Christmas Reading, and Other Stories.
Like how I ended up at Virgil Abloh's last Louis Vuitton show.
I miss taking pictures.
I received a copy of Juergen Teller’s new book for Christmas. “Donkey Man and Other Stories.” Two pictures took me by surprise. Teller had included photos of Kanye West and Steve McQueen which he shot for T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2015.
I never think of myself as a photographer. I shoot what I write, but I never think I can capture a story with a photo as well as I can with words hard as I try. Still, I shot a lot of stories for T in 2015. The photos were the easy part. They’re spontaneous. I don’t give any direction, I actually thought for a long time I wasn’t supposed to give any direction, that it was The New York Times, and it’s real journalism, and all the pictures have to be truthful, and I’d get in trouble if I edited them at all. No one tells you these things. That it’s the Style magazine and of course I can do whatever I want. So while I agonized over writing the most indulgent copy, I never went posing people or fucking around in Photoshop after the fact. Wrongly believing this made picture-taking much easier.
Whenever I read a newspaper or magazine I’m pitching or published in, I always read all the bylines while bypassing the photo credits just never thinking it was my arena. So it never occurred to me until today that I was shooting for the same magazine at the same time as Juergen Teller. A lot of people were, but still pretty cool! Meanwhile I can’t even remember what writers I was envious of back then.
Here are some photos I shot for T in 2015, in the Faroe Islands, Modena, Vermont, Princeton, Milan, and London.
Cold things in warm tones.
Crouching foragers.
Circles and squares.
I had aesthetics! Who knew?
My favorite essay in the book is a story Teller shares about the first time he met the Japanese fashion and art photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in the early 1990s.
Araki saw Teller at this one exhibition in Tokyo, beelined toward him, and said to him and his girl friend, “fucky, fucky, me take pictures.” Teller declined.
It goes without saying I related to this.
Most of you know the story, I was in Tokyo in 2016, writing (and shooting) for WSJ, and I took my translator to a gallery in the red light district. A gallery owner shared her story about the criminal element behind the neighborhood’s Soapland brothels threatening her, and, used to dealing with that sort of thing back home, I got her logo tattooed on me the next day in an act of solidarity. A few months later, the gallery owner was in New York City and wanted to make art with my tattoo.
The gallery owner asked a Japanese fashion and art photographer to make pictures of me and a woman friend at the Ace Hotel and we had our own impromptu “fucky, fucky, me take pictures” experience. A few months later the photos sold out at the Tokyo gallery and there was even a tee shirt to commemorate the experience.
A few weeks ago I went to Miami for Art Basel and I put my camera to use for the first time in a while.
I met Virgil Abloh once. I interviewed him for close to an hour in some private room of the Mercer Hotel before attending a dinner he was hosting at the New Museum for the launch of his Moet collaboration. I wasn’t a fan, but I respect that he sat there and answered every question. And anyway, the magazine ran the story as though it were sponsored content. Gotta love Surface.
I know that interview, story, dinner, is not why I was invited to the show. I was invited to the show because I write a lot about a restaurant group in Miami, and they share a local publicist with Louis Vuitton, and that’s why I was invited. I wondered how many people were invited for similar reasons, and if he were there, and looking out into the crowd, how many faces he would have recognized.
As some of you know, I’ve spent the past six months writing just one story once again.
Another PR agency invited me to Miami back in June, and their client turned out to be a bad guy. Lots of crimes. I told the PR about it, and they swore they cut ties with the guy but they kept inviting him to fashion parties after the fact. There was one night in particular, the bad guy attended a party for a New York fashion designer last September. Now at some point, I’m going to seek comment from that designer, and try to ask him why he invited someone his PR knew was an accused serial rapist and con man to his afterparty. But I know that the designer has no idea who’s invited to his parties anymore than Virgil knew who was invited to his fashion show. Even Virgil Abloh’s last Louis Vuitton show needed seat fillers.
While waiting for the show to start, Juergen Teller and his girlfriend appeared before me. I never know what to say to people at these things, and I’m not one for small talk, but if I knew everything I knew now, I wouldn’t have have hidden behind my camera.
