, Ang Lee, David Lynch, Coen Brothers, Oliver Stone, Scorsese and many more.

This was a dream assignment. They were visual geniuses. I was a rookie against Michael Jordan. It was as if I sat across from the chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov, (which I have done) overmatched.

For four days I danced around them with my cameras. It was a class in technique. They saw my moves coming at them. They sensed my lighting. They knew what my lenses would expose. I fought to surprise them. I challenged everything I knew to find an opening, to make a difference. I felt I needed to impress them. I never felt I accomplished my goal. But.

#BarrySonnenfeld #BloodSimple #MillersCrossing

I listened foremost. I knew they wanted me to succeed. Surprisingly each film man had advice. They had stories about successful failures, and magical surprises in their own work. Sometimes it felt like their mental telepathy was quietly whispering a plan. I listened. Filmdom’s camera men were intentionally or not enlightening my vision. All I had to do was make an interesting photo. Ha!

The epiphany that spoke to me years later, was that I had a great masters class into the art of seeing. Embrace it.

A magical sparkling of stardust was shared by better Merlins than I will ever be.

THE BRITISH INVASION: NEW YORK CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS UNDER SIEGE

January 25, 2021

The life that I chose is to photograph a world that is not mine. And to learn of lives not mine.

1984: MY FINAL BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS

Brian Urquhart : former Under-Secretary-General to the United Nations 1984

British “Body Snatchers” had swallowed up the overlords of New York Culture: The concert halls, the museums, auction houses, Intellectual magazines and rogue magazines were seemingly all led by Brits. It was a bit suspicious. Alone, I embarked on a journey to investigate the institutional elite.

I was a cultural and intellectual neophyte. It never occurred to me that an education and intellectual awakening was about to occur. The Royal Realm was ripe for investigation. Mission Impossibles’ Bruce Geller so presciently suggested, that if I chose the mission, intrigue awaited. Numerous portraits later, I was rewarded with a mosaic of cultural enrichment.

I have lived inside a child’s mind for a lifetime. I have learned to swear like a cantankerous old man. I have learned to dance like Baryshnikov. I have felt the power to stand up to fifty foot waves and to wander alone in the darkness of remote jungles. I tell myself many things. Though, I tell myself a single truth: Prepare to meet life’s challenges naked and on fire. The battles of the heart live in my every waking moment. The life that I chose is to photograph a world that is not mine. And to learn of lives not mine.

My list of portrait sessions had been chosen by a consortium of New York cognoscenti. My first stop was Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations Brian Urquhart. I planned to meet him at his United Nations office. Today I can say the old saying applies, “If I knew then what I know now...”.

What an intriguing life this “Le Carre” personality would mean to me today. Espionage, torture and diplomacy were words attributed to Mi-5 and Mi-6 James Bond types. Certainly nobody says, “Bond,James Bond”. But I would have loved to have heard, “Urquhart, Brian Urquhart”.

He led me on a personal tour of the United Nations. I was quickly reminded of my sixth grade civics class. I realized I should have listened more and not have flirted with so many girls in my classroom. Brian Urquhart was gracious beyond his duty. I was a privileged soul that day. Later he invited me for cocktails at his home.

We met the next evening and had more than a few generous pours of scotch in stemless sterling silver goblets (oh, the significant things we remember). We chatted for hours about life in his diplomatic world and shared a few stories about people we knew in common. Mostly my ears were delightfully burning while being enraptured in his living plight and flight across continents. It was a wonder to me that someone as poised and engaging had spent a life in conflict and more, (as he asked to me)“another scotch?”. He was too alive, too fabulous too richly entertaining. I left that evening with eyes at half mast, and my youth full of tomorrows anticipation.

When it comes to women, I have always been like a 12 year old boy gazing at stars in the universe. I had spoken to Kathleen Tynan on the telephone. I had not ever seen her. I knew just a bit about her. Everyone said, “you have to photograph

Kathleen”. And then her apartment door opened.

I was equally 12 and 100 with infantile disability. I couldn’t talk. It was a presence that I had not yet experienced. I had met many fascinating people, maybe hundreds. It wasn’t poise alone. It was that I knew Kathleen had thousands of conversational intellectual intercourse with a multitude of people from all over our planet, and I had not. She stood in the doorway, and her eyes said “now what do you have to say for yourself”.

We surprisingly spent a couple of hours talking about anything and everything. I seemed to be having a private conversation with myself about her presence. I was in a cloud. Weeks later I brought over the images from our shoot. She greeted me in a glittery sequin dress that the 60’s “Go-Go Dancers” would have worn. Her dress was too short to talk about.

We sat on the sofa looking at my portfolio. I was beyond nervous. Her children arrived. Time for me to go. We never spoke again. But I have always wondered what Kenneth Tynan(famed London Journalist/critic and Kathleen Tynan (famed journalist/novelist)and the Tynan children’s lives were about. It was not of my world. Kathleen was the one to photograph. In those days she was the fascinating talented “Body Snatcher” I was looking for.

Many classical music pieces make me feel like I am floating in the middle of an ocean listening to the waves clap chords down to the “Challenger Deep” and inversely swash atop any shoreline in the world. The music is always about ivory keys, and zen searching strings. Musical notes/chords have always enabled my dreams to dance in alternate universes. One day when I asked YoYo Ma to explain the magic. He said, “you just need to listen”. My naïveté always gets the better of me.

I believe that Mickey Mouse is the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. I often dream in Fantasia’s colors. So when I arrived for my session with famed conductor Sir Jeffrey Tate at his home, I was sure his costume would be a swirl of exotic colors and his walls would be awash in saturated surrealism. Fortunately he was a prince in black cashmere.

My stories unexplainably always involve cocktails. Jeffrey suggested a glass of wine. I made myself comfortable on the living room sofa and prepared my lights and cameras while Tate’s fingers teasingly floated over the piano keys with a Mozart piece.

He moved about the apartment chatting with me as if we had been friends forever.

If he hadn’t winced for a second I would not have noticed his spinal curvature. His eyes quickly caught mine. He didn’t mind sharing and explaining. He just asked that I don’t make it part of the photograph.

The afternoon was almost too polite for me. He shared some stories about some coming of age conducting experiences. Stories about his mentor Georg Solti. I think he realized I was a bit culturally lost. But with a handshake and a bow, he told me he was leaving tickets for me to see his performance at the Metropolitan Opera House that evening. He suggested we should meet up afterwards. He would be delighted to introduce me to people I should want to know.

I remember how I felt crisscrossing New York City in those days. It was like playing checkers with people’s lives substituting for the Reds and the Blacks on the board.

My Black and White photographs turned out to be an anomaly in my career. To this day, I have no memory of why I chose the film. Just maybe I was reaching back to my appreciation for photography’s great history. An homage that visually was a “Remembrance of things Past”. British influencers stole my heart in 1984 with kind hearts and a wealth of living histories.

A Million Haitian Flamboyants

January 07, 2021

When I was six-teen I drove down a famous canyon in Los Angeles. I was heading toward the Freeway over-pass. I made a hard right. It was like a “Pittsburgh Miter Square. I went back up the canyon and accelerated ten miles per hour faster. I made the hard right. I went back up the canyon a third time, and came toward the hard right at fifteen miles per hour faster. It turned out that sixty was too fast. The hard right won. The Porsche spun endlessly. The car rolled back into the guard rail. I think I blacked out. When I focused I popped out of the car and danced along the yellow line as if I was auditioning for the role of Jets or Sharks in Westside Story..

The next week I repeated the exercise in a Jaguar. Then after three spin outs, I decided to go for the record. The heavier car raced down the hill. It started to flip. I think I blacked out again. I remember finding myself at the other end of the overpass. Not a scratch but an exhilarating heart rate. I discovered what being alive meant to me. A number of years later I was still chasing my adventures at record speeds. The speed spoke to my passions. I knew life as it was had another level/gear. As they say, “it should”.

@MercedesBenzMuseum @UNSTUDIO The first model

Many years later I was gunning my engine in a rental car along the rain drenched Autobahn from Berlin to Stuttgart. The engine was a type that sounded like it ran on rubber bands. Every Porsche, Mercedes and more were passing me illegally on the right. My speedometer was reaching numbers that didn’t exist. I couldn’t go faster, but for almost six hours I became a melding of Robert Mitchum’s gleaming into the moonlight from Night of the Hunter, Jack Nicholson’s demon in The Shining and just possibly a gurgling Dr. Frankenstein’s reveling “It’s Alive”. I sat on the end of the drivers seat with chin on the wheel screeching for speed. I am pretty sure I inherited the need for speed from my dad.

Hours later I sat in front of my Stuttgart hotel. My foot was exhausted from thrusting on the accelerator. I headed for a restaurant that served large plates of Currywurst and Hot Spätzle. I sipped on a few shots of whiskey and liters of beer. In bed that night I pre-visualized what my camera might see tomorrow. Life was as it should be.

I made my way to the Mercedes Benz Museum in the rain my first morning. I was shooting for my book, Portraits of the New Architecture/2. I needed the rain to disappear before I shot the exterior. I sauntered inside to catch a glimpse of “Benz” history. It was exhilarating. I stood quietly next to a 1901 baby and glanced across the platform to a twenty-first century prototype. This was a feast for my eyes. The Interior was a combination of a “John Wick” movie meshed with “Metropolis”. It was future/past seductive.

For two days I prowled Stuttgart like a wounded cat. I couldn’t get a break from god’s rain. I returned to the museum daily every time I saw a break in the clouds. Sometimes I would wait for five or six hours not wanting to miss the Gloria Swanson closeup.

When a photographer knows what moment he/she is waiting for there is nothing that can move the eyes. Nightfall would come. Three hapless days. I waited, I waited.

The following afternoon arrived with a bit of hope. With a prayer I saw cloud dispersement. I had seen every Mercedes in the museum. But I still needed just one exterior shot. The Mercedes Benz Museum is like a 21st century ode to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Modernist Guggenheim. I earnestly invoked my cat’s mental telepathy powers. I stood where I needed to stand. I caught the arched rainbow streak across the sky like a million Haitian Flamboyants cascading from the heavens to earth. For a few seconds I understood that there was nothing I wouldn’t do to “make” the photograph that mattered.

I remember the architect told me I was “lucky”. My mind was asylum mad. I had done everything I needed to do to capture an impossible moment. As the sun appeared my eyes welled up. I exhausted all possibilities to succeed.

The Brawling Brutalist With A Heart

December 18, 2020

Pritzker Prize Recipient Paulo Mendes da Rocha

São Paulo Subway station: Patriarch Plaza

When I was 7 years old I spent a summer at a day camp for boy’s. Among other things, I learned to Box.

When I was 9 years old my parents sent me to a summer camp in Canada. I learned to kiss my first girlfriend. I learned to sail and canoe across lakes. But I remember that I learned again to Box.

Boxing had a special allure for me. Maybe because I grew up watching “Ali”. The magic and inspiration that he brought to a child’s imagination was life expanding. Until he lost in a “fixed” fight to Leon Spinks. After that I moved on to the ferocity of Mike Tyson. But I really didn’t have the stomach for digesting my opponents ears.

I remember the famous casting director Marion Dougherty suggesting that I look her up in Hollywood. I asked her what I would do. She said that she would take care of that. “I like the way you are, not a blemish”. The Director George Roy Hill nodded.

I was waiting tables at the time. All of my fellow waiters were aspiring actors. They thought I was nuts not to take up her offer. Can you imagine that If I was truly handsome, I would have been a movie star. Maybe I could have played a boxer in a film. A childhood fixation coming to life on the silver screen?

My only dream was to become a photographer.

I suddenly heard a bang. I realized I was strolling through wild São Paulo alone. My mind was adrift in a fog of fantasy and memory. The rains and the clouds screamed for me to find shelter. I awakened to the consuming pollution and the city’s grimy immersing poverty. The stormy weather quickly vanished. I was alone in silence.

I found myself standing in front of a subway station designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. It was like something out of a movie. I saw these explosive lights racing up to the clouds. I drew my flash gun, attached it to my camera....and “POP”. One frame, one fraction of a second recorded the type of photograph I dream about everyday on the streets of any city, any place in the world. Too old for pirouettes, I danced on my tiptoes. This was São Paulo, anything can happen here.

I was here to shoot the portrait of Paulo Mendes. He was a recent recipient of the Pritzker Prize. My images would find there way into my book “Portraits of the New Architecture 2”. More importantly, unbeknownst to me the next two days would be another affirmation as to why I am a photographer every waking moment.

My assistant and I arrived the next morning promptly as promised at the architects’ studio. It was the start of something precious.

Paulo greeted me with a “bob and weave”. “Your so tall”.

For the next couple of hours he would talk about his work and continue to look me up and down like you might a Sequoia. It was very entertaining.

His studio reminded me more a high school mathematic or science lab. It was tiny with chalkboards and sketches. It seemed to hold the scribbling of a madman or maybe an Einstein. I chased him around like Frazier chased Ali around the ring. The angle was close. I think we were both exhausted. I know my assistant Koji was. He towed some lights around that I never used.

Paulo invited us to his apartment to meet his wife and a bite of lunch. This was a great beginning. His prototype “Paulistano Armchair” winked at us like the ‘49er Gold Miner who had found his first nugget of the Gold Rush and a giant bear stood across the banks of the river. There is always a bigger question.

Paulo’s wife Helene called for lunch. The four of us chatted about everything and nothing. Paulo became anxious like a formidable middleweight stirring to get back in the ring. I sat in the chair with a cup of coffee following lunch. This was history for me. My agenda as a photographer has been to touch history. It was time to get a move on.

We set out for a tour of São Paulo. I reminded myself of the Brancusi myth. He marched from Romania to France to discover his purpose an an artist. I remembered the Tadao Ando myth. He marched across Europe to engage and discover the greatness of architecture. In real time I saw Paulo Mendes lead his devoted followers across his Brazilian São Paulo. His real life experiences mattered.

A Mysterious image inside the Sculpture Museum

We saw “Niemeyer’s, Lina Bo Bardi’s and more. But most importantly we saw Mendes share the streets of São Paulo like an anthropologist might share the findings of the French Chauvet Caves. Brazilian preservation and everything prehistoric mattered to this fighter. We were immersed in the finer points of everything Paulo Mendes. A dreamy education that was just beginning.

The afternoon ended. We made our way to a local restaurant for dinner. After, he insisted on walking us to our hotel. The night fell and wild São Paulo descended. Hundreds from the squalor of backstreets approached. Mendes motioned to us. We were to follow his bob and weave through the open plaza. His boxer stood front and center. If I was to name the moment, it would be the Paulistano Dance. We arrived at our hotel. Paulo reminded us to meet him at the appointed hour tomorrow. “Stay safe”.

That night I received a phone call from the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorretta.

We were trying to negotiate a commission outside of the city. A house he designed for unique clients. It never worked out. He asked me how I was enjoying São Paulo. I spoke about Paulo Mendes, and my fantastic moment in Brazil. I mentioned the city was like a Brazilian Los Angeles. It has much to offer. I try to grasp what I can in life’s minutiae.

The next day we met at the home that Paulo Mendes da Rocha built for his family. The rest of the day as we toured his designs we considered what his vision might mean to the greater São Paulo and a greater Brazil. We had a master class in architecture in a few hours. Our heads were spinning with visual purpose.

The morning departure: My assistant Koji was to take off for Tokyo, and I was to return to New York. Before we left behind some of the São Paulo mysteries and more, we looked at each other with that expression that could only be read as; “what just happened”.

It is rare when people share what they can share. But when they do, life as it is supposed to be whispers into your heart for a lifetime.

Balthus: I CHASED THE ARTIST INTO THE NIGHT

December 03, 2020

I stood by my car door. I made a sinuous pirouette. For a great moment I felt like the great George Orwell. I was about to hit the “road” to and pay “homage” to. Sometimes I think my sole purpose as a photographer is akin to a surfer stepping into liquid: To define the heart of engagement. I was about to embrace it all.

I arrived in Geneva from Paris. Vanity Fair Magazine had arranged a photo session with one of the 20th Centuries most intriguing artists. Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, commonly known as Balthus. He had nibbled at my visual aesthetics for quite sometime.

God’s canvas was the universe as some say. But Balthus’s was a few square feet. Imagination is a gift from the universe, but a canvas is a gift to a handful from each generation.

Balthus lured you into the canvas as Peter Greenaway lured you into the final meal from “The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & Her Lover”. You inadvertently saw what Balthus saw, you inadvertently tasted Greenaways’ finale. Human nature lives luridly in the Balthus oeuvre.

Alexander Liberman: The Quintessential Creative Director for Condé Nast and the second half of the 20th century

Pierre Matisse: The pre-eminent art dealer of the second half of the 20th century

Before I shifted into gear I took a second to remind myself that two of America’s cultural elites arranged this moment. ALEXANDER LIBERMAN, the creative editor of Condé Nast long before Anna Wintour. And one of the worlds pre-eminent art dealers PIERRE MATISSE (Henri Matisse’s son). I was locked and loaded with a cultural army to protect my interests.

I took off in the Swiss January snow. Geneva to Rossiniere is a cultural shift likened to tectonic plated shifting. It is almost like traveling through the melting pot of middle earth. So much is the same but so much feels like an abyss apart.

For one cultural second I was stepping into Jack Kerouac’s rant. His “Satori in Paris” had been a huge influence on me. He searched for his family identity. I was questing for accomplishment. His flask of Remy Martin by his side was now mine. I drove fast toward my engagement. The snowy ride spit up visions of the “White Walkers” (from the Game of Thrones). Fear and anticipation vibrated throughout. The nip of Remy served me well. I became a bit dreamy but a bit more excited.

I used to use the word Vroom to jumpstart almost all of my photography engagements. A bit of mental acceleration with of course some “Remy”. I raced through this road trip. I have traveled Switzerland from west to east, north to south. The mountains the valleys the rivers and so much more have been stamped on my brain. It has been an amazing visual history that will find a home in my obit one day.

I arrived in Rossiniere. I was to meet my dream ghost, Balthus. People who knew Balthus, knew Balthus. I did not. My brain spun wildly in my rental car. How was I supposed to be? I had photographed hundreds of portraits by that time. Yet this was my ghost. I needed to find Balthus. I needed to capture history like no other. My visual mission was to connect our cultural history from my life and lives before and lives to follow. I was mapping the topography of the twentieth century. I was passionately looking for me in this moment. I desperately needed to succeed.

Balthus’s wife Setsuko greeted me at the front door. I gingerly entered the “Grand Chalet”. I knew this was a magical moment, but not until much later did I realize the significance.

I met the master. The three of us went into the living room for some tea, I had promised that I would show a small portfolio( Dekooning, Noguchi, Nevelson, Jasper Johns, Miro and more). He apparently was expecting Picasso, Henry Matisse and more. I am sure he knew that they died before I was born?

We had a delightful exchange. Then into the dining room where I sat next to their 8-10 year old daughter. The four of us enjoyed a terrific 3 course meal. We easily chatted for a couple of hours. Balthus looked over at me and excused himself.

Quite a bit of time passed. Out of the blue Setsuko explained that Balthus has decided not to pose for the portrait. Maybe if I were to return in a week or so.

I suddenly morphed into the roster of Marvel Comic characters. More specifically the Hulk. My celebratory moment diffused in a few words. I raged internally. This had never happened to me. I was obviously ill prepared. I stalked, I ranted. The cage door had opened and my capture from Safari had escaped. The cat had disappeared into the darkness.

Suddenly as if a cool wind from the north captured my racing heart. “Setsuko, will you allow me to shoot your portrait?” I put up a good front. I produced something I was pleased with. The trailers in my eyes kept flickering as if it was Balthus teasing my camera. I prayed for him to appear. He never did.

I left for my car. He had to be somewhere. But he wasn’t.

I shifted gears past the “White Walkers” and other dreamscapes on my return to Geneva.

The next morning I found road rage as a momentary release. I set my mind on new conquests. I placed the throttle on vroom to the South of France (St Paul de Vence, which is an animated story for another time) and focused on Chagall and the unique southern retreat of many. I raced back north to Paris for Dubuffet and Paris.

I ran from one portrait to another with a smile from ear to ear. I realized that I was a wild bird without a guidance system. I had not a mentor. Advice from just about anyone would have soothed my surging angst. But nothing.

I refreshingly realized I had an open canvas to run in every direction. I ran through every nook and cranny that Paris had to offer. I was on fire. If I had died that month in 1984 It would have been the most satisfying death. I had set my goal to become a photographer. I was shooting who and what I wanted. I was shooting the way i wanted to make photographs. It was everything I had dreamed it to be.I stood alone on a corner in Paris.

I stood alone in the world of photography.

I missed the “ghost”. I headed into my favorite cafe for an omelette and frites. A nip of...

I was divinely alive.

Breathless: I Was a Prenatal Jazz Baby

November 12, 2020

Jazz was whispered loudly into my heart from the beginning of my time.

Gun shots rang near by. The police swarmed. We scattered. Count Basie and Joe Williams passionately performed for peace. The 1960’s Watts Concert continued.

I received neuronal signals. Just maybe, even before I knew what it meant, the beginning arrived. I was making history that I was meant to make.

When I was very young I remember passing by the homes of jazz phenoms Ella Fitzgerald and Errol Garner. I always imagined that I could magically hear their notes of music emanating from their yards. Today I realize that my camera has remembered what I thought and what I saw. I have remembered everything I have ever seen.

My formative years had many twists and turns. Music in my life changed many perceptions. My mind was constantly altered by new perceptions from the world I faced. Music defined how my hazel eyes absorbed the world.

I remember sitting with Santana’s “Abraxas” bouncing off my walls one early evening. My father came in. I was sure he was going to tell me to turn the sound down. Instead he sat down with me. He said that he could hear the connection to Jazz. A few minutes later Led Zeppelin united us with“Stairway to Heaven”. A few minutes later we were trading sounds. Many years later my dad called me and I heard my “Abraxas” on his stereo.

Music has had a history in my visual evolution. When I moved to New York, I needed a reason to be. I thought I was alone. My camera was my companion my introduction to the unknown. I had a camera, people wanted to know what it was for me. It was a tool that would not allow me to be alone nor lonely. I hit the streets. My camera was my diviner. My camera navigated how I saw the streets of my life.

My early New York days were embracingly alone on the streets from Harlem to the Village. The days reminded me of Ella and Errol. I heard music. My camera lead me to those sounds. I stepped into every club venue in Manhattan. I crisscrossed the avenues from Lenox and above to the east and west rivers and down to the seaport. I was Peter Sellers in “Being There”tending to his garden. But my mind was a swoosh in a Hyperloop. Nobody spoke to me. But I was alive with exchanges within.

Photography has a funny soul. I never knew what I was doing. I was a bit of a butterfly to light...the light told me how and where to focus. I focused on Dizzy, Miles, Phineas and more. There was not a club door I didn’t know. I didn’t know what it meant to have entre to the city. My camera inexplicably was my access.

Sometimes when I look back, I remember shooting in a venue with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards watching me photograph Big Joe Turner at Tramps. Sometimes I remember Lou Reed watching me photograph Junior Wells at the Mudd Club...or maybe Warren Beatty watching me shoot the Clash at Webster Hall.

I think maybe more uniquely, I remember walking home at 3:am to 5:am along Park Ave. South. A wall of prostitutes dressed in naked outfits telling me how handsome I was. My mind was most times mercifully diverted from their protestations by the revelry in my mind of a night lived. The predawn hours delivered me to Ali’s. Ali was one of Muhammad Ali’s sparring partners. He made sure that Gina, his pizza gal made sure I was handed the best of best pizza slices.

I took 2-3 slices to bed on most nights. I pressed the cheese against my lips feeling the fever from the evenings’ music. I was to be born again with energy for the next night.

I read “The Queen’s Gambit” in 1983. I realized a kinship between me and Tevis’ Beth Harmon. She was me. I was not alone in my thoughts. I too previsualized all my shots/ moves. I had constructed hundreds of images even before I moved the shutter. Ten million of history’s photographs whispered points to consider. I used all of them to save me and send me forward. I was never lost. Alone maybe like “The Man Who Fell to Earth”. Miraculously I began to make images that mattered to me. Thank you Walter Tevis.

The Art of War: A Sun Tzu Dream

October 30, 2020

I have not witnessed war firsthand. But I have walked in the footsteps of giants who have met the fright and friction of war. Those who have witnessed wars’ horrors and have firsthand seen the devils’ imps dancing naked around the maypole drowning our souls.

Calvin Tomkins the preeminent American art critic once wrote, “Calvin Tomkins - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org › wiki › Calvin_Tomkins “Richard, you have photographed almost everyone I have met...”.

Calvin’s note to me means a lot because I always wanted to be where I would discover inspiration. Photographing Calvin in 1988 was a dream.

It is impossible to list all of the amazing artists who have shrilled in askance, why are we at war. Paintings, etchings and more have stood the test of time from Goya to Haring. Artists have set afire alarms in galleries and museums across the globe. Their art breathes with facts and fictions. We witness the artists heroes and demons whilst we wade in political rhetoric and promises.

Mingling with art is like going to church. Great art touches our souls in unexpected ways. When the moments happen, I invoke ungodly incantations. Dancing atop an infernal landscape can shake anyone out of slumbers. The rarity of those moments still surprises me.

I would have loved to have sat alongside Italo Calvino as he weaved together his fact filled fictional Marco Polo recollecting his travels to the Kublai Khan in “Invisible Cities”. A great story I wish to have told. I have other stories to tell. Art will often reveal stories that matter.

The 60s thru the 80s were an influential period in American art. Most New York artists worked and lived in a densely populated area of less than 2 square miles...Soho, West Village, East Village and Tribeca. I stood one day and many days in this epicenter.

The afternoon I entered the LaGuardia Place studio of the artists Leon Golub and Nancy Spero I realized that my maundering about the lack of relevance in the art world had come to an end. Church was in session.

In a lifetime of stories that I share about my communing with cultural icons, I realize how few times the moments are life changing. Spero and Golub’s commitment to art, the artist struggle, their personal struggles can only be met with devout admiration. They saw and engaged the apocalyptic effects of war on our society and in our minds. They trusted that change could be had with the visual arts They were believers in their beliefs.

They took my hands as if on a stroll through the park. They shared their two worlds of intertwined agendas paired together like birds feathers. I didn’t understand their passion, I inhaled it in every moment. We three seemed to dance as they shared their paintings, drawings and so much more. I felt as if a world of art history’s conflict with war was a touchstone to this moment. I felt I was being tested for passage into their inner sanctum. Their artistic war vibrated with every image. I was alive in their fight. So many artists were protective of their works and minds. Leon and Nancy opened a floodgate of personal agendas.

When I left to the village streets to remember my afternoon, I thought about a thousand other artists I had photographed: Louise Nevelson, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein and many more who were so committed to their sanctums privacy, that to be given the key to enter was a gift.

I endlessly rhapsodize about my photography travels and experiences because I realize I have been given a gift. It has only taken me a lifetime to understand how the visual feasts have enhanced my every waking moment.

Chasing Joseph Stalin: The Opera

October 14, 2020

“I never cared where

But to

Be there”

Over a seven year period I made a number of trips to the former Soviet Union. My travels were always predicated on the portraits I was to make. I was in my comfort zone outside of my element. It was a great time the happiest of times. I would dance with my camera, and cast a spell on my unsuspecting subjects. I was Fantasia’s “Sorcerers’ Apprentice”. Soviet cultural elite would host my magic in their homes and studios.

Every afternoon or early evening after I had completed my portrait schedule I stepped onto the Soviet streets. Something always struck me from the dark abyss. Something had vanished. Russia. A particular Russian past was whitewashed from existence. Memories were interrupted. The ghosts of the fallen past had been eviscerated. Still the nightmares lingered. Lenin and Stalin patrolled the citizens minds. Demons lived.

For years I would ask Soviet’s whatever happened to the Revolution’s monumental statues and paintings. Fear and laughter filled the rooms. The eyes and ears of the KGB were everywhere.

I decided I would look for Stalin’s ghost in Georgia. He was the most feared and autocratic Soviet.

My flight from Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) on Aeroflot was a study in fear of flying. I sat in a machine that could fly. It had wings and pilots and a stewardess or two. But the rest would have been an Orwellian “Animal Farm”. The plane was full. My recollection was that there were some 20 passengers including about 5 generals, 3 pigs, 2 goats and about 10 chickens. The runner between aisles was crinkled up to the point the stewardess had to lift the refreshment cart from aisle to aisle.

We made five unscheduled landings in the three and half hour flight. It was either a general or domestic livestock stepping off to deserted landing strips with only mountains on each side. One by one the animals looked over at me and said; “I am dinner tonite please save me”.

Landing in Tbilisi was a starlit moment. An ancient city and a beckoning oasis greeted me. Adventures and misadventures awaited. My translator introduced me to Georgian culture. Tbilisi was a treasure trove of visual delights for my camera. A bountiful of food welcomed me everywhere I went. The city’s cuisine was a savory gift. I remember my eyes capturing persimmons that looked like a panther’s jeweled eyes. Maybe it was a sign that Stalin was near by. I could feel him.

I tried for many days to share my desires and stir some interest in finding Stalin. One of the artist’s I photographed heard my bleat. He offered to show me something special. He would drive me to Stalin’s birth town Gori.

That day was certainly among the most spiritual of my life. He picked me up with my translator in his 1930’s Gestapo styled red Mercedes. We made the hour and half drive with my eyes mingling with ordinary landscape. I did feel like my mind was mirroring Orwells’ Coming Up For Air”. Different agendas different times, but something new was at the end of the road.

Once in Gori we visited a family lost in an alternative history. It was as if Stalin’s ghost greeted me. The only time in my life that I actualized “Alice going down the rabbit hole”.

A world retreated from a Time-Machine that broke down in the 1950s. Maybe this was to be a “Collyer brothers” story. But for me this is why to this day my eyes dream“ I never cared where, but to be there”.

Like most substantive Soviet affairs, the morning started off with shots of moonshine potato vodka. We sat in the kitchen playing ping pong with various translations about Stalin. I stared across the room at two life size “Joe”portraits. The conversation became loudly animated. I excused myself to visit their garden. My eyes were in sensory overload trying to absorb a lifetime of Stalin framed newspaper clippings adorning the garden walls. Maybe the jewel of this paleontologist like discovery was the porcelain fountain statue of Stalin peeing in the pool of water.

I was young I was stunned I was in heaven. I made my way back to the kitchen. It was time to leave. The four Soviets turned towards the life size paintings and gave a “zieg heil” salute to their sovereign. My feet were in exit mode.

My mind was under siege on the drive back. My vodka tears were streaming down my cheeks. I had imagined something more rewarding from my efforts to find the Soviet past. I had imagined something more empowering. Instead my youthful disillusionment remembered another defeating moment. I was inescapably holding the hand of the famed Soviet soprano Galina Vishnevskaya.

We stood together in front of “Joe” and the Kremlin Politburo. One evening she had concluded an exhaustive performance of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”. She was mentally and physically exhausted. She was thrilled that her leader had invited her to the prestigious dinner.

“Joe”motioned her to perform for his guests. She had believed she was an invited guest. She realized she was a mere servant. She performed for her life for her future. Tears poured down her cheeks. Stalin’s alligator eyes smiled. He enjoyed the fear that held the room and Galina prisoner.

My guide returned me to my hotel room. The vodka whispered for me to sleep. I no longer needed to find Stalin. The intoxicating experience would lift me up for tomorrow and everyday that followed.

For the Love of Women

October 01, 2020

The train has always been a place to allow my mind to blend into the rhythms of the clouds. I imagined the sensory deprivation tanks à la the film Altered States.

I eagerly floated my mind between happiness and madness.

It is mostly a great prelude to what I might discover upon meeting my subjects. The pre-visualization is like pre-op before surgery... the mind goes, the body goes.

One afternoon I tested my relaxed discipline on a train to see Eva Zeisel. The ceramic designer was a prized moment for me.

There was a time when just about everyday was a day to make a portrait. I have not decided if those days were made for me to collect memories or make memories. I gladly stepped across the streets of Manhattan. I crisscrossed the globe. I weaved through and around the lives of cultural icons who impacted our lives, my life.

Eva was ninety something, I was forty something. When I arrived at her home/studio, It was if I was a soldier returning from war. Her eyes greeted me as if I was there to rescue her from self-imposed exile. Her aged frame lit up an entire universe. I was aglow. We quickly became acquainted like two lost old souls needing what the other had to share. I knew she would open her past life for me. I knew her story would become our story.

I merely had a camera, Eva had these beautiful ceramic works that looked like dancing heirloom egg shells whispering dreams in the wind. There was grace and beauty that my privileged life has not forsaken. I touched her fragile pieces to try and understand the fragility of her time spent in Russian concentration camps and the passionate urgency of a woman as she stepped towards independence. I would never know the extent of Eva’s nightmares. Her sufferings and eventual freedom became essential to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Eva and Arthur were romantic partners...Oh to be a fly on the wall.

Her passionate life, and ghostly sufferings raced my heart. Her ceramics were a window into her past and a mirror into my present. I have always wrapped my mind around these unanticipated pleasures my memories held.

At days end I found the return ticket to my city. I knew I would never contribute to the world as Eva did. The nearly two hour ride home allowed me to decompress. With a nip from my flask I embraced the words and passions that this gentle jewel shared.

#LouiseNevelson #sculptor #artist #YO_YOMA #GABRIELSOBOE #ENNIOMORRICONE

Louise Nevelson in pictures looked like she was spreading havoc around small villages. She was part fanatic preacher in “Night of the Hunter” and part everything “Patricia Highsmith”. She was the darkness that reigned over children’s nightmares. I imagined her studio to be like a clutch of witches’ cauldrons sending billowing potions into the unknown.

Nevelson had been photographed by all of the great photographers. What was I to make of her madness. I was afraid. And then... I stepped into her Soho, New York studio. An assistant helped me with my bags. I waited in the corner of her studio. Her massive gentle sculptures stared down at me. I waited.

I heard her voice come through the alcoves. Her powers were present. I knew I had heard a similar sound somewhere before. Yes! I exclaimed. Yo-Yo Ma.(Yo-Yo who I photographed not too long ago, had performed Ennio Morricone’s Gabriel’s Oboe) Nevelson’s purr and Yo-Yo’s cello cosmically seemed to collide into one seductive enchantment.

I think Louise saw me as someone to take care of. Her intimidating warmth shattered my impressions. She coddled me. With her powerful embrace, she sat me down. She placed her black cashmere cloak around her shoulders and demanded to hear anything and everything about the artist portraits I had made to date.

I had made hundreds of portraits by this time. I certainly mingled among all styles, all factions of contemporary art history.

Her Yo-Yo Ma reached out and spoke to me. “Richard my dear, you are going about this the wrong way. You are making beautiful pictures, but of who?” Artists I said.

She said, but what is the connection. I said I am making pictures of artists from all different styles and periods. She said you need to become more intimate with your subjects. She looked at my face and said, not to worry you are not my type and even for me too young.

She asked if I play poker. I said no. She said, ok this is what you need to do.

I am going to introduce you to some fellow poker players. If you want to know me you need to know my world.

#louiseNevelson #PatriciaHighsmith #Nightofthehunter #jasperjohns #Mercecunningham #johnCage #RobertRauschenberg #poker ART

I sat by her side drinking a beer. She dialed Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage/Merce Cunningham and maybe five more. She looked at me when she got off the phone. She said, you know what I am trying to tell you? I said, I think so. She said, well get on home and send me some pictures from your sessions.

I said, but what about us. She said, I don’t have anymore time. She looked at my eyes and whispered, make it quick and make it good.

It was the only time that I felt I was out of my element. When I was finished she gave me her hand and said thank you. I said for what? She said for making a photograph that I know I will love.

Zaha Hadid Whispered

September 17, 2020

I sat one afternoon amidst a room of giants. I was not frightened. It was like something that Thomas De Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater) would experience the morning after an “episode”. Dwarfed by unique personalities, I imagined I needed a machete to cut through the axons that ruled my impulses. Life sometimes seemed in flux, but I was in control.

The flock wondered why I was among them. It was an odd moment for me, perplexing for them. My stature in the community was nowhere near theirs. But there was a whisper on the wind that lured me to safety.

Yale University is/was a tremendous institution, at the apex of American education. I was an invited guest to sit in on a series of architecture graduate school reviews. My host/friend, Greg Lynn always thought that a visual perspective, a photographer’s perspective could warrant a valuable suggestion and advice to the built environment. It is a necessity to consider architecture not only for its design and practical applications, but how the world might see it as well. It is a way to communicate with the populace and the future/past. I could not disagree.

I made the journey to New Haven for about 6 years. I was always excited to greet faces from my past, and a creative core: Frank Gehry, Robert Stern, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Wolf Prix, Richard Meier, Greg Lynn, Charles Holland, an amazing gathering of fabulous minds.

The reviews allowed me to encounter the new age of architecture that the graduate students would present. There is something of a primitive fire that arrives under the ass that says, “get a move on little doggie, youth is marching your way.” I constantly felt that I needed to arm myself with the experiences from my past to share with the present future. It was a wonderful stimuli.

So there I sat among Pritzker Prize winners and exceptional architects from across the globe. I looked around at the seated gathering. One in particular who dueled with me from the past was the reigning queen of architecture, Zaha Hadid. Zaha was certainly one of the great creative architecture giants. In a way she was the 21st century’s Oscar Niemeyer.

Herbert Muschamp, former editor of the New York Times once claimed Zaha Hadid one of the best architects of the second half of the 20th century. Zaha was tougher than almost everyone on the playing field. She had all the weapons: Talent, style, vision and hutzpah.

Our earlier encounter was bloody. Every word was a match lit, a reason to spar. “En garde” seemed to precede every exchange. The new meeting at Yale presented a different and surprisingly tender hearted genius. I was caught off guard. She was brilliant. She measured my heart and shared her mind. I knew life seemed surreal from time to time, but this was a trip to the moon.

As we spent the afternoon critiquing the work of a new army of architects. I caught myself looking down at Zaha’s shoes. I remarked how amazing they were. Zaha wore these ultra chic shoes specially designed for her by a world famous house. She gave me a bit of history about the stylish footwear as we admired the students efforts.

Architects are sometimes measured by the shoes they wear. Shoes are oddly a status symbol. The realm of design inhabits many idiosyncrasies. I never asked anyone about this. But the feet had to wear not just Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, or? But absolutely unique to the fashion brand, unless one of the architects was tickling ninety and corrective shoes for seniors were more comfortable.

Simple elegance :: Cincinnati Contemporary Museum of Art

Zaha was a genius. This particular afternoon she seemed to want to treat my ear as a companion. She constantly leaned over and gestured to some student’s work, or conveyed something about one of her colleagues.

The review was coming to an end. Zaha leaned towards me and said I want to tell you something. But you must promise not to share this with anyone! She whispered into my ear! “Now promise, this is between us”.

All of the attendees got up to leave for the day. As Zaha got to the door, she looked back and mouthed, you promised! And then she was gone.

I never saw her again after that day. But the whisper emboldened me...

Art And The Age Of Alcohol

September 08, 2020

“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

Some people say the day Jackson Pollock danced sylph-like adroit his canvas for photographer Hans Namuth was one of the great ballets of art history.

One day someone heard the curdling screams from rape in Lord Byron’s Bell Tower. The young victims’ shattering sounds heard by Percy Shelley across the Tyrrhenian Sea were among the most frightening sounds in literary history.

They say the jazz musician Art Pepper’s finger nails scraping the white chalked walls of the Santa Monica California Synanon asylum, challenged the most psychoacoustic levels known in jazz history.

All of the above share the suggestion of lives consumed by life’s toxic vices beyond the pale. Stories of inebriated behavior originate from 7000 BC til this very second and beyond. A book of unique intoxicating behavior needs to be written. But honestly who has a thousand years to read it.

Maybe alcohol was/is the alluring equivalent to the Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay’s spell for sailors to espy and follow the narrow band of light above the horizons to their death. It seems we are all lured by what dreams may be. Creative forces expect one to find a key in life that doesn’t exist.

My earliest recollections from my life as a portrait photographer are only slightly fogged by the slew of immense pleasures that the company of contemporary art history greatness embraced my waking days for some 20 years.

By the early 1980’s I had photographed many fascinating enigmatics such as Isamu Noguchi, Willem de Kooning, Andre Kertesz and hundreds more. I am not sure if I was lured by their circles of interest, or those inhabitants were slightly interested in me. I guess in this case one can have it both ways.

#ClementGreenberg #artcritic #abstractExpressionism #1982

Clement Greenberg, the esteemed champion of Abstract Expressionism and cantankerous art critic, invited me to shoot his portrait. His New York Central Park West apartment walls were filled with fabulous Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, Pollock of course...and so much more.

The time was 9:30 am. Clement offered me a coffee. Then another.

We spoke about my travels into what was his art world, and becoming mine.

I think the clock said 11:00 am when he came back from his bar with a glass of scotch. He queerly with a fraction of hesitance asked me if I wanted one as well. By 1:00 pm we had about 5 glasses of amber on the rocks.

When I left his home, the New York summer heat flattened me. I slept that afternoon until 4:00 or 5:00. I awoke to what was one of the most enriching memories in a lifetime. Art history on so may levels touched my heart. I was beginning to understand what it meant to be armed by experience.

There are a thousand stories to tell:

James Rosenquist doused me in Jack Daniels and figuratively set me on fire with stories and memories about days before I was born.

Robert Rauschenberg cranked out like a Gatlin gun shots of Jack Daniels across his kitchen counter. We drank a cask of alcohol across a decade of encounters.

Jean Michel Basquiat ordered fire breathing Jalapeño infused vodka by the bottle. We spoke about what mattered for a dozen hours. Neither he, nor I, could remember what that was.

I met thousands of societies’ cultural extraordinaire for many years. Cocktails never had a proprietary hour. I drank a bit with some luminaries. But what I remember most is that each and everyone wanted me to meet them as they were and share their thoughts and creations.

I cherished the literary voice of Christopher Hitchens. He invited me down to Washington DC for a chat, a drink and a portrait. What if I had gone?

California: I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE FEARLESS LIKE JOAN DIDION

August 27, 2020

#Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne 1998

“A world vanishes but does not die, for I have only to become still again and stare wide-eyed into the darkness and it reappears. There is then a world in me which is utterly unlike any world I know of”.

Henry Miller

I was too young to know the truth.

I cannot remember the first time I hitchhiked in Los Angeles. I might have been ten or eleven. It was something that “we did”. I do remember when I was on my way to see a girlfriend. I think we were going to play spin the bottle, or maybe just match our lips together. It was like dancing the “Jerk”, a bit awkward.

I managed a ride. The guy was older. At that stage someone twenty could be fifty to a young kid. We headed south. He was going to take me as far as as I was going. We drove by a few blvds. I was too young to know the truth. His eyes were halting. The vibe in the car was new. His hands were halting. The car stopped at a red light. I jumped out. I ran all the way to my girlfriends’ home. I did not know what halting meant at the time. I was too young to know the truth.

The age was enlightening for a thousand good reasons. Not long after that episode I was standing on Wilshire blvd and 7th street when a car pulled up. “How far are you going?” The actor James Garner said. It was James Garner for gods sake what could go wrong. The Great Escape was my favorite film and James Garner was my 4th or 5th loved star in that film. I hopped in. He too asked me how far I was going. We talked about so many things. I cannot remember a single one. He drove me to my front door. He asked, “do your parents know you do this?” He asked me if he should come in and tell my parents. I said no no. Hitchhiking was my way as a kid. I remember hitchhiking all over the west side.

Not long after, I was with my parents in Watts (South Central Los Angeles) at a concert to heal. The riots (1965) had torn apart the city. Everyone was on edge. It is possible that Count Basie and Joe Williams (and more) were the panacea for our times. My visual education was already absorbing a city’s life. That Los Angeles seems like a long time ago.

The youth in me has since retired.

I was from Los Angeles. I am now from New York. I became like Paladin: Have Camera - Will Travel. The Los Angeles I left behind was an intersect between James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), Russ Meyer( Beyond Valley of the Dolls) and Walter Mosley ( The Devil in a Blue Dress). I have since crisscrossed the globe. I escaped my easy days.

I met Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne for a photography assignment. It was like meeting my future’s past. The life they prognosticated for me was the life I had already led. I did not know it.

Joan and John drove to destinations unknown in Los Angeles. Every weekend they landed in an alien territory just to feel the systolic pressure that inhabited the Los Angeles pulse. They spoke volumes about the magnetism that these experiences brought to the table. It was as if if they heard Homer’s Sirens calling them. Those Sirens caress my ears and eyes every time I return to Los Angeles for work and to revisit my stomping grounds. I have attempted the same challenges in New York. The DNA is not transferable.

My adult eyes are married to my youth. My camera always weds the past with the present. Joan and John awakened in me what I subconsciously knew. Joan wrote about sitting on the hood of her grandfathers truck. He pulled out a gun and shot a rattlesnake. Joan wanted to be fearless like her grandfather. I always wanted my pictures to be fearless like Didion’s words.

ALMOST NAKED IN MOSCOW

August 13, 2020

“The camera is much more than a recording device, it is a means by which messages reach us from another world”.

Cinema great Orson Welles

My mind felt as if I was surfing vapors from magical clouds covered in gold dust. My strides through passport control mimicked the cinematic gait of Sean Connery’s From Russia With Love James Bond. 1985 was filled with many photography firsts. Moscow was waiting.

Driving through endless Moscow squalor to my hotel, my first visual impressions were what President Reagan’s advisors knew...Russia was penniless. If there was gray squalor, it lived in Moscow.

I arrived at the famed Hotel National on Red Square. I exited my taxi with a Fred Astaire pirouette (I can say that. I knew him and photographed him). My eyes touched every Russian detail. I floated inside. Russia was waiting for my camera. One million images would never be enough to capture this historical treasure.

My first breakfast was memorable for the conversational companionship that might have been. The famed actor Peter Ustinov was sitting in my view of Red Square. I was certain once I asked him to move a bit we would become lifelong friends. But instead the presumed MI 6 spy just grunted and moved an inch if that. We had breakfast everyday apart for one week.

I was greeted later that morning by my KGB (Novosti a state run news agency) guide. We visited a government building to deliver an envelope for the Industrialist Armand Hammer. Yes that Armand Hammer (#Occidental Petroleum and more). The envelope glowed in my camera bag from New York to Moscow. I was desperate to unseal the 11x14 package.

Somehow Raiders of the Lost Ark omen came to mind...Be careful what you wish for. Fortunately the government official smiled when I handed him the package and said, “I can see the seal was not broken”. I am positive the envelope contained cash or secret documents.

My Soviet objective was to capture every living cultural figure. I fell thousands or millions short. The hundreds of painters, sculptors, ballerinas, singers, conductors, writers, actors, chess grandmasters I did photograph will stay in my heart until I die.

For six weeks I photographed 3-4 personalities everyday. My personal driver crisscrossed the city. The Samovars fired up smoke signals across Moscow alerting the Russians to my impending arrival. The American was coming. I was greeted with vodka and “Nostrovia” from morning to night.

There was a particular day I might have allowed myself to become too intoxicated. It was “May Day. The celebration of the revolution invaded my Red Square with howitzers, marching soldiers, tanks and helicopters. What I didn’t know was that the “square” would be cordoned off for the event. I still packed my camera bags for a day of photography. I naively went about my day.

After a day of shooting I had to navigate my way back to “the National” around the city circles(rings). Like the planet Saturn, you might need an added centrifugal force to power past each ring. I imagine after quantities of vodka that the Moscow urban master planner, Russian architect Osip Bove romantically set his heart on mimicking Saturn’s rings.

That night there was a dinner party in my honor. I had been shooting from dawn till darkness. My driver would no longer accommodate me. I was on foot. I ran as a camel might for the oasis. I finally arrived at Gorky Street. I was on familiar grounds.

I arrived to find howitzers parked in front of my hotel. I gleefully swung like cheetah from the first one...until a few soldiers advised against that.

I made my way to my party a bit later. It was a great evening that I hardly remember.

Late that night I realized I was lost amidst traces of Saturn’s Rings in Moscow. I imagined what Bove might have dreamed and let the stars navigate my way home.

My pants were for some reason strewn over my shoulder. I had just a few rubles in my shirt pocket.

To be continued...

CHASING SHADOW LINES: The Whale’s Krill

July 29, 2020

The days and nights that held me steady in the middle of the Southern Ocean (Antarctica) was a dream come true. Life seemed frozen in the balance. I waded in the brilliance of a million translucent Krill. I struggled mightily to move amid the swarming shadows.

The depth of darkness freeze framed my movements. I saw shadows that had not been seen before. Suddenly the massive numbers of Krill seemed to be thrust into a gigantic maelstrom that appeared from nowhere. Nowhere might have been 23,000 feet below.

I swiftly realized the frightening whirlpool was thrusting a ninety foot blue whale swirling and twirling it’s elephant sized tongue in every direction.

The whale just as quickly as it appeared vanished into the deep. The Krill had been devoured. All that was left behind in the oceans wake were great spirited shadows as far as the eye could see. I will never forget the enormous baleen plate of this gentle monster emerging from the deep, and immediately diving into the vortex of the sea leaving shadow lines for my eyes to redeem.

Shadows have defined my photography for decades. I have never tried to explain them. Maybe the meaning lies in the volume and subtleties that the shadows emphatically exclaim. Maybe the answer lies in Neruda’s walk with his lobster through the parisian Palais Royale. The lobster is silent, yet knows the secrets of the deep. Maybe as Orson Welles’ archingly warned on the radio,”the shadow knows”.

Steven Holl’s Athletic Center Columbia University

Thousands of my photographs breathe because the shadows work like a magicians sleight of hand. They live in the magic of technology. One just needs to follow the lines. Sometimes they may swirl like in a maelstrom. But other times the shadows are partially hiding a voice, a heart and my mind.

My portraits and my architecture’s design images include shadows that lure one into the web of the photographers intentions. The playful truth stirs the adrenaline everytime I lift a lens to my eye. Forty years of playing the lines of shadows might seem a bit claustrophobic. But every photographer needs an internal PowerPoint.

Many years ago I had a fabulous neighbor. He was the famous tinkerer, tailor and soldiered photographer Andreas Feininger. He was among photography’s most renowned engineer and scientist. He looked for art, but clearly he was a great practitioner for the sake of science. I feel privileged to have had him in my life.

For a number of years we talked about photography as if we were in the science lab together. He was a perfectionist. I was the artist.

Over a glass or three of scotch we would talk about photography for hours. We would talk about the Bauhaus, his brother Lux, his brother the priest, his father Lyonel and of course all of the work he produced for Life Magazine.

His wife Wysse (a Swedish artist who Andreas met at the Bauhaus) would always pour a thumbnail of scotch into my glass. But she never let the glass go empty. We enjoyed our scotch.

Andreas would always critique my new work. “Your photographs live in the shadows. You have created a body of work that is like a puzzle that has no last piece”. I didn’t always understand him. But I loved that he opened the door to his world.

I live and thrive with my memories of my past. Everyday enlivens my lust to live again tomorrow and make a new photograph that will become yesterday.

THREE ARTISTS STOKED MY LIFE

July 16, 2020

Raphael Soyer 1982 in his New York Studio

I have communed with the dead at cemeteries as far flung as Père Lachaise in Paris, Novodevichy in Moscow, and Louis Armstrong in New Orleans. Maybe the inhabitants of more than one hundred cemeteries have ghostly spoken to me as in Dostoevskys’ Bobok

Sometimes you feel the need to hear the dead. Sometimes you need to clearly actualize their passion.The dead I refer to are the thousands of images I am recalling for my blogs. The life that they have breathed into me stay with me every time I manage a single click on my camera. It is the magic the dead share, that maintain the fire to create my future.

When I was a bit younger I wanted my time to reflect the history of art in America. Improbable as that might be, I was visually invoking the great lives of the worlds’ urban whisperers. Why couldn’t my pictures recall the raconteurs: Samuel Pepys, Raphael Holinshed, Boswell and Steele. Maybe I am one screwed-up romantic.

Watching artists being artists was a dream that became a reality. I couldn’t possibly place them in order of significance. I only know that the artists’ works and personalities allowed me to breathe. Years later, my eyes remember these moments as I might imagine one thousand resplendent Quetzal Mayan birds in flight. The jeweled birds dazzled and mingled in my imagination.

Resplendent Quetzal | National Geographicwww.nationalgeographic.com › animals › birds › resple...

When I consider the stories I need to share, I laugh. Certainly millions of episodes come to mind. Fortunately I see the collective process through a magical toy kaleidoscope. No color, no moment left unfettered.

Raphael Soyer was this fantastic diminutive giant. The respect he garnered as an artist was equivalent to a New York Yankee “roll call”. His circle included Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, his twin Moses Soyer and me.

Look into my eyes and you can only see how blessed I was to have the power of art shared with me by artists who whispered passion. I am six foot three. Soyer was a mere few feet tall. But we danced in his studio as Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof might have waltzed along the roof tops. Soyer’s grace and intellect emphatically touched my visible heart with every minute we were together. I never met Sholem Aleichem but I have imagined that his ghost danced with me every step of my way home rejoicing in the pleasures that I gleaned from my Soyer moment.

The next day I traveled to the upper west side to have an encounter with my first naked septuagenarian. I arrived at the home of the artist Alice Neel. We sat down across from each other and she offered me coffee. I caught a glimpse of Alice closely tucking in her nightgown. She speedily asked me if I would like to photograph her naked. I might describe myself as a slightly “wet behind the ears” 28 year old. I politely declined.

My god was I stupid! Alice was famous for her nudes. She was hoping that I would include my nude portrait of her in the pantheon of my art world images. Yes I missed a famous moment. But at that time I was acutely aware of her suicide attempts. I was not stopped by conscience. I felt compelled to merely appreciate the tender moment posed before my camera. After I had said politely that I would not be photographing her naked, she looked me in the eyes, and without a second lost, she lifted up her nightgown and pleadingly asked, ”are you sure”? A million shades of blush passed before my eyes. Her daughter burst in. Silence prevailed. To this day I see the nightgown lifted above her head. My appreciation for nudity has never been the same. Memories are golden.

One fall day I entered the home of abstract artist Robert Motherwell. At the time, he was my “White Whale”. Hundreds of artists had passed before my camera. Why had it taken so long to shoot the portrait of one of the most underrated great artists of the century? Sometimes life presents mysteries that there are no answers for.

I was aware that his ex wife was Helen Frankenthaler. I was aware of many Motherwell stories. I was certainly not prepared for his present wife Renate Ponsold. I was sitting in the living room waiting with coffee in hand for Bob to say he was ready for our session. In walks Renate. She bellows, Why are you photographing Bob, I have several photographs of him? There is no need for another photographer’s portrait.

I rarely spar with other photographers. I have always stated that to have a life behind a camera is a dream. I merely looked up at her and said I am making a book of my own images. She twirled around with a huff, and I never saw her again.

Standing in Motherwell’s studio was like imagining the marriage between the hallucinating Jefferson Airplane gazing out at the Woodstock throngs, and Thomas De Quincey putting to paper his “Confessions of an Opium Eater”. My mind was astonishingly bended in so many ways by his colors and shapes and shadows. I was euphoric. The funny thing is that this great artist couldn’t draw.

He shared with me some of his art school experiences. His professor insisted that the students be able to draw portraits like Cezanne before they move on. One day he looked at his drawings and realized he would never be able to emulate Cezanne. The next day, he packed up his intellectual baggage and became Robert Motherwell; “Abstract Artist Extraordinarie”.

CHRONICLING THE PARISIAN ART WORLD: CIRCA 1983. THE PRESENCE OF CESAR, THE MEMORY OF YVES KLEIN

July 02, 2020

The artist Cesar in his Paris studio 1983

When I stepped into twentieth-century cultural history, Parisian cafes became my intellectual home from the very first moment. I remember lighting up my first Gauloises in Cafe de Flore, Le Dome, Deux Margot, La Coupole and dozens more. Boy did I look handsome. I had the cigarette dangling from my lips like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, like Bogart in Casablanca. I was American cool. The irony was that the French smoked Marlboro.

My twenty/twenty-first century has been like riding visual currents that dance in my mind like the moons’ tidal forces. I have stepped into “rabbit holes” that have run my mind ragged. I have felt at times like my mind has been invaded by a Hunter S. Thompson neurosis. Maybe something more harrowing was at play.

When sanity woke me up, my heart wished I had walked alongside Brancusi step by step to Paris. I just might have created something great in this life too.

My Paris was a place that I thought I could sit among intimate friends and talk about art, politics and girls. The city became home for my camera. It was a place where I eliminated all creative inhibitors. Every morning I would wonder what I would see. Would the camera realize what was triggering my excitement. Certainly this look back in time would be my evidence. I was there to photographically chronicle the art world of Paris. Those immeasurable adventures till this day touch me every time I look though my viewfinder.

Paris was where I first experienced the sensation of gamboling among a coterie of artists. Paris may have been yielding to the New York art world supremacy, but jois de vivre is sublimely french. A young photographer is best suited by discovering the importance of life’s passions before he/she experiences the chaos that awaits the future.

I was introduced to the artist Cesar Baldaccini, “Cesar” by the curator of the Pompidou in 1983. The meeting became for me a James Bond martini, “shaken...”

This volcanic personality awakened me to creative possibilities. He was surrounded by lovers and other strangers. Yet it seemed as if he was only concerned with making my Parisian experience, a life’s moment.

I am always reminded of one of my photography heroes when I think back to that 1983 day. Embedded in my visual history is a story about the Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosea receiving an early commission to photograph the famed Japanese author Yukio Mishima. Upon arriving at Mishima’s home, Mishima asked the budding photographer, “what would you like me to do?”. The youthful Eikoh suggested that Mishima strip down naked and the photographer would wrap him up in rope!! To this day it is an inspiration that I have never approached. I have not yet made the photograph that needs to be made.

Cesar was open to anything. I had photographed noteworthy artists like Jasper Johns Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg and hundreds more. I was still in my creative infancy discovering the photographic equivalent (for what the surfers describe) as the mystical “stepping into liquid”.

For about a week I found myself sharing part of each day with Cesar (the French cinema award is named for him). One day Cesar climbed up to what I refer to as an interior widow’s walk. A perch I sometimes sat to watch him work or cavort among his circle. In his best English asked me if I was going to attend his exhibition at the Pompidou?

A few days later I stood in my “Sunday best” surrounded by a contemporary French cultural elite: Jean Tinguley, Nikki de Saint Phalle, Leanora fini, Pierre Soulages, dealers collectors, curators, and moi! I was young and proud. The night came to an end. Cesar suggested that I come with him and a few friends for any evening finale.

Some people grabbed a taxi. Some walked. It seemed maybe one hundred fanciful personalities had gathered like Fellini s denizens from La Strada on the terrace of the Petit Palais. We wondered what the occasion meant as the clock neared midnight. Cesar waved his arms for us to gather round the balustrade.

A countdown began. We were ordered to look in the direction of the Arc de Triomphe. We heard “One” shouted. From the Place de la Concorde to the Arc... all of the street lights fell dark. Thirty-seconds later, as far as your eyes could see, Paris street lights reappeared in the hue of Yves Kleins most memorable blue as the night became midnight. The mysterious celebration engulfed everyone of us.

Cesar was the impresario that led this particular visual journey among Paris’s cultural elite Klein’s celebrants. The city was blanketed Yves Klein “blue” that night. I was forever elevated to a place where experience was limitless. Life forces, life’s engagements stay with your heart until you die. They remain to protect you and enable you.

Yves Klein “Blue and the arc de Triomphe

Musings on Architecture: It is in the Details

June 19, 2020

Gang, Diller-Scofidio-Renfro, Mayne, Gehry and Kuma.

There is a lot of blubber in architecture. Blubber aside from referencing whales and obesity, in architecture is mostly about architecture that merely builds the same building as predecessors have for an eternity...but sadly offer a mere twist or crown to suggest something new is at hand.
I have photographed thousands of buildings. I have spent days, weeks and years ruminating about the layers of interest a structure suggests, offers, shares with my eyes. When I engage a structure I always feel as if I am entering my own secret garden. It is a place that is private to my eyes. I sometimes think I am a character in Peter Matthiessen’s search for the Snow Leopard. I am alone in my own intellectual wilderness. I see all but I am alone. I am no longer in my Private Idaho, but in a welcoming seduction of craft and art.

Most often for me, I find comfort living inside the the mind of a tiny child experiencing his/her first carnival, first Disneyland staring up at the vendor with the pink and white cotton candy. The eyes are shining with desire to reach out and touch. The child may know what it will taste like, but perhaps something new will be tasted. That is what I feel like when my camera sees architecture of desire. I know what I see but sometimes my mind is ablaze like Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. If the design is electric, I am excited to grab even more than the camera can see.

The hundreds of architects I have photographed have provided me with a window into the best designs and ideas the world is seeing today. I will never see everything I need to see. I will bask in the opportunities that were shared with me. The architects listed above compelled me to think about what photography of architecture means to me.

Coming to terms with the values of the design of architecture is an enrichment that can never be underestimated. These designers have unique agendas that have what Christmas brings every year; A gift. They have a sense of sparkle that ignites the fire within. We admire with jaws dropped. Yes other do as well, but this is one of a series of blogs; patience please.

Photographing entire structures is sometimes a matter of understanding the architects/clients agenda and footprint. I alway stress the need to start with the widest angle and like a lion slowly stalking their prey move in for the kill. The game is about swallowing the entire project and move to where the most enriching detail pauses your breathing. Then slowly reverse your steps. The best photographs speak to what you include and exclude. That is the essence of any photographic narrative.

The endgame is to find clarity.

Clarity is the time Dame Kiri te Kanawa (a story for another time) stood aside a piano in this wonderfully London skylit studio one morning. She was rehearsing for a solo performance. I sat across the studio. I sat in my cotton robe with coffee in hand as she rehearsed a section of two arias. The pianist began. Kiri began. I sat engulfed in the purist cultural experience of my life. The soprano genius invoked some of my best visual aha moments. The morning perfection of sound and light has fed my inspired appreciation of photography ever since.

Languishing In My Paris Bathtub

June 05, 2020

Surrealist artist Marcel Jean 1983Paris 1983 — Surrealist artist Marcel Jean 1983
Paris 1983

I raised my head in a Paris morning, plodding along from my hotel bedroom to my bathroom. The path was steeped in an imaginary bank of clouds.

I stretched my body into the massive bathtub filled with hot water. I hefted a volume of Anne Rice’s Interview With a Vampire in one hand and James Joyce’s Ulysses in the other. A bit of an odd marriage that works my need for escapism and my intellectual spirit.

I opened my bathroom windows to the city rooftops, with Paris fall weather blowing across the heat rising from my tub. The heat and cold managed a foggy stationary front lofting above my body.

The ghosts of Joyce’s Stephen Daedulus and Anne Rice’s Lestat sat on my window sill while I reanimated. They were either guarding my soul or alerting me to an omen yet to be recognized this morning. The morning read was my rite of passage during my Parisian travels. My hours reading were sometimes long and tranquil. But today my ghosts interrupted the tranquility with a motion for me to get along. Yes it was time to hit the streets. I dressed and stepped out to experience the mysteries that will arise. Today I was meeting the fabulous surrealist artist Marcel Jean.

But first, my eyes caught my favorite cheese shop...to buy my favorite saucisse (sausage) in buttered baguette with sharp mustard and agreeable cheese to accompany me up to Sacré-Coeur. My French hotdog in hand, my ghosts in tow I stepped along Rue Bonaparte to Rue du Bac. The route delivers many amusing diversions. Among my favorite was Deyrolle, one of the great companies of entomology and taxidermy in Paris. Not only is it the home of many natural history curios, but sometimes I can feel the ghost of my intellectual hero Walter Benjamin stand with me. We become like two chemical compounds merging into one. My eyes invade Benjamins. We stare into the shop like children teared with wonderment. Benjamin bemoans the loss of the Parisian Arcades. Together we share the passing of time. Our eyes pass from curio to curio imagining the histories to be told, and the lives lost. It is a lovely saddening experience.

All of Paris is the life of fantasies and realities merging before our eyes.

A photographers life is essentially a conversation between a camera and a human being. Maybe I am a bit drunk with life like James Stewart in the movie “Harvey”. One is alone with his thoughts as he/she marches through life. It can be extremely animated, but obviously alone. You hear voices, and watch myriads of people. It remains a great life, that is filled with quirks. Those quirks are filled with moments listening to sounds that motivate your mind and passions. Sometimes just wandering the streets my stride might be driven by head scratching sounds: Little Anthony’s “Hurts So Bad”, Brian Ferry’s “Avalon” or Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher”. “Quirks”.

I summon my ghosts to dance along with me. We pass the Hotel des Invalides, the Sorbonne and a bit of Pigalle before landing in front of Sacré-Coeur. Montmartre Cemetery is a breath away. The walk had been a bit quixotic a bit romantic.

Once I arrived near the Montmartre Cemetery I remembered photographing a half dressed model riding atop a barren headstone... She was dressed like Ludwig Bemelmans illustrated schoolgirl “Madeline”. It was a lame attempt to mimic the photographers Guy Bourdin or Helmut Newton. But that is what young photographers do. Fortunately I moved on towards my own voice.

We went past the cemetery and finally arrived at the home/studio of Marcel Jean.

The Surrealist artist was one of the most fascinating artist I have met. His English was slightly better than my French. He made great efforts to show me his work and more importantly make me feel as if for those short moments, I was the most important person in the room.

For me he was the French version of an earlier blog about the English artist John Piper. Publishing intellectual theories and essays about contemporary artists seemed to be more important than the artistic creations.

I have mentioned more than enough that even in 1983, artists were more curious about the other artists I had photographed than the shooting moment at hand. In hindsight it was something to embrace. But I have always tried to drive the conversation towards the subjects ideas and passions. There is this constant curiosity that needs to know what someone else is creating...I don’t know why, but it has been a constant.

He pointed to a round table near his paint brushes. Waiting for me was some coffee, a few cookies and a bottle of whiskey ... We continued to share our worlds until the

morning had become afternoon. It was time to finish I what I had come for.

I raised my camera and ...

Paris again was waiting for me.

Surrealist Artist Marcel Jean Paris 1983 — Surrealist Artist Marcel Jean
Paris 1983