Portrait

I took some awesome images of friends and family members, in fact I liked to go into the street and ask a random person to model. Yet, I remember I did have a great studio shoot courtesy of the father of a friend. He was in his 90s, a thin gentleman who was sitting in his favorite plush-covered, dark maroon armchair. He was wearing his white, but not so white anymore having been repeatedly washed over the years until the color morphed from white to grey, T-shirt under his favorite bathrobe with the collar. The chair was as old as he was, with holes and spots and worn down armrests; his old hands, with swollen veins and brown-spotted skin, clasped around them. Absentmindedly he looked straight into the camera, his eyes red, watery, and sad after a long life with successes and disappointments. Looking at his picture stimulates my memory. He worked in the theatre industry in public relations. I met him frequently for lunch in one of his favorite delis in New York and enjoyed his stories he presented to me in his high spirit. He came to life like a flower getting tickled by the spring sun.

However, the picture reveals the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other he had to endure. But there also seems to be great mountains of unbearable solidity and the deep thinking of the ultimate truth of his being. The shame, the pity, the humiliating difficulties over his lifetime, formed/molded his personality. The sadness and nostalgia flowed around him and covered him like a sheet covers a child. And still one remembers there is death around the corner. Death is as part of life; to think of it with the understanding and with the emotions, as the inviolable condition of life.


I have another splendid portrait which I would like to mention, but it was created in Sutton Place, New York. An old, elegant lady in a beige coat, (it must have been fall as dead leaves were on the ground in the back) with white hair, was walking her small, white dog. I asked her if she would mind being my model for the afternoon. She agreed happily. She sat down on the nearest bench with her dog on her lap, drifting off with her thoughts, perhaps to a time when she was young and beautiful. She thought about the photographs of her young self that she kept in a drawer. Why does a woman keep a photograph of herself when young? It is vanity. She had been a pretty girl and kept a photograph of herself to remind her of what a pretty girl she was. It encourages her when her mirror tells her other things. Showing her picture, she could have said to me ”That was me when I was twenty…”.    

I enjoyed haunting jazz clubs. I loved jazz and went with my camera into many New York clubs, for instance, Birdland, Bob City. There was a club I enjoyed most, now out of business, on 6th Ave and around
13th street. Players could come and play in 24 hour sessions. 


      

From night until early mornings the club was crowded with jazz players and jazz lovers. The atmosphere was vibrant and exciting; the tiny room was filled with a haze of smoke. Stylized, my work captured a world of shadow, (sometimes more black) silver, and smoke; the dark interior, gleaming microphones, and threading through it all, cigarette smoke that twined as if it were an incarnation of the music itself.

I avoided photographing people that were known in public; also I didn’t know anybody really. I was fascinated when I met strangers on the street. I was drawn to older people because I was interested in their faces and their hands with wrinkles and scars. I chose subjects that I could believe were found, just running around, lying around, like a nut that I had to crack open. I didn’t want perfect, I wanted to see the real person. I tried to establish new experiences in the familiar subjects to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. “The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination,” Arbus, a famous photographer, noted.