Born to be Wild

Gay Pride Parade, 1987, Washington Square Park, NYC. They were calm and affectionate, not shouting demands or slogans, just loving being there with each other. I hope they have been happy these last twenty-four years.

Sixteen year-old

If there is any success in this photograph it is due to the calm of the sitter and her choice of colors, both of her hair and her dress. Her hair, of course, is the luck of her birth, but her dress is her sense of style she has developed.

She sings solo for her school, the national anthem at special events, and in chorus at concerts, lately at Carnegie Hall. She cooks desserts and speaks French with her mother. Loves English and liked, "seeing herself in a new light."

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.

At Pain Quotidien

They had been enjoying themselves and had not stopped talking. Now it was time for them to settle up and concentrate on the business in hand. A moment's silence and also they were still. Click.

Rain on 5th Avenue

She protested for a moment against having her picture taken but her friend wanted it and she gave in. You do, we thought, attract attention if you dress well.

A donkey ride

The man's hand has a gentle but firm and reassuring pressure on the donkey, guiding it through the thin crowd of bathers and spectators. His stick keeps the animal going at a fast walk. Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, 1980.

Young musician

We went to the recording of one of Bravo's art reality shows "Work of Art" and Caroline spotted this girl in the crowd. She knew her as one of the children of a very musical family in Garrison. I went round to their house a few Saturdays ago and her mother was the perfect mother-of-a-beautiful-daughter-being-photographed. "I'd like to be a bit higher up." I murmured. A stool was produced in a matter of seconds. Not just a stool that a-wobble-and-you're-off-it, but a three step ladder that nobody can fall off. The girl took no notice of her mother. I was the conductor that day and her eyes were glued to the camera and her mother was invisible to us both. And when I asked for a black shirt mum and daughter agreed without fuss as to which one they thought I would like.

Lily

Lily, a grandchild, photographed in London also. "Where am I?" she asked on seeing the picture of her brother Louis posted here two weeks ago. Keeping all good things to last is my answer.

Sam Pemberton

Soccer loving ten year-old Sam, photographed on my recent visit to London.

Cap and hood

High school friends on Main Street, Beacon NY.

Draftswoman and soap maker

When asked by Caroline if I could photograph her, she replied, "I mean, I have totally never had a good picture taken of me."

Gwen is an architectural draughtswoman during the day. At night she goes down into her basement and makes soap and oils that smell deliciously of lavender and geranium.

She sells them regularly at the Beacon farmer's market and online at:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/beyondthepicketfence

Caroline had mentioned her as a possible subject several times and this weekend we found her at a craft fair in Beacon. I pulled gently on her arm protesting that we both thought she had a wonderful face. Could she please spare five minutes, ask her friend to look after the stall and come with me.

I had found a place with good light two doors down in the entrance to an empty store.

The spare chair

At Le Pain Quotidien, Madison Avenue. A late breakfast. Fun place. Wonderful apricot jam and perfectly boiled eggs. Groups and couples talked earnestly and cheerfully. Strangers in good spirits introduce each other at the long communal table. Then glancing over my shoulder, I saw a quite different mood.

Girl at the Frick Collection

Downstairs where the kitchens once were I suppose, the Frick has put together an exhibition of drawings and etchings by Rembrandt. I loved the self portraits. They were a little difficult to see on Saturday because many are only inches big and people like to step close to examine them thoroughly and you have to wait your turn.

Upstairs we looked at the Rembrandt paintings. As dark as some are, made more so by the low lighting, they held us. Richard Avedon adored the youth on the old nag (The Polish Rider) trotting off to find his fortune. It inspired him as a young man going out into the world.

Admiring it and other old masters was a girl strolling between one painting and another with her audio tour pressed to her ear. She stopped by her mother or father and spoke for a moment before skipping to the next painting. It was her father who first lowered his hand set long enough for me to introduce myself. I asked him if I could photograph his daughter. He agreed and so did she and they obligingly interrupted their viewing of the paintings.

We crossed 70th Street. I asked the girl to stand under the awning of an apartment building. As I was thinking that I liked the clip in her hair, her mother stretched out an arm and removed it. "You don't want this clip, do you? I have a photograph that I like of her at home where she is wearing it. The clip has always irritated me." This was not the moment to argue I thought.

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.

Student

She lives in Crown Heights with her mother in the same apartment in which she was born, eighteen years ago. She wants to go to Suny, New Paltz, in upstate New York. "Beautiful place, I love it." But she is not sure her mother can pay for it.

"For many months I have been looking for work. I cannot find any."

Words couple

They were sitting on a bench on Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. I wanted to snap them as they were. She was massaging his temples tenderly but the background was a car with disturbing color and contrast. I asked them if I could photograph them in the shade of a tree close by. He replied first, "I would love that." She said, "Awesome." Later they told us that he got headaches and she got rid of them for him. They both love words. She works for a literary agent and he for a magazine about infrastructure. I asked him if he studied engineering at school. "No, comparative literature." "What is that?" Caroline asked. "It's not anything," he replied. They loved Crown Heights and later we saw them again as we headed towards Breukelen Coffee House, a haunt they too like.

Israeli student

Today the sun was out and it was almost warm. The pictures I took were in the shade of buildings, in this case the Brooklyn Public Library, with sun bouncing off the light paving in front of it, to produce a perfectly even light.

She was brought up on a Kibbutz, still lives in Israel on a Kibbutz, but a different one. She is visiting Brooklyn and will stay as long as she is allowed by her visa. I asked her if she would have to return to Israel to do national service. She said yes. "Meanwhile I have my sister's army jacket to keep me warm."

She was delighted when Caroline asked her if I could photograph her. Yet she was modest and a little shy.