Sun and freedom

No wonder we want to do this again. Washington Square Park, NYC, 2016.

Oh, for a warm sunny day!

This was not quite the last time we saw the sun but after today it feels like it. Caroline and our late dog Louis in Garrison NY, 2011  

Sam Wagstaff with Robert Mappletrhorp's portrait of Patti Smith

Sam Wagstaff in the mid 1980s in his apartment at 1 Fifth Avenue, seen here with Robert Mapplethorpe's picture of Patti Smith for the cover of her first album Horses recorded in 1975.

Thanks to our present way of life I am reading two books a week. Just finished Just Kids by Patti Smith which I would probably not have read had I not, a week ago, run out of books and, also had I not, only a month before discovered what an exceptional writer she is when I read M Train. Her material is riveting, we know, but writers can make a horrible hash of anything, if they are bad writers.

Sam Wagstaff was the rich collector and curator who became Robert Mapplethorpe's lover and patron. He also helped Patti Smith financially with a trip to Charleville, France, where  the poet Authur Rimbaud was born and where he also died.

"When I was 16, he appealed to me, and at this time of my life, I'm still learning from him."  Patti Smith said in an interview with Andy Gill in The Independent in 2007.

"Why I love Arthur Rimbaud is not because he was a princely fellow: I love his work." 

When I took this picture, Mr. Wagstaff had recently finished cataloging his large collection of photographs. He showed my assistant and I some of the pictures he treasured most. He told us he had found most of them in book shops who also dealt in photographs, and in order to save time and fuss, when the shop's collections were in boxes, he bought the whole box and discarded what he did not want when he got home.        

Helleborus orientalis

 

Come along April! Isn't it about time you pulled yourself together and treated us to a couple if fine days? Planting, tidying and weeding can be so pleasant on a sunny, windless, 60 degree day.

Photograph by Dmitri Kasterine,  Helleborus orientallis in  our garden in Garrison, NY, April 22, 2020 

The sad state of men's tennis

I have always liked ruins. Here is a ruin of a tennis court in Beacon NY taken in 2013. Not much hope for it and I must go and have a look to see if it is not now the site of a condominium development. Being a regular tennis player (or was until the closing down of all activity outside home) I was heartbroken to see this.

Until high schools stop grabbing money for football and promoting football as the sport that will get you girls, we are lost, and tennis will be over shadowed. American male professional players will continue to struggle.

To support my unscientific and breezy comments on football, I cite the fact that American women players are doing well on the WTA circuit at the moment.

I had not looked at this picture for about ten years. I remember they were not quite sure they wanted to be photographed together because they had, that day, gone their separate ways, they said.

I wonder if it was the earrings. From what you can see from the photograph, you can't fault the shirt or the skirt or the necklace, or her or him. But, were the earrings a mistake?

Ah well, it was their business—I'm just expressing an opinion. I feel it is the only thing about these two, only knowing them from the photograph, you could be put off by. I liked them both, but couples are always separating for apparently no good reason that their friends and acquaintances can understand.

Unknown woman.

It was early afternoon in Red Hook, Brooklyn in 2011. We had had lunch with our friends who told us about a woman who lived in a chapel round the corner and gave dinner parties for twenty-five people, cooked by her, and lit only by candlelight. We should meet her, they said. They had spoken to her that morning and she was expecting us. We called her several times and we pressed bells, shouted and knocked on her door. She finally answered a call and said, "Give me a moment while I get dressed." This is how she appeared. Encouraged by Caroline to take her picture, I am not sure I would have photographed her if she had appeared in something more conventional when greeting strangers. But the face went with the outfit, I thought, and I asked her to stand in the doorway. 

We never received an invitation to dinner which was disappointing but maybe her living in the chapel was brought to an early end by a landlord or by the authorities and she never found another place to seat 25.

This picture has little to do with what we are concerned with today except that it has a soothing quality. I have forgotten the details but it was taken in the Midwest probably in the early 1980s. (My filing system from that period will never be held up as an example of how to keep track of ones photographs.)

But I wanted to tell you about something worth reading from the BBC website to do with Greek history, plagues and Boris Johnson, if you have not already read it. I have neither a picture taken in Greece, nor one of the present plague, nor one of B. Johnson, but this picture does at least have the look of isolation about it.

Oh the joys of summers's past! Photographed in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, NY in 2011.

You never can tell about subjects in photographs who look calm and collected―they may have just had the most colossal row.

Ways of Escape

In 1980, Graham Greene published a memoir called Ways of Escape. Much of the books consists of exciting incidents and encounters in his life, some of which led to his writing a book of fiction. Among the episodes he describes are life in West Africa in the service of MI6 (the British Secret Service) during World War II, his thoughts on and use of opium and his travels to Hanoi, Havana and the Middle East. In a number of these reports Mr. Greene was under fire or in danger of his life in other ways. To escape, it was action he was after.

Today, escape is only available through what you can find to do in isolation. No action, thank you, nobody wants danger through activity, there is enough danger by simply strolling about. My ways of escape are through Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert, P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, writing and gardening.

I took this photograph of Graham Greene in his apartment in Antibe, France in the early1980s. The apartment had just been broken into, he thought by the police, lawyer and judge from Nice he had recently accused of being corrupt. He tells the story of this corruption in J'accuse.

For those who are not infected, is it this?

or is it this? The choice is often ours. Easy to slip into the former. The latter might be the way through today's peril. 

Francis Bacon

Penguin are using my picture of Francis Bacon for the jacket of their publication Francis Bacon by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan which will soon be on sale.

I took the picture in the mid 1970s in London. Bacon arrived at my studio with the mutual friend who had made the sitting possible, sat down in front of the camera, and after a few words of greeting, fell asleep.

We left him undisturbed for a few while and when he woke up he made us laugh with his usual liveliness and wit.

Sally, 1992

I have had to put aside my series People of Cold Spring until we can get near each other again. Here is one I did 28 years ago of Sally Murphy, then a child of four, who might well have set fire to your house so exuberant was her behavior, now a singer and mother.

When things have righted themselves I shall do the three or four people I had lined up before the troubles began. I will then have about ten people to show as samples of the twenty or so that I will finally do either for an outdoor exhibition in Cold Spring or monthly series for a local newspaper or magazine.