This is the poster for an exhibition in Valladolid, Spain of some of my portraits of artists, writers and performers taken between 1963 and 1988 in Europe and the United States.
A little research revealed that the city of Valladolid, in the region of Castile and León, the largest autonomous region in Europe, was founded in the 11th century. Christopher Columbus died there. Phillip II was born there and Isabella and Ferdinand were married there.
The show is being curated by Dª Cristina Albornoz who reviewed my exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2011 for the Spanish magazine XL SEMANAL. At the time she said she would like to do a show for me in Spain and she has.
I took the picture of David Hockney in the mid 1970s when he was living in Paris. This is the courtyard of his studio. I remember running through London Airport to catch the plane, slipped and skidded along the floor. I was helped to my feet by fellow travelers, uninjured, and made the flight. Today it would be safer to miss your plane than run through an airport swinging camera bags.
The show runs from March 14 to May 5 2013.
I took this picture of Stanley Kubrick under a camera platform built on the set of
A Clockwork Orange near Kingston-upon-Thames, England in 1970. The publishers Fotofolio have recently made it into a postcard.
Stanley and I were sheltering from the rain underneath the camera platform and shortly after I took the picture the platform began creaking and groaning and then wobbled and collapsed. As the creaking and groaning began, both of us leaped out from under it like rabbits bolting.
I took this photograph in 1978 in the Upper Richmond Road in the district of Putney, London, England. It was recently selected by Rod Fry ARPS who wrote about it in The Royal Photographic Society magazine Contemporary Group Journal. Rod first noticed the picture in a book of mine called England and the English, published in 1982. He was reminded of it when he saw that I had an exhibition of my pictures of writers and artists at The National Portrait Gallery in London, in 2011.
It is the 40th Anniversary of the publication of "The Female Eunuch". Loved in London, where she appears regularly on TV shows, now hardly known here. I never meet anybody who has read her books, but after forty years "The Female Eunuch" is still in print. Not bad.
I remember her clearly; quick, funny, friendly, but very serious about her believes. Did not at all mind moving furniture with me to get a clearer view by the window. Never cared much about what she wore. She wears simple and comfortable clothes, and occasionally, in her youth, removed them for a photographer. She seldom dressed up for them.
I cannot remember the occasion that I took this picture. It was almost certainly a wedding or a dance somewhere in England in the 1970s where glasses were constantly refilled, and that this woman had an unusually un-English face. I also wonder if curly hair was the fashion then or her own statement.
I remember that it was taken on Ilford 800 ISO HPS film with a Leica. 800 ISO was comparatively high speed for those days and HPS had excellent grain structure and shadow detail.
His name was Charlie and he operated the Anderton Boat Lift. He was brought up on a barge on the canal where his father operated the lift before him. He had pneumonia three times because of the damp, he said. The lift provides a 50 feet vertical link between two navigable waterways: the River Weaver and the Trent and Mersey Canal in north-west England.
The picture was taken on the best colour film Kodak ever made: Kodachrome II, the sharpest, the most natural saturated colours under any lighting conditions, and you could expose it for half an hour and it wouldn't change colour. This is a recent scan from the original.
I remember my excitement at seeing this couple. The contrasts between them: thin and fat, stylish and traditional, angular and roundness. He so nonchalant and she wanting to play. The couple lived in the North of England and had been coming south to Margate every year for twenty-five years.
In a comment about my photograph of Roald Dahl (posted December 3, 2009), Heather recently asked me if I would say what was the most flattering and the most offensive remark made to me when a subject saw the picture I had taken of them. Here is my answer:
I liked the German painter Rainer Fetting's comment on seeing his picture. "Some kind of sexy," he said. Or from Stanley Kubrick on the set of "Dr. Strangelove" after I had been there a few hours taking pictures of him for a magazine, he asked me if I would like to work for him. He had not actually seen any of my photographs but said, "You seem to stand in the right place."
Then the withering ones: "The carapace of an aging turtle - sub Avedon," from the British actor Dirk Bogarde. On second thoughts this is not actually offensive, just a description from a good writer.
Offensive? What about this from the writer William Styron? "I do not care for the photograph." (Now in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian.) But the most offensive answer I have received to a request to photograph somebody was made at a London tennis club in the mid seventies when I asked John McEnroe if I could photograph him. He replied, "What's in it for me?" I don't think McEnroe is like that now. (Except he is still funny.) I am a great fan of his commentating and playing.
I had to find a way of distracting her from looking at me with her pretty smile. I said that I needed a minute or two to adjust the settings on the camera. I fiddled with the Rolleiflex, and kept half an eye open to see what she was doing. Then something must have entered her mind and she looked down and forgot I was there. I clicked the shutter.
Photographing a financial adviser yesterday, (see post above of "George F. Hamel, III and friend") reminded me of Prince Rupert Loewenstein who was was the Rolling Stones' financial adviser from 1970 to 2007. I took this picture at a party at Greenwich Palace, London, probably in the mid 1970s. I remember the room lit only by candles, but thanks to Ilford's wonderful film, HPS, rated at 800 ASA and a steady hand, not to mention the total lack of shutter vibration from the Leica at 1/15th second, the pictures are fairly sharp.
Happy Birthday Cathy.Love from Dad, Caroline and Nicholas
Francis Bacon, the English painter, would be one hundred years old this year. I am posting this photograph a little late in the day, as his exhibition has already been seen in Madrid and London, but it has turned up at the Metropolitan Museum here in New York this week.I took the picture in the late seventies. When he arrived at the studio, he sat down in front of the camera and fell asleep. He did not mind at all being woken up and stayed awake while I took the picture. He had an especially pleasant voice and gentle manner.
This was taken in the mid-seventies on a trip to Israel, and I am posting it in response to Andrea's comment about smiling photographs.
(See comments about "Teenage Couple", below.)
I recently heard that the National Portrait Gallery in London want to acquire about twenty of my portraits of writers and artists that I took while I was living there in the seventies and eighties.
Here is one that I took of Hockney at his Paris studio in about 1975. I remember feeling very at home in this courtyard of his studio.
Jessica's parents live in a 17th century house in Florence, Italy. I found the background on the top floor of the house where the sun was coming through a paneless window on a small balcolny. Years later I was asked to copy the wall to use as a background for an advertisement. Absurd, but in advertising you first do what the client asks. A friend of Caroline's took a plaster cast of his concrete studio floor and trucked it over to us. Of course it looked terrible but sort of O.K. and they used it.
