IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I took out my camera and even longer since I printed in a darkroom. So, I’ve exercised my photographic curiosity in other ways, mainly reporting on a few major photo events in the city.
I wish I could say it was a pleasure to interview William Klein, whose work I hugely admire. But the infamously cantankerous photographer, a native New Yorker who has lived in Paris most his life, seemed disinclined to talk to me. Maybe it was jet lag. Or, maybe he thought the WSJ represented what he once called NYC—”a monument to the dollar.” Or perhaps he was simply displeased to be back in his hometown, which he told me was a sh*thole–within the first five minutes of our interview. Any way you slice it, he was a tough customer. And waving that cane at me did little for my confidence. [Photo: Andrew Hinderaker]
On a more cheerful note, I spoke with Jeff Rosenheim, the curator responsible for the exuberant William Eggleston show at the Metropolitan Museum. The small show include 36 dye-transfer prints, which nearly vibrate with their color energy. Textural, velvety, nuanced, painterly, the prints are other worldly—an irony of sorts, as Eggleston was all about the earthly and ordinary.
I have long admired Aperture and was thrilled to go behind the scenes of the magazine’s redesign. The revamp brings the magazine back to its roots as a long-form critical look at photography and, at the same time, considers the insistent forward thrust of the industry.
