Barely had our story on that sale been printed than it was out of date. Now the world has a new record-holder, and the art community is beside itself with glee. But what about the pond itself? Is it still a viable photographic subject?

Is This Steichen’s Pond?

Sometime in the last summer of early fall of 1904, Edward Steichen wandered away from a home in Mamaroneck, in Westchester County, about 45 minutes north of New York City, and walked downhill toward the marshy wetlands at edge of Long Island Sound. There he made a photograph that would one day upend the art world and usher in a new era in photography.

A print of the photograph, which Steichen called “The Pond — Moonlight,” sold for $2.9 million at a special auction at Sotheby’s in February, making it the most expensive single photograph ever. One of three existing gum bichromate prints that Steichen made from the same negative, it had been part of the Gilman Paper Company collection of 8,500 images acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year. Since the Met already owned one of the other prints of the image (the third is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), the museum “deacquisitioned” it along with other material at the Sotheby’s auction.

All told, the sale brought in an astonishing $14,982,900. Many art insiders believe that result reflects a steep, upward trend in prices for photography in general. (It was only last November that a Richard Prince image became the first single photograph to break the $1 million barrier.)

In the aftermath of the sale, “The Pond — Moonlight” became the focus of much conversation and historic speculation, but perhaps none more intriguing than that raised in a New York Times article regarding the exact location of the pond. Today, Mamaroneck is a woody suburb, but in 1904 it was sparsely populated. Steichen had gone there with his first wife, Clara, and their newborn daughter that summer, staying in the home of art critic Charles H. Caffin. Could it be that his pond still exists?

To find out, American Photo launched an expedition. Our team was aided by Gloria P. Pritts, the village historian of Mamaroneck, who in the weeks after the auction began researching possible locations in which the pond might have been. After poring over the evidence and Steichen’s own records, she concluded that the pond had been in a low-lying area that is now part of a golf course, the Hampshire Country Club. “The golf course would have been within walking distance of the Caffin house,” says Pritts, “and there are a lot of old oaks and other trees there in the direction in which the moon would have been setting.”

Our team surveyed the golf course and found several ponds, including the one you see here. If this is Steichen’s pond, it is now surrounded by sand traps and single-family homes. But if the rustic landscape of Steichen day is gone, the artistic allure of what he captured remains.

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There are a lot of people in Vidor who used to work in the oil fields,” says photographer Dave Anderson. “If you ask them what they do now, you always hear, ‘A little of this, and a little of that.’ Some roofing. Some other things.”

Vidor, in east Texas, is a rough-and-tumble place probably best known for having an active Ku Klux Klan, but that’s not why Anderson chose to document the town and its inhabitants. Instead, he saw something poignant there. In his new book, Rough Beauty (Dewi Lewis Publishing, $40), Anderson captures what Houston Museum of Fine Arts curator Anne Wilkes Tucker calls in her introduction “a portrayal of hope.”

The book is a brilliant debut for Anderson, a former television producer who also once worked in the Clinton White House. “I fell in love with photography, and I knew I had to make it happen for me,” he says. “I didn’t think it would happen this soon, but I’m grateful.”

Q&A With Dave Anderson

Q. Why did you choose a place like Vidor to document?
A. I was taking a photography course with Keith Carter at Lamar University, in Beaumont, Texas, which is near Vidor. The idea grew out of an assignment he gave.

Q. How’d you get to Texas?
A. It was a long journey. Originally I’m from Michigan. In the ’90s I volunteered for the Clinton campaign, then got a job in the White House. That was interesting. I later became a television producer, but I discovered I had this love for photography. So against the advice of all my relatives and friends I gave up a great job to become a photographer.

Q. That was brave… or foolish indeed.
A. I just stalked several photographers I admired — Keith Carter, Michael Kenna — and took workshops from them and badgered them. That’s how I learned. Michael, I think, still regards me basically as a stalker.

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Fashion photographer Raphael Mazzucco shot the cover and 36 pages inside last year’s 250-page Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. But what he really liked were the pictures that never got into the magazine.

On top of his cover assignment, Mazzucco had been tasked with shooting a story featuring eight of the famous models who’d posed for SI in the past. Editor Diane Smith selected the group, including Elle Macpherson, Rebecca Romijn, and Rachel Hunter.

Shooting in the Bahamas with a Pentaz 67 and a Leica Digilux 2, Mazzucco made images that went well beyond the magazine’s usual T&A requirements to capture a timeless celebration of sun, water, and beauty. The pictures can finally be seen this fall in a new book, Exposure (SI Books, $30). “You can’t mess up with a crew like that,” says Mazzucco.

Q&A with Raphael Mazzucco

Q. What was this shoot like?
A. We did the whole thing in one week in August 2005, at Harbor Island in the Bahamas. Elle has a home there, so that made it easier to get everyone in one place. It was really amazing that Diane Smith was able to pull it off. Some of the girls came early in the week, and we shot them then, and some came later. But they were all together for one day. That’s when we did the group shots.

Q. How did you adapt to shooting each girl, one after another?
A. You know, each girl was different. Each one brought her own energy to the project. Veronica Varekova was just out-and-out sexy; Carolyn Murphy was sort of natural and fluid in her beauty. Rebecca Romijn is an actress now, and she brought this incredible talent for being funny and slipping into different characters. Yamila Diaz-Rahi and Daniela Pestova were perfect to work with.

Q. You didn’t just shoot them lounging on the beach in swimsuits.
A. No, this is about them, it’s about this special moment when they were all together, so I approached it like that. I wanted the pictures to be filled with movement and life.

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The French photographer had been captured by Nazis in 1940, and he had spent 35 months in various prisoner-of-war camps. After two unsuccessful attempts at escape, he finally succeeded. In 1943, he dug up the Leica he had buried on a farm near Vosges and began taking pictures again.

By the end of the war, however, rumors reached America that Cartier-Bresson had been killed. MoMA’s photography curator, Beaumont Newhall, went to work on a major show. Then, in 1946, it was learned that he was still alive. Cartier-Bresson decided to come to America to work on the exhibition — a show that helped to establish him as a major figure in photography and art. And that, until now, was the tale of the remarkable event.

Another chapter is being written this fall, however, with the unveiling of an ornate leather photo album that has been culled from the archive of Cartier-Bresson, who died in 2004 at age 95. The album, housed at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, contains 345 images printed by HCB himself to prepare for the MoMA show. Some of the images are among his most famous. Others are “outtakes” of well-known images. Most of the images in the album have never been seen before.

“The album represents a major contribution to our understanding of Cartier-Bresson during this period,” says Agnès Sire, director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. The organization has been working with German publisher Gerhard Steidl to produce a facsimile album. There will also be an exhibition of the original album and photographs at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation from Sept. 21 to Dec. 22.

The original album, approximately 11.8×15.7 inches, lay “asleep” in the Cartier-Bresson’s archive until 1992, when the photographer himself noticed that the scrapbook’s paper pages were deteriorating. Working with an assistant, he began removing the prints from the pages, until his wife, Martine Franck, convinced him to stop. At that point, only 13 pages remained untouched. The Foundation will display the isolated images in a chronological layout, as HCB did in 1947.

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Though the Vietnam War ended 30 years ago, its distant thunder continues to echo. It was perhaps the most intimately photographed war in history, and in those still images the fighting has never ceased. The most powerful of the pictures are the ones that captured the apperceived truth of the morally contentious conflict. In these sustaining images, it is the suffering of the combatants alone that speaks with authority.
To mark the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Paris Match magazine decided to track down the subjects of two such photographs. One was a shot of a wounded black Marine reaching out for an injured comrade, made on October 5, 1966, by Life magazine photojournalist Larry Burrows, who would himself be killed in a helicopter crash near the Cambodian border in 1971. The other image showed a bewildered Marine kneeling over the body of a fallen comrade, taken in April 1967 by legendary photographer Catherine Leroy. To photograph the two men, the magazine assigned Leroy herself, now living in Los Angeles.
Over the years, Leroy had kept in touch with the Marine she photographed that day in the bloody battle for Hill 881 near the border between South and North Vietnam. His name was Vernon Wike, and he lived by himself in a small home in Prescott, Arizona. When she and Paris Match correspondent Regis Le Sommier met Wike in 2005, it was clear that the man Leroy had photographed so long ago had come back from the war with a burden he could never rid himself of. Married four times, with two daughters he no longer speaks to, he had been living meagerly on a $325-a-month pension. The 58-year-old told Leroy that he felt more like 80. “While not physically hurt, he suffers from extreme Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, waking from nightmares every night,” wrote Le Sommier. “On his arms, he has tattoos of the names of his dead comrades. He’s lost in a jungle of his own mind.”

For Wike, the haunting memories and the pictures that Leroy shot of him during the war had become intertwined in a psychological spiral. The “Hill Fights” of spring 1967 were toe-to-toe slugging matches between Marines and North Vietnamese troops near the Marine outpost at Khe Sahn. Leroy, a freelance photographer who would later be seriously wounded while covering the war, arrived at the battle in the late afternoon that day on a resupply helicopter, wearing combat fatigues and a white handkerchief over her hair. She quickly learned how intense the fighting there was.
“I was standing next to a colonel, and suddenly I heard a zzzzzzzz-ing sound near my ear,” recalls Leroy. “The colonel said, “You better take off that white handkerchief, because someone just shot at you.'”
She began following a Marine company on an assault through the bombed-out terrain. “It was hard to walk, because the earth was loosened and giving way, and the noise of the battle was deafening,” Leroy says. Pinned down by gunfire, she saw a wounded Marine four meters ahead of her. “I heard someone yelling, “Corpsman, corpsman!” And I saw this other Marine rushing to the wounded man, and he put his ear on the man’s heart. Then he looked up in total anguish.”
The man in anguish was Wike. Recounting his story of that day to Le Sommier, he said, “I heard a bang, and I lifted my head out of the trench and saw my friend Rock — it all happened like in some dream — his body started falling and I threw myself at it. The only noise I heard was his heartbeat disappearing little by little. The bullet was in his chest.”
As Leroy recalls the incident, Wike, who had been among the lead assault, then picked up the dead soldier’s rifle and disappeared among a second wave of Marines. “He was yelling,
‘I’ll kill them all!” she says.
Wike returned home from Vietnam without any physical injury but troubled. In 2003 he accidentally shot himself with a gun he had placed in his pants pocket. In 2004 the house
he was living in burned to the ground.

Leroy photographed Wike in the cluttered bedroom of the small apartment he moved to after the fire, shooting with a Mamiya 7 and a single strobe. As she worked, Wike told her that her images of him as a young man had marked him forever; after 30 years, he said, it was still those pictures that woke him from his sleep at night.
Two days after the portrait session, Wike suffered a stroke that paralyzed his body and cost him his sight. He later moved to the home of a sister in the Midwest. “Vernon,” says Leroy, “is haunted.”

Leroy found the black Marine in the Burrows picture with the help of Burrows’s son, Russell. Jeremiah Purdie was living in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a framed print of the famous image hanging in his home. A tiny shell fragment was stuck in a corner of the frame — a fragment that entered Purdie’s skull that day in 1966, when, during the battle for Mutter Ridge, Burrows photographed him.
That battle was part of a six-month action called Operation Prairie whose aim was to cut off North Vietnamese infiltration through the Demilitarized Zone into the South. It turned into a costly affair, pushing U.S. casualties for the week to their highest of the war. When Burrows cabled New York with instructions on handling his damp film, he found himself apologizing: “Sorry if my captioning is not up to standard, but with all that sniper fire around I didn’t dare wave a white notebook.”
While covering the fighting for Hill 484, Burrows took a series of photos of a wounded black Marine being evacuated. In the most famous image from the series, the wounded Marine, Purdie, reaches out to a mud-covered comrade.
After he came back from Vietnam, Purdie tried to bury his memories of the war. But he, too, had nightmares. His wife, Angel, told Le Sommier that her husband often woke up screaming. It was only three years ago that Purdie, after counseling from a PTSD specialist, began to talk about his experiences during the war. He said the counselor had liberated his fears, finally convincing him that he hadn’t abandoned his comrades when he was flown out of the battle.
Purdie had joined the Marines during the Korean War because, he said, it was the only service that would “take a black man.” After Vietnam, he worked as a Marine Corps recruiter, talking to young men, most of them black, in parking lots and supermarkets. For his efforts in the battle for Hill 484 he received the Bronze Star. His wife told the Paris Match reporter that Burrows’s photo had helped Purdie deal with his memories of Vietnam — allowing him, in a sense, to remain connected to his fellow Marines who never came home.
“When I photographed him, I could tell he was tired, so I had him just sit on his bed,” says Leroy. A month after the portrait was made, Purdie died. “I consider myself lucky to have met him, and photographed him,” says Leroy.

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Desperate housewives are never more desperate than the ones in David LaChapelle’s photographs. The image at right, part of a recent fashion story shot for Italian Vogue, has all the essential LaChapellian motifs: sex, chaos, humor, and a healthy disrespect for visual logic. When he looks at a suburban street, he sees a surreal landscape in which the quaint lives of soccer moms can be disrupted by sudden disaster, from a violent storm (in this case a hurricane) to the violent sexual yearnings caused by the sighting of a rock star. This elegant mom blithely walks away from the turbulence, strangely ambivalent to the uprooted world around her. Perhaps, like LaChapelle himself, she simply enjoys the spectacle of it all.

“It’s funny, but we shot those pictures in June of 2005, before Hurricane Katrina, and they were at Italian Vogue being printed when the hurricane hit, and all I could think of was that the pictures looked so much like the devastation I was seeing on television,” says LaChapelle. Hurricanes happened to be on his mind. “My mom lives in Florida, and they’ve had so many hurricanes there. So these pictures kind of represent how we’re all going about our daily lives, shopping for luxury goods and not worrying about bigger things like global climate change.”

It has always been easy — too easy, in fact — to see LaChapelle simply as a photographic provocateur who celebrates pop culture and its transcendent vulgarities. That’s primarily due to the nature of the work, most of which was made for magazines selling celebrities, fashion, and entertainment on a highly disposable monthly schedule.

It is only in looking back over his 30 years of work that one can see LaChapelle’s consistently ironic commentary on the culture around him. More than any of his contemporaries, LaChapelle has been determined throughout his career to create a photographic world all his own — a place that bears his personal stamp and operates under his very particular rules. He’s been called “the Fellini of photography,” a statement not at all hyperbolic. His supercharged colors and archly funny juxtapositions — a model crushed under an enormous inflatable hamburger; Elton John rocking out in a room full of cherries and bananas — reflected the tastes of MTV generation when he burst onto the scene in the mid-1980s.

“His images are the candy-coated connective tissue of the modern pop culture animal,” one commentator noted midway through the following decade. Lately he has dabbled successfully in documentary filmmaking with his 2005 film Rize, which another critic called “a gripping portrayal of the hip hop ghetto nation.” He also designed and directed Elton John’s 2004 Las Vegas extravaganza “The Red Piano.” But his legacy is still defined by the images he shoots for magazines and collects in books, particularly LaChapelle Land (1996) and Hotel LaChapelle (1999), both of which sold out initial print runs and became highly valued by collectors.

In another attempt to stake out the farthest reaches of his creative universe, LaChapelle is now bringing out a new book, and it too will be a hit with collectors — by design. Discreetly titled Artists & Prostitutes, it is being published by Taschen in a limited edition of 2,500 copies signed and dated by LaChapelle. The book is an oversized 13.6 x 19.7 inches, and at 688 pages it comprises a full retrospective of LaChapelle’s work — everything from his latest fashion pictures to his porno-chic imagery for Arena and other magazines, as well as his memorable portraits of celebrities whose cultural impact may well be far less enduring than his pictures — Lil’ Kim, Paris Hilton, Tupac Shakur, and Pamela Anderson, to name a few.

“If there’s an exhibitionist left who wants his or her picture taken,” LaChapelle once said, “I’ll be there.”

Therein lies the meaning of the book’s title.

“Actually I wanted to call my first book Artists & Prostitutes, but the publisher wouldn’t let me because he thought it was in bad taste,” says LaChapelle. And the meaning? “It works on a lot of different levels,” he says. “There are artists and prostitutes in the world, and I don’t make a judgment about them, I photograph everyone the same way.” In fact, says LaChapelle, “some of my best friends have been prostitutes, and sometimes to be an artist is to be a prostitute, and vice versa. I once read this great quote from a prostitute, who said that when she was with a client she always had to find something about him to love, even if it was just his shoes. And that’s the way it is for me in photographing all the celebrities I do. For the time they’re in the studio, I have to find something about them to love, even if they’re not being very nice.”

The book begins with an image LaChapelle made at the beginning of his career in 1985, a shot of the Beastie Boys in Times Square. The layout then places the surprising span of his career into perspective. “Up until now I don’t think my work has been well understood except by the people I work closely with,” he says. LaChapelle takes particular exception to the idea that he is just a digital magician who produces his amped-up images in Photoshop.

“It’s true that I was employing digital technology early on, because I had a grant from a Japanese company to test out their equipment,” he says. “But in fact what we really do is build sets, paint backdrops, and all the images exist in real time. We don’t do all that much in post-production.”

His famous shot of a nude Lil’Kim covered in Louis Vuitton logos, for instance, required the diminutive rapper to be body painted. The driving vision springs more from an instinct for theater than from digital know-how. “I’m really not that interested in computers,” LaChapelle says.

He also dislikes the idea that he has only one trick, or one emotional response, to every subject. “I don’t allow myself to be just the guy who’s a clown, who does all the wild colors and light, funny photos,” he says. “Not allowing myself to be categorized is what’s kept me around for so long. And I think this book represents that — it’s the first time all the work has been put together in one place.”

Plumbing a 30-year career and editing it down even to a relatively expansive 688 pages would seem to be a daunting task, and indeed LaChapelle spent three years planning and laying out Artists & Prostitutes. Some photographers say they hate looking at their past work, preferring whatever current project they happen to be working on.

“I really enjoy looking back to see what I’ve done, and where I’ve been,” says LaChapelle. “Each picture is a record of what I was doing, who was working on the shot with me, people I was in love with who I put into the images in some way. For me, my commercial work is also a personal photo album of my world.”

And it is one thrilling place.

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In his long association with Victoria’s Secret, photographer Russell James has shot several memorable ad campaigns and special projects, such as last year’s “Backstage” print and television campaign. (See American Photo magazine, March/April 2004.) Now, however, the company that put lingerie into malls from coast to coast is collaborating with James and two other photographers, fashion photographers Ellen von Unwerth and Raphael Mazzucco, on an entirely new kind of project. It’s an elaborate photography book that spotlights the creative visions of the imagemakers and beautiful bodies behind the famous brand.
James’s images are not typical glamour shots, however, but rather studies of shape and light that capture the enduring beauty of nature and the awesome beauty of his subjects.
The idea was to let the photographers and models visually interpret the word “swim” in any way they deemed most creative. For James, that meant flying around the world to some of the most beautiful beaches on the planet, accompanied by models like Heidi Klum, Naomi Campbell, and Gisele Bündchen.

© JAMES RUSSELL/COURTESY VICTORIA SECRET DIRECT, INC.

James’s images are not typical glamour shots, however, but rather studies of shape and light that capture the enduring beauty of nature and the awesome beauty of his subjects. In this exclusive preview, we present a portfolio of James’s photographs, along with his behind-the-scenes stories of how they were made.

© JAMES RUSSELL/COURTESY VICTORIA SECRET DIRECT, INC.

Interview with James Russell
R ussell, this is a unique project, how did it come about?
It grew out of a discussion with the president and CEO of Victoria’s Secret Direct, Sharen Turney-you could really says the project actually comes from her mind. She had his idea to do something special with the brand, and she presented it to three photographers: myself, Ellen von Unwerth, and Raphael Mazzucco.
And what was the concept for the project?
Sharen said basically that she wanted to see something extraordinary and beautiful in the swim world, which could be collected in a book. There would be three different volumes-one for each of the photographers. So the work you’re seeing here is from the volume of the book that I did.
The idea here-what Sharen told us she wanted-was for us to do anything we want, and that we should be driven by our own vision. The only thing Victoria’s Secret asked, from a creative standpoint, was that the images somehow be a reflection of the idea of “swim”-what the word “swim” meant to us photographers individually. That’s an incredibly open-ended assignment… It is interesting. You hear this kind of creative spin from companies all time, but Victoria’s Secret actually believes that the wealth of their brand is in the creative people around it. The fact that they get these great girls, and these good photographic people, that’s the bank the company has to build on.

© JAMES RUSSELL/COURTESY VICTORIA SECRET DIRECT, INC.

So where did you go with the idea?
I just let my imagination go. I thought I’d like to reflect on “swim” in the broadest sense. At first I was thinking of doing very straightforward reflections-literally reflections as seen in water; then I realized that “reflection” means a lot of things when it comes to water. I realized a reflection could be an impression in the sand, a reflection in the water-that simply the way you photograph something was reflective. And I decided right away to take a very solid, black-and-white, graphic, stylized approach.

© JAMES RUSSELL/COURTESY VICTORIA SECRET DIRECT, INC.

That seems at first an unusual creative decision. Usually when you think “swim” and “beach,” you think color. How did you decide you wanted to do it in black and white, and in this particular style?
Well, let me back up a bit. Originally, I had planted the seed in Sharen Turney’s mind to do something that would be extraordinarily creative in the market. Something that people would look at and say, “That
Usually when you think “swim” and “beach,” you think color.
wasn’t advertising, it wasn’t a catalog, it was just pure images.” Then she spun this notion around and gave it back to us, and said, “Here it is.” And I took them very literally. I sat back and thought, Victoria’s Secret is a very powerful, glossy brand, and yet what the company is saying is, “Do what you want to do.” So I arrived at black and white. It wasn’t just to get away from that big, glossy approach, but it was more that I just had to focus on what I’m passionate about, and what I’m passionate about is lighting and shape. And I also wanted the challenge of working in digital. I was a staunch enemy of digital to a certain point in my career, then I tested some equipment and realized that, no matter what photographers do, digital was coming down the line. So I decided to do this project in black and white because I wanted the challenge of arriving at something that was digital yet seemed authentically black and white, that felt real. I loved the idea of using the most ultra-modern digital technology and combining that with the more historical style of photography, which is black and white.

© JAMES RUSSELL/COURTESY VICTORIA SECRET DIRECT, INC.

Tell us about about the shooting of the project itself…when did you do it?
I shot it during a three-week period last fall, from October through mid-November. So it was shot in a short time frame, as these things go. There are two ways to do a project like this: One is to do it a little at a time, between your regular commercial assignments. The other is to have someone say, “I want you to focus on this, and here are the resources to get you to the place, to get from the place, and getting the girls won’t be your problem, we will help you with that.” So it was terrific. Victoria’s Secret unleashed the creatives. When you talk about getting to the locations, you’re talking about some pretty spectacular places. We took one trip to Sardinia, one trip to St. Tropez, and one trip to Mexico. And of course the company was incredibly supportive. For instance, I was in St. Tropez, and I wanted to get to Sardinia, and there was no practical way to do that, so they sent a jet down-one of their private company jets-and took us out of St. Tropez and dropped us into Sardinia, so we could be shooting in St. Tropez in the morning and shooting in Sardinia in the afternoon. Gotta love ’em for that.
How big a crew were you hauling around for this?
It fluctuated in size. Sometimes we’d have multiple girls, a lot of producers, so the crew was 15 to 18 people, which is a lot. But there were days when we’d have a basic crew of only five or six, when we needed to access really remote locations.
Who were the girls you shot?
We had terrific partners on this. And I use that word in regard to the model very carefully, because they were full partners in the creative development of the images. And they were basically all doing this for free, so to speak. In terms of the book, not a single dollar was paid to the creative talent involved on camera. Which was a challenge. The company said, “Look we’ll back this project, but you have to do it. But we ended up with the very top girls who work with the company: Heidi Klum, Alessandra Ambrosio, Ana Beatriz, Gisele Bündchen, Naomi Campbell, Karolina Kurkova, Adriana Lima, Angela Lindvall, and Marissa Miller, to name a few. The creativity involved in working with all these famous models…that’s an interesting idea.
How did the project play out as you shot it?
Like any project, I started with a preconceived idea-at first, it was going to be very expansive- about the locations as much as the girls. But once I got to the places, I found that it was just much more interesting to shoot a piece of coral in very tight closeup, and then the beauty of the girl. The project from my standpoint just didn’t need much more than that. It’s just an example of the way these things often work, where you preconceive an idea, but you gotta let it flow, or it doesn’t come out.
Did the locations themselves present any particular creative problems or opportunities?
I had stayed at all those places while shooting different projects, but basically the locations, even though they don’t scream it in the photos, each offered a different kind of inspiration. In this case, since the models were full partners in creative process, we would all have to adapt to different places. Girls would react differently in different locations. If you take a girl to Costa Careyes, Mexico-one of the places we shot-she’s going to have to fly through two different cities, then get into a car and drive through some wild country for two hours, then she’s going to be staying in a house in the middle of nowhere. So you really get into another space. It’s so removed from the rest of the world, from agencies and managers, so it’s possible to sit and chat, to have a cocktail and say, “Hey, let’s do something really cool,” and you’re able to partner with the people. So while the locations might not seem visually significant in the final images, they were all very important because they were all very remote and beautiful, and they allowed me to get with the girls, the stylists, and the hair and makeup people, and just have little one-on-one conversations. I’d ask the girls what inspired them, or I’d give them concepts, like a shell, or seaweed, sticks, water. Karolina, for instance, gravitated toward these dry, crusty sea weeds, which as a photographic element at first glance you say, “How am I going to make this work?” Then you realize there’s something beautiful in everything-in seaweed, in driftwood, everything.
What did other models react to?
With Gisele it was simple. She was huddling from cold because it was a windy day, and there was sand blowing all over her body, and I thought, that’s a great element. And she’s like, “Bury me, baby, bury me.” And so into the sand she went. And so a lot of the pictures evolved in that way.
Tell us about the shot of Heidi sitting on the beach….
I’ve shown these pictures to a number of people, and they all say that series of images, and that shot in particular, is just captivating. It’s a terrific character drawing. It was made in Costa Careyes. We were able to coordinate it so that Heidi could join us there. She

© JAMES RUSSELL/COURTESY VICTORIA SECRET DIRECT, INC.

Sometimes you put a swimsuit on a girl in that situation and it can come away looking a lot more cheesy and a lot less real, so it wasn’t just about getting the girl to take her clothes off.
brought her child down, and she was down there with her now-fiance, Seal, and so we had a chat, and we talked about a lot of swimsuits, we talked about a lot of concepts, but Heidi said, “You know, where I’m most comfortable is just in being me, so to speak. In the most free way.” So I said, “Okay, let’s take that to the extreme. You’re one of the most free, engaging people that I know, so I’m just going to cut you loose out in the wild here. We just took her down one afternoon to an absolutely deserted beach where she could have total comfort, and we just literally ran wild in the waves.
Well, the pictures are very sexy, and there’s some nudity…
The nudity factor….it’s always interesting. So much of what we think of related to water and the word “swim” is just natural, pure beauty. Sometimes you put a swimsuit on a girl in that situation and it can come away looking a lot more cheesy and a lot less real, so it wasn’t just about getting the girl to take her clothes off. In terms of the edit of the book, we stayed away from obvious nudity, but it just worked to include these kinds of shots. Doing work like this, it’s a place where you can get inspiration from someone like Irving Penn, and other absolute masters at taking shape and form and not bombarding you with the sexual side of it. Not, by the way, that I am comparing myself to Penn in any way.
What camera system did you shoot this project with?
After a lot of debate, I elected to go with the Canon EOS-1Ds. It’s an extraordinary system, in that it allows you to be very spontaneous and to really go with the flow of a shoot, while also offering a big, 11-megapixel resolution. The way I usually worked was to shoot in JPEG rather than RAW, so that I was working with compressed files, which meant that I wasn’t dealing with these absolutely huge RAW files on there on location. It also meant that I could shoot fast-seven or eight frames in bursts. You can work as close to traditional 35mm photography as possible.
Was this a project a way to force yourself to learn to use digital technology?
No, I shot a lot of stories digitally. After a long time I grew to have faith in the resolution of the Canon system. For a long time I battled what every photographer battles with concerning digital capture. I just wanted pictures that had the feel of film. I didn’t know whether I would ever be able to get that feel shooting digitally. But I also realized that the world has just taken a digital direction, and not just in post-production. And my feeling is, we just have to figure this out. There are a lot of people out there who are passionate about traditional techniques, who are trying to figure this out. One of my great partners on this project was a lab in New York called Coloredge. They are working with the most beautiful printing techniques and papers. They basically enable photographers to go out and shoot digitally and then to give them something strong on the back end.
Did you have any problems with the digital system during the shooting of this project?
None whatsoever until the very end. And it had nothing to do with the cameras; it was all about me. It happened when we were shooting Heidi down in Costa Careyes. After three weeks of shooting on
I think I destroyed two EOS-1Ds bodies while chasing after her-each camera valued at about $8,000.

© JAMES RUSSELL/COURTESY VICTORIA SECRET DIRECT, INC.

beaches all over the world, I hadn’t hurt one piece of equipment, which was remarkable. And then that afternoon with Heidi romping through the waves, I think I destroyed two EOS-1Ds bodies while chasing after her-each camera valued at about $8,000. I would run into the water to try to shoot her-she was unstoppable. That hurt. So thank God they’ve come out with a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II. Now I can upgrade, though I won’t have much to trade in….

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Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Fourth of July parade. Seguin, Texas, 2002.

This famed photojournalist tells what it was like to shoot everyone from Richard Nixon to Michael Jackson, and to capture the history of a country that has never ceased to fascinate him.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Anna Wintour. Paris, France, 1994.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra. Plaza Hotel, New York, New York. 1966.

As a photographer, Harry Benson has always had a simple goal. “I just want to go out and take pictures that people will want to look at,” he says. That sense of mission has enabled him to create a long and celebrated career that has taken him from his native Glasgow, Scotland, to the rough-and-tumble Fleet Street newspapers of London and on to America. In 1964 Benson was photographing the Beatles for the London Evening Standard when the band made its first trip to New York. “After that, I

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
George Burns and his cat. Beverly Hills, California, 1992.

If you let someone else impose their point of view, especially the person you’re shooting, you’re not going to get the picture you want.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Bob Guccione. New York, New York, 1984.

told the paper I wasn’t coming back,” Benson recalls. Instead, he began covering America. His images captured the nation’s crazy-quilt culture, as well as its history during the last half of the 20th century: He traveled through the deep South to document the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and was in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated; he went to the Midwest to photograph a group of ladies in a small Nebraska town protesting what they said was a lewd movie at a local theater; working for Life, Vanity Fair, People, and other magazines, he also photographed the famous and infamous, from President Richard Nixon to Michael Jackson. This year Benson is bringing out a new book, Harry Benson’s America (Harry N. Abrams, $40), a collection of little-known and never-published pictures made during the course of his 40-year stay in this country. John Loengard, the former director of photography at Life magazine and a longtime friend of Benson, says the book reveals a different side of the photographer: “It shows Harry dressed in a way few people see him,” says Loengard. “This isn’t the formal Benson we expect; he’s more dressed down-not exactly informally, but certainly more casual.” In the exclusive portfolio here, Benson takes us on a romp through an America that is at once serene and surreal-and totally his own. He talked with American Photo contributing editor Jeffrey Elbies about his career, what America has meant to him, the kind of photography he brought to this country from Fleet Street, and what makes a good picture. “In the end,” he says, “that’s all you’re really after.”

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Me, Christmas Day, Glasgow, Scotland, 1936.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Bernice Golden. Belle Glade, Florida, 2003.

Harry, when did you actually begin taking pictures?
When I was a kid I had a box camera, a Coronet Cub, and I took pictures of my pals playing football and things like that. I liked it. I was a terrible student. I could never do anything that bored me, and taking pictures didn’t bore me. I became more interested in it after I got out of the Royal Air Force, about 1949. By the way, I wasn’t a pilot or anything like that. I was a cook, which is a humiliating thing to be. Oh, the cooks, they were real scum…criminals, all of them.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Police Chief Michael Miller. Belle Glade, Florida, 2003.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Jacqueline Susann. New York, New York.

And how did you become a professional photographer?
I started by shooting weddings. To this day I have a great deal of respect for wedding photographers. I would get up at 4:30 in the morning, go to the High Mass weddings and shoot, go home and develop and prints the pictures, then go back to the receptions and see what I could sell. I was also a holiday camp photographer, taking pictures of people on vacation. Then I started getting work for a local newspaper, and from there I managed to get to London. You know, there’s a certain sadness in thinking about all the fun and late nights and street corners I had to wait at in order to get to the point where I’m sitting here talking with you about photography. It’s strange. I was just happy to get an assignment from the local paper in Glasgow; I hardly dreamed of getting to London, let alone New York. To get a picture published was a wonderful experience-to think that someone actually bothered to print something you did. That feeling has never left me. I still feel that photography is more of a privilege than a job.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Mobile-home park. Southern California, 1970.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Cyndy, Jerry, Rosie, and Terry Hall (left to right). Central Park, New York, New York, 1978.

Your new book is a very edgy view of America….
I consider that a compliment. Look, the thing you always want as a photographer is to get to the center of a story. As a photographer, you’ve got to go out to do a story knowing that there is only one point of view that matters-your point of view. If you let someone else impose their point of view, especially the person you’re shooting, you’re not going to get the picture you want. So I have always had an edge in my photography. It’s not a team sport, the way I play it.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Bob Hope. Palm Springs, California, 1998.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Johnny Cochran. Los Angeles, California, 1995.

Is that edge something you brought with you from working on Fleet Street?
Absolutely. Photography is not a genteel business as it’s practiced there. You have to be aggressive to go into a place and get close to a subject to get a good picture. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is to go into a restaurant to get a picture of a famous gentleman with his new girlfriend. Then you have to get out again. And at an English daily newspaper, if you screwed up and missed a photo, you’d get a call at about 11:00 at night, and it wasn’t pleasant. So I learned that you always have to come back with a picture. But the competitiveness wasn’t just about the job. It was also about the pride of being a photographer, the love of it.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Edith Bouvier Beale. Long Island, New York, 1972.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Johnny and Ricky Carson. Lubbock, Texas, 1970.

Growing up in Scotland, what was your image of America?
It came from the movies. My mother would take me to the movies all the time when I was five or six. She told me not to tell my father, because he wouldn’t have liked the idea. For me America was always an exciting place, and it still is. Later, during World War II, I saw American and Canadian soldiers stationed nearby. I’d never seen a black man until then. When I lived in Glasgow, a distant relative sent us a brochure showing America’s national parks. And I always remember that one page said, “Utah, a land of endless scenic discovery.” And there were these beautiful color pictures of mountains and Indians. And it was just breathtaking. And that was America to me.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Caroline and John F. Kennedy, Jr. Boston, Massachusetts, 1984.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Jose Williams. Memphis, Tennesee, 1968.

There is an aspect of photography that is about recording history.
You look at famous pictures-the photographs of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta, for instance-and you think, “How wonderful would it be just to have been there.” I used to look at Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures of the Kennedys and think how wonderful it would be to do that. You’d think, “What could I do if I had that opportunity?” And there is a great responsibility that goes with that idea. Because you’re recording history, you have to succeed. There is no other option. You have to get a good picture, because it’s history you’re recording; you don’t get another chance at it.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Housewives. Chadron, Nebraska, 1969.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Housewives. Chadron, Nebraska, 1969.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Dr. Henry Kissinger. New York, New York, 2003.

So each photograph is a challenge….
It’s a crisis that I’m after in terms of motivation for taking a picture. Each photograph is a crisis, and you have to succeed.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Mother with child. Beaufort, South Carolina, 1965.

Of all the stories you’ve done in America, is there one you’re most proud of?
Probably the Civil Rights movement. I’m very proud and glad that I covered it. And that I got some good pictures to show for it. In fact it’s probably the story that I did my best work on. It was a news story, and for me news stories are the top-to cover a news story well, I think, is the top of the heap. Because news can never happen again. That’s it…it’s over. It’s not like you can go back in the studio and try it another way. I’m also pleased with my images of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. Those are always the stories you fall back on, when you think, “Maybe I’m not so good,” then you can think of these stories and say, “Well, I did my job.”

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Christopher Reeve. Pound Ridge, New York, 1998.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Man with flag. Washington, D.C., 1971.

Even your portraiture is set in the real world. You don’t do much studio work….
The studio has always been foreign territory for me. There are only a few studio pictures in the new book. The thing about studio portraiture, for me, is that those kinds of shots can always be re-created, endlessly, and they are. Everyone does the same kind of shot. For me a good photo can’t be repeated. The moment happens, and then it’s over.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
World War II veterans. Omaha Beach, Normandy, 1994.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Michael Jackson. Santa Ynez, California, 1993.

There is movement in your pictures; the subjects are engaged in the world.
Rule one of my kind of photography is to keep the subject moving; if you’re photographing the president, or some corporate executive, don’t have them sit in a chair behind their desk. Because after a few minutes they’ll be pushing a button to have their secretary lead you out of the office. That happens.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Donny and Marie Osmond. Ogden, Utah, 1977.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Celia Goldie. Chicago, Illinois, 1998.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Celia Goldie. Chicago, Illinois, 1998.

You’ve shot lots of presidents. In the new book, there’s an amazing shot of President Nixon from 1974, pointing at a globe, as if he’s plotting the geo-political future.
That was taken in San Clemente, California. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Chief of Staff Alexander Haig were in the room, and when I saw the president move toward the globe, I just pushed my way in and shot. I overstepped my boundaries a little-I mean, pushing aside Henry Kissinger! Sometimes the only way to get a picture is to just hold your breath and move in, get close.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
E.B. White. North Brookline, Maine, 1977.

That takes nerve….
You get better at it as you get older. When you’re younger it can be easy to be overawed by someone famous. It’s a very big problem if you go into a situation like that with assistants. Then you’ve got a whole production to worry about. I prefer to work alone, or with a single assistant. And I’m not overawed by anyone, really. I’ll tell you what I’m looking for as a photographer: I’m looking for the no-man’s-land between me and my subject-a kind of neutral place where we’re equal. I’m not going in to become friends with my subject. Who said I was ever going to be their friend just because I’m taking their picture? I do get on with certain people, but it’s not because I go in to be their friend; it’s because I go in to do my job, and not encroach on their friendship. I’ve been asked to stay for dinner by most people I’ve photographed. But I still keep my distance.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
President Dwight David Eisenhower. Palm Springs, California, 1965.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
President Richard M. Nixon. San Clemente, California, 1974.

The technology of cameras has come a long way since you got started. Do you use a digital camera now?
Yes, I’ve got a Canon EOS 1D Mark II digital SLR, and it’s an incredible camera. And I think, ‘What a lot of pictures I didn’t get that I might have gotten with this camera.’ Then again, I can say there are a lot of pictures I wouldn’t have gotten if I’d been shooting with that camera. Its bulkiness and weight would have prevented me from doing what I did with a smaller camera, which was to stay mobile. The Iraq war was photographed largely with digital cameras, but you haven’t seen better pictures come out of there than the images of Vietnam shot by Larry Burrows. And when your camera costs around $8,000, you’re not apt to want to bang it about. Today cameras are more like instruments than tools.

Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Ethel Kennedy and family. McLean, Virginia, 1988.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
American cemetery. Colleville-sur-Mer, France, 1994.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Pat Buckley with her pekinese, Foo. New York, New York, 1977.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Peg Ogonowski and her daughter, Laura. Dracut, Massachusetts, 2002.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Fourth of July parade. Seguin, Texas, 2002.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Shirley Temple Black and granddaughter Teresa Falaschi. Woodside, California, 1988.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Charles “Sonny” Liston. Lewiston, Maine, 1965.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Debra Grzelak and Neal Lavro. Staten Island Ferry, New York, New York, 2002.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
Louise Cowell Bundy. Seattle, Washington, 1989.
Photo: Harry Benson. All Rights Reserved.
William F. Buckley, Jr. New York, New York. 1988.

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To capture the noted and elite of our culture-he has famously photographed artists, critics, actors, and writers-relies on photography’s ability to isolate, objectify, and glamorize. But his latest project presented particular artistic challenges. Two years ago he began photographing a different type of cultural figure-porn actors, in states of dress and undress. It meant shooting nudes, something he’d never done. It also meant photographing subjects already famous for baring all for public consumption. What power would a portraitist have to reveal more? “They f— on film,” says the photographer, “so there are not a lot of secrets left.” Nonetheless, Greenfield-Sanders has produced a collection of images that intriguingly unites high and low culture-he describes the project as “class meets ass.” The result is the most-talked-about photo book of the year, XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits (Bulfinch Press, $35). Its release this fall coincided with a major exhibition at New York City’s Mary Boone Gallery, a behind-the-scenes film airing on HBO, and even a soundtrack CD from the film, attesting to the modern cultural allure of porn. Here, Greenfield-Sanders talks with AP about the creative decisions behind the project.

© TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS/COURTESY BULFINCH (2)
Actor/Director Sean Michaels.
© TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS/COURTESY BULFINCH (2)
Christy Canyon
© TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS/COURTESY BULFINCH (2)
Sander’s Book

For Greenfield-sanders, getting the money shot meant making his nude subjects comfortable on set. Here he tells AP how he did it.

You’ve shot many notable people in America. How did the idea of shooting porn stars occur to you?
It really goes back to 1997 when I saw the film Boogie Nights. That inspired me to think about porn stars as a group. My first idea was to photograph them clothed, not naked, because I thought, from watching the film, that they might be interesting as people. I’d never thought of them as people before that-you objectify them, because that’s what porn does. I didn’t do much with the idea, though, until 1999, when I actually met a male porn star. He came here and posed for me, clothed, and then he said, “Let’s do a nude now.” I was taken aback and immediately thought of doing it in the same pose as he’d done with clothes.
In your HBO film about the project, you say you’d never shot nudes before, and that shooting porn stars made it relatively easy for you, because they were used to taking their clothes off.
Right. That’s important to all this. I was so uncomfortable, and they were so comfortable, that I quickly learned to be comfortable with nudity. My goal as a photographer is always to make my subject feel comfortable. I do that in a million different ways, with little tricks. From the moment someone walks into my studio I’m watching everything, every gesture.
The juxtaposition of the nudes and the clothed shots seems to reveal a lot about the individuals.
I think it’s interesting that these people almost all look more relaxed without clothes than with. It’s who they are, what they do.
How does this project fit into your entire body of work?
In a number of ways. For one thing, it’s a series. A lot of my work-at least my exhibition work-has been series. I did a series on artists from the 1950s, a series on art critics, a series on the East Village art scene. I always think that way, inclusively.
It’s interesting to think about when you did this-the Bush administration had come in, the religious right was in ascendency, yet porn was never bigger. Is porn mainstream now?
I don’t think porn will ever be mainstream, but porn stars as celebrities are. I have a theory about how that happened: It’s because of Howard Stern. His whole thing is talking to people outside the mainstream and making them celebrities. And once you’re a celebrity, you’re part of the pop culture. At the same time, artists were beginning to use porn and pornographic imagery in their own work. Boogie Nights came out with mainstream actors like Mark Wahlberg and Julianne Moore playing porn stars. And of course publishers began to see the potential of porn stars. Now Jenna’s autobiography is on the bestseller list.
You interview the actors for your film and for the book. And many of them are very articulate and interesting.
I don’t know how to say this without being condescending, but my preconceptions about porn stars were very clichéd when I started. But I found them to be exceptionally smart, some intellectually, but all of them smart in the sense that they’re driven and know what they want. And they’re very open-there’s no spin with them, which I loved.
Let’s talk about the actual photo sessions. Did that openness affect how you worked with them as a portraitist?
Very much. A lot of factors caused these pictures to end up looking the way they do. For instance, you want to vary the poses, to be interesting. So a session would start out with a conversation with the star about what they considered their best feature-butt, breasts. That would help dictate a pose-let’s come in closer, or let’s be full length because your legs are great. For the men, of course, it was about their penises. And most of them insisted on not being shot totally flacid-they didn’t want to let down their audience.
Something occurs to me. Do you know the TV show Nip/Tuck? It’s about plastic surgeons, and each episode begins with them asking a client, “What don’t you like about yourself?” But you were asking these people, “What do you like about yourself?” It’s about esteem.
I love that show. You know, I always try to make people look the way they wished they looked, the way they want to see themselves. It’s not that I’m trying to glamorize them; these are not glamour portraits. They’re very real, very dignified, and powerful. It’s almost like these porn stars were looking into a mirror and seeing themselves and saying, “Hey, I look pretty good today.” That’s the point I’m trying to get to.
You shot everyone all in color…
In the beginning I also did some black and white, but it looked arty to me.The color is more real, a little more porny. And going with the light gray background in each shot was a great decision. I’ve usually gone with dark backgrounds, because the subject pops out. This background is almost like a skin tone. It’s very cool.
You shot them in your New York City studio with your antique Deardorff, and also in L.A.?
Yes. I have an 8×10 portable Deardorff for traveling. In my New York studio I used my 70-year-old Deardorff 11×14 camera with an 8×10 reducing back. I shot on EPP Kodak color transparency film. It’s my usual lighting-no backlight, just a single giant Elinchrom softbox with two heads powered with two Profoto 2,400-watt-second packs. Normally we shoot at f/32, but depending on the bellows factor we might open it up a stop. The portraits are beautiful, but they’re not just pretty. With this big camera you use, you also exposed all the the little flaws. The photographs, really, are a combination of reality and gloss. The key is to get just the right mix, and I think we did it.
-jeffrey elbies

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