Dmitri Kasterine: Boerum Hill

Showing posts with label Boerum Hill. Show all posts

Monday, July 12, 2010

Fashion designer

Most politely he said "Oh no! I don't think I want to do that sort of thing." I persisted, "Could I show you some of the pictures I have taken," and remember as I said it that I had left them in the car. Now I am sunk, I thought, as but as he began to walk on. Have I got any cards left in my wallet? Yes! And fished out one with a picture of Stanley Kubrick on it that I had taken on the set of A Clockwork Orange. He looked at it and finally said, "Did you take this?" "Yes, I did," I replied. And then started to ask me a flurry of question about Kubrick filming A Clockwork Orange and said that it would be alright for me to photograph him.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Chef Depp

Cheeky and good. Brooklyn is full of good young chefs who work at places you want to go to because the food is perfectly all right and the people are fun. The Building on Bond in Boerum Hill is designed, built and managed by the owner who decorated it with metal furniture out of factories, vintage books, scales and bottles.

Also you can set up your office at an eight foot long table. Electric current to recharge ailing laptop batteries is available from an old pull down reel affixed to the ceiling. Charming staff. And what were those two woman sitting opposite each other smiling about, as they stared into their machines and typed for half-an-hour, laughing, but not saying a word?

Sunday, April 19, 2009

The Last Vice

Stan Rubinstein is a pianist but no relation to Arthur. I sat down next to him on a bench outside the restaurant Building on Bond in Boerum Hill. His wife told me that cigar smoking was his last vice; she has eliminated all others. Jazz is his first love but he doesn't play much these days as his left hand is a bit stiff.

"I'm a tough old Jew from Brooklyn and nothing is going to get me down."

From the photographer

I started this blog in December 2008. At the time I did not know if I would enjoy it or not, and whether I would get any response to it. I am enjoying it and people have responded. I made a silent pledge at the outset not to say much about my artistic intentions or the composition of the photograph. I would just talk about what led up to taking the picture and what it was like doing it.

The discipline is actually not a strain for me, because I do not desire, and really have never been capable of discussing my intentions, artistic or otherwise. My wanting to take a photograph appears as fast as a bolt and without warning when I spot the subject. I then take it or not, depending on how brave, awake, or fumbling I am with the camera. I enjoy exploring, looking for things that stop me, or frighten me. To fear to take a picture usually means you want to take it.

dmitri@kasterine.com

Biography

Born in England in 1932, I started out as a properly brought up young gentleman with an English mother and White Russian father. He fought wars all his adult life and died in a car accident in the North of England at the age of forty-seven.

Photography came to me at aged eleven, photographing birds at the bird feeder my mother put up outside the kitchen window. After the acute disappointment of the birds being minute specs in the picture, I did cows in the fields around us in Kent.

After the wine trade, Lloyd’s, racing cars, selling cars and flying aeroplanes to Australia, I became a photographer. I photographed my friend’s engagements and their weddings. I worked for magazines and advertising agencies.

I was sent to Los Angeles to photograph Mick Jagger, returned to England via New York where I met Salvador Dali in the elevator at the St. Regis Hotel. Thence started my interest in living here. Three or four years later I moved to America, remarried and lived happily ever after.

Dmitri Kasterine