Window Education

Louis Vuitton, Soho, 2012

It’s funny what you can learn from just looking at store windows. I took this picture in New York recently. It’s the luxury retailer Louis Vuitton’s Soho store. I was intrigued by the undulated polka dotted “leaves,” or whatever they are. (Don’t they look like something that would grow on the bottom of the sea?)

One of the nice things about New York City stores is that many of them haven’t completely lost the art of visual merchandising. Unlike suburban stores, where everyone either drives by or, in the case of malls, has bare brick exterior faces, there are lots of people walking in New York. Shop windows are important real estate for merchandising.

Last week one of my Flickr contacts posted a picture of a store window so familiar to the one shown above that I wrote to ask if it was the same one. He answered that it was another Louis Vuitton store in New York.

Then, just a few days ago, I happened to be leafing through some recent issues of The New Yorker magazine that I hadn’t gotten to yet and saw an ad for an exhibit of the work of the Japanese artist Yoyoi Kusama.  I’d never heard of Yoyoi Kusama. But I recognized the polka dot motif immediately.

It turns out the Whitney Museum is doing a retrospective show of Kusama’s work and that Louis Vuitton, under the direction of creative director and designer Marc Jacobs, is sponsoring the exhibit. Hence the Kusama, or at least Kusama-inspired, Vuitton window displays.

Jacobs is a fan of Kusama’s work and wanted to give her an opportunity to return to New York in style. Kusama, who was born in Japan, was big on the New York scene during the 1960s. She hung out with Warhol and Lichtenstein. She was known for her provocative art “happenings” and her obsessive use of polka dots. She described polka dots as “my medicine.”

Unfortunately, as most of us know, dots can be fun, but have little actual medicinal value. Whatever restorative value they’d had on Kusama waned, as well. She suffered a mental breakdown during the 1970s and retreated to Japan, where she is said to have lived in a mental institution ever since. According to an account in the Daily Beast:

“For her triumphant return to New York, Kusama, a diminutive woman, wore a Technicolor red wig, a black dress splattered with red dots, polka-dot sunglasses, and myriad other dotted accessories from Vuitton. She has a reputation for being unreliable and inscrutable, but she can also be endearingly earnest. She is alternately admired for using art as a means to understanding her mental illness and accused of using mental illness to make her art that much more tantalizing.”

All this, just from having looked at a store window.

Francesco!

After a Hard Day of Photography, 2012 (photo: Marcela Gindri)

At one time, Francesco Scavullo was one of the world’s preeminent fashion photographers. It’s said that he photographed anyone and everyone of importance, from the cream of the Social Register to super models to rock stars. Scavullo shot the nude centerfold photograph of Burt Reynolds for Cosmopolitan magazine.  Even more controversial was his portrait of the adolescent Brooke Shields in a provocatively sexual pose. His flashy, “make love to the camera” style and rock music-infused studio sessions were the template for Hollywood’s depictions of fashion photography for many years.

I don’t move in that world. But by chance I did once meet the famous Scavullo.

It’s probably closer to the truth to say that I was introduced to Francesco Scavullo. I remember meeting him. I’m sure he didn’t remember meeting me.

In 1980, I made a work-related day trip to New York City. Seated across the aisle from me on the plane that morning was a local guy who’d become famous for having introduced to the United States a food-processing device that was all the rage in Europe.

He was also become famous hereabouts for having, as people used to put it, “marrying well.” His wife was the daughter of a well-known industrialist and stepdaughter of one of the richest men in America.

We chatted on the plane and shared a cab into Manhattan. As he stepped from the car, JK turned back and invited me to join some “friends for drinks” that night at their apartment.

After a day of work I felt tired and frumpy. My suit could pass for cocktail wear at home, but not among the swell set of the Upper East Side. A rainstorm and resulting gridlocked traffic, however, delayed my departure to the airport just long enough for me to give a second thought to the allure of “drinks.”

If your concept of a New York apartment is one or two cramped rooms shared with three roommates, let me must tell you that JK’s apartment was not that kind of place. Upon arriving, the doorman gave me a look of doubt, if not downright disapproval. But after a call upstairs verified my legitimacy, I was escorted to their floor—yes, they had their own floor—and greeted by a young factotum in a white waiter’s jacket.

In fact, there were a lot of factotums in white jackets serving food, drinks and generally attending to the dozen or so people already there. After relieving me of my overcoat and briefcase, I was shown into the drawing room. I mixed and mingled as best I could. The other guests talked of places and events and pastimes of which I knew little. My wife and I had not just closed up the summer place in Southampton. We weren’t making plans to be in Gstaad for New Year’s Eve.

Eventually it was time for me to leave for the airport. As I made my way to the elevator my departure was blocked by the arrival of a flock of new guests. At the center of the group was Francesco Scavullo. I was drawn back into the party briefly, where I was introduced to the great photographer. He took one look at me and barely acknowledged my offer of a handshake. Famous photographers don’t shake hands?

As for the picture above, a classmate in the photography workshop I recently took in New York asked me to pose in front of (and in) the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. What is not visible in this picture and wasn’t apparent to me at the moment she took this picture was that there was a small rivulet of water getting ready to pour down my back.

What we do for art!

 

Fountain Life, 2012 (photo: Marcela Gindri)

Grace Notes

Celebrating El Bautismo, 2012
(Click on image to see larger.)

Sometimes when you’re out taking pictures you get a little gift, a little something very different from what you expected to find. I like to think of such gifts as the grace notes of photography.

I received one of those gifts a couple of Saturdays ago when I went out to take pictures of people on the beach. I walked along the water’s edge looking for interesting people. I found some and photographed them. But just as I was getting to the place where I was going to turn around and walk back the other way, I came upon a group of Hispanic men, women and children conducting a baptism in the ocean.

I arrived just as the formal ceremony was ending. The baptized were standing up in the waves and walking up from the ocean. Some were wringing out their wet robes. Family members swarmed about with dry clothes and warm and loving embraces. You didn’t have to be a person of faith to feel the pride and acceptance the people who were baptized felt. It was in their smiles and in their looks of contentment.

I don’t know whether these people are members of a specific church, or not. There were no banners and nothing anyone was wearing or said identified any group. The man who looked like he might be in charge wore no vestments.

My usual approach upon witnessing an event that has such meaning to its participants is to hang around the outer edges and give the participants—in this case the members of whatever congregation this was—some room to enjoy their celebration and privacy. But these folks were out in the middle of the resort beach. The baptism took place in the midst of hundreds of other beachgoers.

So, like others who were coming and going from the surf, I stepped closer into the company of the congregants and lifted my camera. I took a number of pictures in just a few minutes. But this is the one that best captures the joy of what I saw that day.

In His Element

In His Element, 2012
(Click on Image to see Larger)

One of my friends lives in a semi-cloistered faith community. The facility where he lives used to be a fully cloistered Catholic monastery. (It’s still surrounded by a tall brick wall that reveals nothing of the interior buildings, courtyards and gardens.) With the exception of a single nun designated to handle such things, the residents of the monastery did not interact with the outside world. Visitors were not allowed in and residents did not go out. It is said that for many years the monastery’s ancient furnace was maintained by a “diminutive nun with a wire coat hanger.”

The contemplative nuns who built the monastery settled there in the late 1800s to pray for the welfare of a city that had been largely destroyed during the Civil War. For years the nuns supported themselves baking communion wafers for hundreds of churches throughout the region and also, it turns out, the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet.

During the 1980s the nuns moved to a new site better suited to their contemporary needs. The old monastery was purchased by a nonprofit ecumenical Christian group to preserve its prayer mission and, more importantly and immediately, protect its prime real estate from commercial development. Today a dozen or so kindred souls reside in the former nuns’ dormitory. They care for the buildings and grounds and oversee the facility’s programs. Their quarters are simple. They gather several times a day for prayer.

To pay the bills the group ran a school at the site for a while and continued to bake communion wafers. Neither, though, was a sustainable operation, for which reason the facility’s board instead chose to take advantage of the old monastery’s history’s and facilities and use them as, among other things, a center for personal spiritual growth, pastoral counseling training, an outreach program for area children and a venue for religious and secular retreats and conferences. Rather than remain completed cloistered, today’s residents work hard inside and outside the walls to serve communities of need and promote unity in a sometimes fractious metropolitan region.

The Chapel, where this photograph was taken, was built in the late 1890s and continues to be the spiritual center of the facility. Despite being in the middle of a busy modern city, it is an altogether calm and calming place.

Closer Still

Styling from Danville, 2012

(Click on image to see larger)

I’m learning to get closer still.

To get the good portrait, so it’s said, you need to get close, This doesn’t mean cheating by getting “close” with a long telephoto lens or by sneaking a picture when the subject isn’t aware of you. It means getting close enough to talk to the person.

I’ve been working a lot on my approach lines lately and I’m making good progress in approaching strangers in order to take their photographs. I get the distinct impression that this is one of those skills you need to exercise regularly so that you don't get out of habit. 

I'm also discovering, I'm happy to report, that there are all sorts of people orbiting around my life who I should be photographing. Most are people I'd never given a moment's thought to before. Just the other morning, for example, I happened to drive my our local outdoor vegetable market and noticed the lady who manages the floral side of the market standing at the side of a field of flowers. Between the light, the shape of her body, her dress, her sun hat and her position relative to the field it was like a moment from Van Gogh. I could see the image in color or in black-and-white. (I'll be back, Caroline!) 

As I look at the pictures I've been taking of "strangers" lately, I see that I’ve still got a lot to learn about what to do with people after they’ve given me permission to get up in their face. I notice, for example, that I’m still standing well back from most of them, and even though I'm standing back from them I’m not giving them much context. 

This is an artistic choice. But noticing this merely adds to the list of things of which I need to be conscious. No one says you have to respect all the “rules.” But it isn’t bad to know about them so that you’ll at least be deliberate when you’re breaking them.

I encountered the man shown above on the beach a couple of Saturdays ago. I was initially attracted to his grandchildren, who were playing at the water’s edge. I’m a little squeamish about photographing children without a parent being close by to say it’s okay. By the time I identified the kids’ family, though, the kids had scattered in such a way that the interesting symmetry of their original composition had been broken. So I struck up a conversation with their grandfather.

Nice guy. Cool hat and glasses. Nice horizon reflections in the glasses except for the photographer. 

Wearing Your Faith

My Family is My Strength, 2012

I don’t know if this guy’s a Promise Keeper, or not. Sure looks like it. He was, in any event, happy to talk to me about his tattoos and explain their history. The story’s pretty much what you would expect it to be. He loves his family. They’re everything to him. He has a stomach big enough to tell everyone how he feels.

This man and his family were visiting Virginia Beach last week from “near Hot Springs, Arkansas.” It seemed important to him that I understand that his family is from “near” Hot Spring, not in Hot Springs. Maybe he figures his hometown is just too small for me to have heard of. Or perhaps he doesn’t like to be associated too specifically with Hot Springs, the boyhood home of Bill Clinton.

What I do know is that the toddler portrayed in ink over the man’s heart is now fourteen, but could pass for twenty-two. How do I know that? Because the boy was standing nearby and told me, without an hint of irony, “Mister, that ain’t what I look like anymore. I’m fourteen. People confuse me for twenty-two all the time.” He said all this in a soft, husky voice reminiscent of no one so much as Bill Clinton.

One thing I can say about people from near Hot Springs: They don’t take the obvious for granted.

A Tale of Two Ladies and a Dog

The Other Eyeglass Saleslady, 2012

It’s true. People with unusual clothing, body art and markings want to be recognized and photographed. They’re easy to approach to photograph because you know they didn’t dye their hair purple or pierce every loose bit of skin on their body in order to go unnoticed.

It’s the people without distinctive style, appearance or features who you have to work a little harder to find something to compliment and break the ice. It’s not like you can walk up to someone with an unusual jaw and compliment it (though I’m working on it, because you never know when you’re going to encounter someone with a really unusual and interesting jaw and need a good approach line).

The easiest people to approach, it turns out, are people with dogs. The more dogs, the easier they are. Dog people are nutty. I should know. I am one. They love to be noticed because of their dogs, as if they have something to do with how cute their dogs are. If you don’t believe me, go watch Best in Show. Those crazy depictions of dog owners aren’t that far from the truth.

In any event, it’s an encounter with a dog that resulted in the pictures in this post.

To be honest, I really didn’t care about the dog, an ancient Jack Russell terrier, recently resurrected from its deathbed, its owner told me, by copious amounts of money, surgery and space age medicine. Rather, the dog was a way of getting to the owner, and she was just a way of getting to the lady shown below with the red lips.

I’d noticed the lady with the red lips when she stepped outside of the eyeglass store where she works to smoke a cigarette and drink a glass of iced tea. Her red lips were striking against her pale skin.  I wanted to photograph them, but was a little sheepish about approaching her with some cheesy, “I really love those red lips” line. Fortunately, one of her c0-workers joined her and and started a conversation with the dog owner, who happens to be a customer of the eyeglass store.

As I approached I reached down to pet the old dog. The dog’s owner immediately struck up a conversation. I listened to the dog’s sad medical history and, when the time seemed right, told the second eyeglass saleslady I loved her glasses and would love to photograph her wearing them. That’s her at the top of this post. Doesn’t she have a lovely smile?

After a little conversation, I figured it was time to turn to the lady with the red lipstick, who had meanwhile had a brief and hostile cell phone conversation with her boyfriend and was looking generally pissed. When I turned the camera to her and said, “You know I can’t ignore those striking lips. They’re gorgeous,” she initially turned away, but was eventually charmed into giving me the pose you see here.

By the way, all of the glasses are blanks.

 

The Eyeglass Saleslady With the Red Lips, 2012