Young couple under a street light outside Botanica in Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY.

Just read two superbly written articles by Cath Pound published in the Culture pages of the BBC website. She is a master of brevity and unramblingness.

The first article is a review of short stories which she recommends for those still with more time than usual for reading. The second article is about the painter Bonnard. I am a photographer who has never really liked color photographs very much, especially color portraits. After seeing Bonnard's work again I shall be sticking to black and white photography.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200612-the-best-short-stories-for-every-taste-and-mood
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190201-the-man-who-painted-moods

I realize this photograph of the quite attractive couple I have displayed above has little to do with the text. Well, if you can see a connection let me know. But I also thought that between the two they might inspire a short story.

Kinga

Thirteen years ago I was playing tennis without my eye on the ball in Stowe, Vermont. I shouted to my opponent's wife as I saw this face walk by, "Quick, ask her if I may photograph her."

The next day I took this picture. Last week I had an e-mail from a collector in Reading, Pennsylvania saying he wanted to buy a print of it. He will hang it above his desk, he told me. He had seen it several years ago on my website, always liked it and was now in a position to buy it.

Kinga is Polish. At the time I photographed her she was a housekeeper at the hotel where we were staying and was studying drama at the University of Warsaw. A few years ago her husband ask me if I would send him a print of the picture.

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.

The Twist

I received this letter not long ago.

"I am a psychologist working at the Coltman Street Day Hospital in Hull❲England❳. Our primary work here is to help older people with a diagnosis of memory loss or dementia. We have excellent facilities here including a large flat screen television we use to flash up various historic photographs of Hull for our clients.

I want to update the images on our running PowerPoint display that we have in the main wait area and saw your website. I wondered if there was a possibility of copying your photograph The Twist on your site so that clients can be stimulated in memory back to their childhoods and persevere their precious memories. Is this something you would consider?"

I wrote back agreeing to his using it. I took the picture in the early 1960s in London at The Lyceum Ballroom for The Weekend Telelgraph.

Quiet man

This is Ivan, brother of Jason Ross. He arrived late on that day in Brooklyn when Jason and Natasha found subjects for me. He sat down and hardly spoke. Yet, later when I photographed him, he was the paragon of politeness and consideration.

Contentment at Homespun

As the world knows, every other person in Beacon, NY is a refugee from Brooklyn. Our acquaintance who makes cowboy boots and children's shoes, and who recently moved into a loft in Newburgh (across the river) said, "When you can't afford to live in Bushwick, you know it's over." I wonder if these two once came from Brooklyn?

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.

Comfortable on stone

She was sitting in the back of a café in Springfield Massachusetts writing. We sat at a table nearer the front. She never looked up from her notebook until, quite suddenly, she closed the book, got up from her chair and stepped towards the door. She passed our table looking neither to the left or right nor saying a word to anyone. I lost my nerve at the sight of this forbidding young woman dressed entirely in white. She disappeared out of the door. Well, I thought, that was that. A chance to photograph someone special gone. You idiot, why didn't you just get up and say something to her? Anything. But to sit there in silence, watching her go by...

Before we left the café I asked at the counter if they knew who she was. "Oh, yes! She comes here all the time."

"May I leave her a note?"

"Certainly, I'll be sure she gets it."

A week later the telephone rang and several weeks after that Elizabeth turned up on the train for lunch, with her two-year-old son. This is one of the photographs I took. We soon discovered that she was far from forbidding; she just had had things on her mind. Caroline and Elizabeth became friends and, as she reminded me the other day, Elizabeth and her son came to my sixtieth birthday party and visited us on other occasions for summer weekend lunches.

Nearly twenty years later she still sends us a Christmas card every year from her home in Virginia, where she married and had a second child.

What do you want?

This is Louis, my daughter Cathy's son, taken in London where I gave a talk at the National Portrait Gallery last month. Louis enjoyed the evening because my son Nicholas wore a tie, and that, thought Louis, is exactly what I am gong to do. He wore it for a while and then had an even better time whirring it around his head.

Before the talk I wrote out in longhand a good deal of what I was going to say but decided not to use the script, nor did I use the headings I had made. A talk is a talk and not a lecture or a speech. I began by recounting my feeling of hope that the gallery would call and say that a dissatisfied visitor had attacked the photographs on the walls with his umbrella and the talk was cancelled. We could all then go straight to the Chinese restaurant. My point was that it is about the same strain to face giving a talk as it is taking a portrait; half of you is fearful of it and wishes it cancelled.

Calm moment

This is Maya, my son Alexander's eldest daughter. She is bilingual in French, Spanish and English. She lives near Geneva, Switzerland. Her mother is Chilean and an artist. Maya was sitting at the refectory table in Cathy's house in London, under an overhead light, when I noticed her expression.

Ken Dodd remembers

Ken Dodd is sitting in his old primary school playground in Knotty Ash near Liverpool, England. This is one of a series of comedians in a reflective mood that I photographed in the 1970's. I do not know if his fame reached these shores, but Ken Dodd has sold over 100 million records and at the height of his fame was a household name in England that equaled the Beetles. He is still touring at the age of eighty-four. My idea of doing the comedians with their mouths shut was embraced by the art director, but the editor, when he saw the photographs, shook his head and doubted he could run them. But he did and the art director remained in his job and I continued to work for him.

Long distance runner

My assistant Nicole was driving up Third Avenue. She stopped at a red light and there was a tap on the window. She knew the young woman who was standing there, but was not happy to see her and refused to open the door or lower the window. Nicole drove off as the light turned green.

Twenty blocks later Nicole sat at another red light. Her eyes were raised waiting for the green. Then a vague shadow of a person appeared in the corner of her eye and she turned. There to her astonishment was her friend beside the car. Passion, fleet of foot, and endurance had won the day. The young woman had run the twenty blocks and caught up with the car. Nicole gave in. Smiling she opened the door for her.

When Nicole told me the story she asked if I would like to photograph this champion. One afternoon we drove to the Bronx and photographed her in her apartment.

Going away separately

A bride and groom leaving the Hyde Park Hotel in London for their honeymoon. She isn't sure whether the man clutching her is not a better bet, and he thinks another drink (but probably not his last), will help things along.

Couple by street light

I'd like to know more about these two. Sometimes I'm only interested in the shape or expression of people I photograph. But with these two, I would like to know more, because she is dressed differently from him, more formally and with a bag and scarf, and he is in just a thin sweater. Also she spoke not a word to me, yet he was warm and forthcoming about having the picture taken, but as it was nearing eleven o'clock and they had not eaten, I could not keep them any longer. I had already dragged them out from their table that they had just settled into.

Surprise

You seldom know what people are talking about or feeling when you are observing them. Before I took this picture, I had been watching the couple and I thought from their expressions that they didn't know each other well. They were being polite and careful. After this show of aggressive surprise, I am not sure.

Smoking lovers

In this photograph, taken in London in the buffet of Waterloo station, thirty years before I took the couple at Diner (above), there is more expectancy than surprise in the young lady's expression, and not a scrap of aggression. In fact, even without their shared love of tobacco, they seem made for each other. You could not be sure of that in "Surprise". Those were still the days when it was polite to light your girlfriend's cigarette for her and always before your own. And there is more in her look than the sweet anticipation of that first delicious drag on her cigarette.

Christmas tree salesman

First day back in Brooklyn for several weeks. The day started badly. Lunching at the friendly and cosy Boulevard Café on Bushwick Avenue, a young woman sat writing in a notebook at the next door table. Yes, writing in a notebook. When she stared out of the window she looked good, lost in thought. But a fuse box stood out prominently behind her head and I could not get myself in the right place without her seeing what I was up to. I abandoned it and we moved on.

Caroline spotted a man selling Christmas trees from a stall on Broadway. He obligingly gave me his time. If you have a section of sidewalk the length of a sizable store front, full of Christmas trees on December 4th, a Saturday, you do not have much time to clear them.

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.