James Patterson, writer, film producer, philanthropist

Two weeks ago the telephone rang and Leopoldo Gout introduced himself as the executive in charge of production of a project. He told me they were making a documentary about Belle Glade in Florida, written, produced and with commentary spoken by a well known writer. The writer, he said, had seen my photographs of Newburgh and wanted to use them in his film. He was born and brought up in Newburgh and Newburgh is not unlike Belle Glade in many respects. They would also like me to photograph the writer.

"May I ask who the writer is?"

"James Patterson."

The shoot took place in Newburgh where Mr. Patterson was filming some street scenes to intercut with the main narrative in Belle Glade.  The weather on the day of the shoot had began fine, but by eleven, when they wanted me to take Mr. Patterson's picture, it was raining and snowing. 

I had already decided on a foul weather location. I had called Dan Brown, the proprietor of The Wherehouse, the popular pub on Liberty Street. In his back room he has a window facing north of the size that gives exactly the crisp light I like. I knew it of old, having done some pictures of Newburgh citizens there last summer.

                                                                               Photograph by Leopoldo Gout

Lunch on the river—mist and ice covered—at Cena 2000. James, his wife Susan and six film crew. Three very smartly dressed forty-year-old women were the only other guests. James asked me about my career. 

"Mostly magazines doing portraits of artist and writers. Now I sell the prints to collectors." I replied.  

I told him that many photographers I knew did advertising work also, and that I had tried but had not got on well. "You know what it was—you were in it once." 

He said, "I've been clean for twenty years." 









       

Stoppard and Sappho

“Meet me at my dentist, he's a friend, we can do it there,” Tom Stoppard told me on the telephone.

I found myself a week later in a dimly lit waiting room in Harley Street wondering if I was really supposed to shoot Tom Stoppard together with the two or three other patients waiting for their appointments. I probably should have, but we went into Regent's Park.

Ann Margaret Daniel recently wrote an essay entitled Stoppard and Sappho in her blog for The Huffington Post using this photograph, and the Roman fresco from RegioVI (insula occidentalis) in Pompeii of Sappho.

James Baldwin

I was still living in London in the late 1970s when Robert Priest rang me from Esquire in New York to ask if I would photograph James Baldwin. I knew that he lived in France and it is always a thrill to be asked to go somewhere else to photograph a writer besides a cold house in Hampstead or a cluttered flat in Earl's Court. This was particularly nice because Baldwin lived in Saint-Paul-de-Vence where I had  been once before and dined at La Colombe D'Or, one of the most attractive restaurants anywhere. 

I drove into the main square of Saint-Paul-de-Vence the evening before I was due to take his picture. As I past a café I noticed sitting at a table facing the street a black man. He was surrounded by five white young ladies all leaning forward towards him wide eyed as he spoke. I recognized the man almost at once as James Baldwin. The girls were young enough to be college students. When I saw him the next day I asked him about it and he said that yes indeed they were American college students. He said he liked that particular café and went there often. The group spotted him and he invited them to sit with him.

We spoke little during my time with him as is often the case when I photograph people. I concentrate on how to arrange the scene beside and behind my subject and where to place the camera. Mostly I allow people to compose themselves, with an occasional, "Just a little to your left...yes, that's it, there." And if the sitter looks too fixed I move away from the camera or ask a question which usually causes people to re-arrange themselves.

I remember James Baldwin saying that when the revolution came he would be out there in the streets with his carving knife. When Occupy Wall Street takes hold I wonder if it will be like that.

Felix Salmon and Michelle Vaughan

Of the 15 or so people I have photographed in the carriage house of the Garrison Institute, Felix is the only one who, noticing a number of golf balls scattered on the floor, looked up at the window panes of the floor to ceiling windows and asked, "Is there any connection between the golf balls and the broken panes?" As there is a large lawn in front of the carriage house it is quite possible that someone had been out there practicing their swing.

Alan Furst

Whatever else you think Alan Furst is good at, to my mind he is a master of the lower-upper-middle-class English staccato voice of the 1930s—the one the mid level Secret Service had in the 1940s. He does, of course, write this voice, not speak it, something to my mind that is difficult to do well because it is riddled with special inflection, threatening and unexpected emphasis, and the use of words that are not quite what the dictionary gives you.

In Spies of the Balkans two Secret Service agents, Jones and Wilkins are briefing Francis Escovil, a junior street operative. Jones explains that they have to clean up a mess caused by a superior and are giving the job to Escovil. Here I quote from the book:


"Somebody with a name?"  Escovil said.

"Oh, we can't tell you that." He stared at Escovil. "Are you mad?"

"I see," Escovil said, faintly amused, which was not at all the proper response.

"Do you." Wilkins said.

Only in England, Escovil thought, could "Do you" be spoken in such a way that it meant "So now I shall cut your throat."   

Yet, Alan Furst is not English, but an Upper West Side American Jew, now Sag Harbor resident. Besides the exciting plots in his books, it is his gift of a perfect ear for different English accents that made me smile.

Kathryn Schulz

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.
She writes standing up at her Mac which lies on a bench exactly the right height for her comfort. She likes everything in place before she starts work. Disorder prevents words flowing. 

Everything was in place when I arrived and I felt quite at home. She is very good at sketching and has a floor to ceiling blackboard on which she has drawn a family of leaping frogs. The cat has her own chair placed in front of a window.  

Joy Setton at Fort Defiant Café

This is a photograph of a stranger, but with the help of the staff at Fort Defiant Café in Red Hook, Brooklyn, I discovered that it is the writer Joy Setton. I took the picture a couple of summers ago and have since read her articles in Taki's Magazine. One that particularly struck me was about money in the art world from fifteenth century Florence to today. Amongst other aspects of banking then and today, she writes about usury, the origins of bankruptcy, letters of credit, how much gold a woman could wear, and, "Bankers in fifteenth-century Florence were so wealthy that even rulers envied them."
Click here for article in Taki's Magazine

Raymond Carver

Today is his birthday. He once said, "I am beginning to feel like a cigarette with a body attached to it." Not about this photograph but spoken to his very first interviewer in 1977, as reported in the introduction to Conversations with Raymond Carver, edited by Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull. I took this picture in about 1985 in his garage at his house in Syracuse, NY. A print of it is now in the permanent collection at The National Portrait Gallery, DC.

Margaret Drabble

Because I will be discussing Margaret Drabble in my April newsletter I am posting this picture as a teaser. The reason will be revealed on April 8th.

Liking daylight more than any other light source, and used together with no background clutter, I look for windows near blank walls as soon as I arrive in someone's house. I would have liked to have made the right side of the wall a little darker with a four by two foam core to block off some of the light, but even carrying in a foam core, which weighs about as much as a sheet of newspaper, was apparently too much for me that day.

Seven-year-old writer

On the cheese counter line at Fairway in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a father and his seven year-old daughter waited their turn. Caroline, who was behind them, was taken by their warm relationship and the little girl's liveliness and good looks. They began to talk to each other. He was English, and by chance, lived as a child in the street adjoining mine in London. Caroline told him that she thought I would like to photograph his daughter.

And so it was that last Saturday we met for a sandwich at The Hope and Anchor and to take a photograph. The place was packed, but a slim, quiet and polite young man immediately took care of us and showed us into the back room. As soon as we were settled the girl took a notebook from her satchel and started work with a pencil. "I'm writing a book," she said. "Actually, at the moment, I am working on The Table of Contents." Then she read us the first paragraph of the book: "The dark crept into a light corner where Judy was sleeping. No-one could hear the loud moans of the dog. When a piece of the sun popped out of the air it bounced off clouds in a fast speed. It landed with a thump. It was a glowing ball as bright as a star but more. It started to grow into a flower. Everything was dark. The flower was sucked into the ground. Judy and her 2 brothers started to wake up."

She ordered pancakes and bacon and as she ate, she chatted and wrote. I looked around and saw behind me an empty table in good light which the management warmly welcomed me to have my subject sit at, whenever I was ready to take the picture. The light came from a glass door into the street and a mixture of coloured and regular tungsten lights from the room.

The girl suddenly said, "I thought we were here to have my photograph taken and all we have done is talk, talk." She had talked as much as any of us and had also been busy devouring the extra bacon that she ordered with her pancakes.

I was ready, and without any fuss she sat where I asked her to and she sat how I asked her to. The other customers looked and smiled as I am sure everybody does when they see this radiant, high-spirited girl.

William Styron

This portrait of William Styron is included in a current show called "Recent Acquisitions" at the Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery. It was taken at Mr. Styron's house in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1984.

The photograph was first exhibited on Martha's Vineyard where Mr. Styron's friend Art Buchwald looked at the photograph and said to him, "I didn't know you were a homeless person, Bill."

Mr. Styron's house was dark and crowded with furniture and books so I asked if I could look around outside. The summer house immediately caught my eye and with some coaxing Mr Styron sat on the steps. I said that I thought he looked too scrunched up and suggested he lean back on one elbow. He did so and I was ready with my finger on the shutter release before he had time to think about smiling.

Germaine Greer

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.

Columbia Teaching Fellow

He wondered why I knew he was a writer. He wanted to know who I was. He asked polite, clearly announciated questions in full sentences. I told him that I had photographed quite a lot of writers including Baldwin and Beckett and that seemed O.K. I had some pictures on me to show him what I had done in Brooklyn. We sat for quite a while and his friend talked to Caroline about dogs. He told me he was on his way to New Jersey which he had been trying to get out of all day. "I'd rather be shot."

William Empson in a dressing gown

He answered the door dressed like this. I said, "Please come into the garden, stay as you are, I love what you are wearing." (Writers, and others, like to be rid of photographers as quickly as possible so he also got what he wanted.) American English and English English, so different. Dressing gown? Robe?

Dirk Bogarde

See above for commentary.

Muriel Spark

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.

A young writer outside Café Orwell

He was standing outside Café Orwell smoking a fat yellow cigarette. Was Orwell a vegan? Because the café offers only Soy milk. It's a dark place, five or six writers tapping away at their illuminated keyboards. There was nobody talking to anybody. This man liked to talk. He lived in a hostel round the corner. They would find him a job if they had any jobs, but they didn't have any.

Roald Dahl

I don't remember if Roald Dahl was much interested in film (although he was married to Patricia Neal), but several of his books have been made into movies - very recently: "Fantastic Mr. Fox". I remember him more for his love of wine and food, gardens and talk. He wrote to me when I sent him this picture: "You will notice that this person is leaning at about 30 degrees off the true vertical line. This is a fairly accurate reflection of his attitude to life."

Beryl Bainbridge

Actress, novelist, critic, biographer and generally loved person for her forthright comments on radio and television in the U.K. She arrived at the sitting perfectly styled for a portrait of actress turned writer. I photographed her another time, I think, because her house was full of things, stuffed animals and junk. Perhaps I found this wall there, outside her house, but... can't remember.

Paul Auster, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY

The New York Review of Books published this photograph in their December 23, 2010 issue. The article is a review by Joyce Carol Oates of Sunset Park by Paul Auster.

This was the first photograph I took in Brooklyn. It was 1986 and taken for The Times in London. Little did I know that nearly twenty-five years later I would spend so much time in Brooklyn photographing. Twenty years went by before I set foot in the place again and then only for a day. It is also the only photograph I have taken of a well-known person in Brooklyn.

Paul Auster lived in one of those brownstone streets in Park Slope that lead up to Prospect Park, where the houses have steep steps up to mahogany doors ten feet high and thick enough to stop a bullet. He worked in a tiny apartment in a block right on the park - too dull and too small for photographs, but I knew we just had time to do something in the park before it got dark.