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My most popular photograph was an accident. In December 1979 I was hard at work on the book that was eventually published as Berenice Abbott - American Photographer. At the time my editor was Jacqueline Onassis and Doubleday was scheduled to publish the book. I had met her earlier in the year at the International Center of Photography, where she was on the Board. It was then I learned she was serious about photography and that she was drawn to Abbott because of her own great love of the French photographer Eugène Atget. One day Mrs. Onassis telephoned and said she wanted to come down to my studio to look at all the Abbott photographs I'd assembled. We set an appointment and a few days later she arrived late in the morning with her assistant, Ray Roberts. We spent two or three hours going over all the photographs, but when we were finished sorting through the Abbott inventory, Mrs. Onassis said she wanted to look at all the other photographs hanging on the walls of my studio. There were twelve rooms in those days, and the walls were covered with many photographs, paintings and posters, but most of the really fine photographs were in three rooms and a hallway on the third floor. We spent some time looking at all the images and discussing the various photographers who were responsible for them. She looked at each and every one very carefully. I had to carefully steer her through the kitchen because there was one picture in that room, thankfully one that could be hidden by a large door, that I didn’t want her to see. It was a joke picture that Johnny DeVries had taken and then put in an antique frame. I’m standing in the doorway of Berenice’s house in Maine, holding a broom and looking awful. He surrounded the picture with birch bark, put it in an awful frame and wrote across the bottom, Lee Harvey Oswald in Maine. This probably would not have pleased her. Mrs. Onassis was particularly impressed with a large 16"x20" photograph I'd printed from one of the Atget glass plates still in Berenice's possession, the famous image known as Magasen, avenue des Gobelins (1925), male mannequins in a shop window. She’d never seen anything by Atget except 8”x10” contact prints and was astounded how good they looked enlarged. I told her it was very difficult to make enlarged prints because Atget plates were very dense, exposed to used with printing out paper in sunlight and that I had to find one that was less dense to even have a shot an an enlargement. She understood. She also noticed my copy of Atget Photographe de Paris, undoubtedly the first book about the French master, and asked if she could borrow it. I said, “Of course, and you can keep it as long as you like, if you'll let me take a photograph of you holding the book.” She agreed without hesitation and we headed to the room I used as a photography studio. My 5"x7" Deardorff (with a 4"x5" reducing back) was always set up under a large skylight. Film holders were ready for just such an occasion. There was zero setup time. It was mid afternoon and there was still enough natural light to do the job without any help from Con Ed. I made three one second exposures. Mrs. Onassis wiggled during the first when she was facing the camera but held perfectly still for the second, the side view. Ray Roberts joined her for the third. In all likelihood this is one of the few, if not the only, formal, large format post-1963 photographs of one of the most photographed women of this century. I sent her a copy of the photograph and she said she liked it. She also said she liked the Atget book and it was waiting for me on one of my trips to visit her at Doubleday. We continued to work on the book for about a year until it became apparent Doubleday wasn’t the right publisher and she turned us over to ArtNews/ArtPress Books, who, in conjunction with McGraw-Hill, published the book in 1982. We stayed in touch until she died in 1994, but never worked together again on a project, even though we came close in 1991. I never did anything commercially with the photograph until 1999, when I had a retrospective exhibition at The Witkin Gallery. Since then it has become one of my most popular pictures, at auction, shows and charity events and was even featured on the cover of the catalog for the inaugural Heritage Auctions photography sale. Strangely, however, I have never once been contacted by any of the people who seem to put out a book about Mrs. Onassis every year, with a request to use the photograph but perhaps that’s just as well. |
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