Jonathan Becker: A Life in Portraiture

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Jonathan Becker: A Life in Portraiture" on The Grand Tourist with Dan Rubinstein

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Introduction

In the October 9, 2024 episode of The Grand Tourist with Dan Rubinstein, host Dan Rubinstein delves into the illustrious career of renowned portrait photographer Jonathan Becker. Rubinstein provides an insightful overview of Becker's journey, from his early days in New York to his influential work with prestigious publications and his enduring legacy in the world of photography.

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Early Life and Influences

Jonathan Becker was born in 1954 and raised in New York City, a hub of artistic and cultural activity. His upbringing was deeply rooted in the arts, influenced significantly by his parents. His father was a drama critic at Time Magazine before moving on to work with Roger Stevens, a prominent figure in real estate and Broadway show production. Becker’s mother was a protégé of Martha Graham, a pioneer of modern dance, and served as Becker’s godmother.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Becker: "I think I was conceived in Allen Ginsberg's loft."
[00:34]

This statement highlights the Beat Generation's influence on Becker's early environment, underscoring the blend of literary and artistic cultures that shaped his formative years.

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Passion for Photography

From a young age, Becker was drawn to photography, often seen with a Brownie camera capturing moments in Central Park. His fascination with documenting reality transitioned into a professional pursuit as he honed his skills, building a darkroom in his attic and taking on portrait assignments.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Becker: "It always had a link to work and a livelihood for me because... I always knew I could make this work somehow."
[05:37]

This determination laid the foundation for his future success in portrait photography.

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Mentorship with Brassai in Paris

Becker’s journey took a pivotal turn when he traveled to Paris to become the protégé of the legendary photographer Brassai. This mentorship spanned the last ten years of Brassai's life, providing Becker with invaluable insights into the art of portraiture and the intricacies of the photography world.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Becker: "I learned more from his writing than... directly from him about photography."
[14:16]

Their relationship was mutually beneficial, with Becker assisting Brassai in preserving his photographic legacy by retrieving and safeguarding Brassai’s unpublished prints.

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Career Highlights and Contributions

Upon returning to New York, Becker's career soared as he began shooting for influential magazines such as Interview, Women's Wear Daily, Vogue, and notably, Vanity Fair. His distinctive square-format photographs, captured with a Rolleiflex camera, became iconic, featuring a diverse array of subjects from celebrities like Madonna and Calvin Klein to political figures like Donald Trump and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Becker: "The picture's reversed, so there's some remove... it makes them happier too."
[40:06]

Becker’s unique approach—often candid and unaltered—allowed him to capture the true essence of his subjects, setting his work apart in the competitive field of portrait photography.

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Challenges and Reflections on Modern Photography

Becker expresses a critical view of contemporary photography, particularly the prevalence of digital alterations. He laments the erosion of photography’s authenticity, emphasizing that digital manipulation undermines its value as a truthful document.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Becker: "I have no use for that business... it's Adobe that makes these Photoshop programs that become harder and harder to recognize as products that alter."
[55:35]

This perspective underscores Becker's commitment to maintaining the integrity of his work through traditional film photography.

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The Lost Time Monograph

Becker’s first true monograph, aptly titled "Jonathan Lost Time", is a culmination of his extensive career. The book showcases his black-and-white and color photographs, offering a visual narrative that spans decades and features an impressive roster of influential figures.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Becker: "It's a narrative sequence that told... akin to reading a short novel or something, but purely visual."
[50:09]

The monograph not only celebrates Becker’s technical prowess but also his ability to weave stories through his lens, capturing moments that resonate with viewers on a profound level.

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Personal Anecdotes and Memorable Experiences

Throughout the conversation, Becker shares personal stories, such as his serendipitous encounter with Diana Vreeland—another titan in the fashion and photography world—while working as a taxi driver in New York. This anecdote illustrates the unpredictable nature of his career and his knack for connecting with influential personalities.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Becker: "She posed like only Martha Graham can pose... and she didn't stop. It was a fabulous portrait."
[46:36]

These experiences highlight the depth of Becker’s interactions with his subjects, often resulting in powerful and intimate portraits.

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Influence of Mentors and Colleagues

Becker credits several mentors and colleagues, including Bea Feitler and Jean Paul Goude, for their guidance and support. These relationships were instrumental in shaping his professional path and refining his artistic vision.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Becker: "My approach is of curiosity and attention to the subject."
[42:43]

This philosophy, influenced by his mentors, underscores Becker’s dedication to authentic and meaningful portraiture.

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Conclusion and Legacy

Jonathan Becker's career is a testament to his unwavering dedication to the art of portrait photography. His work not only captures the likeness of his subjects but also conveys their essence, making him a distinguished figure in the creative world. Becker’s reflections on the state of modern photography serve as a poignant reminder of the medium’s potential for authenticity and storytelling.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Becker: "Keep it simple."
[59:03]

As Becker continues to influence aspiring photographers, his monograph "Jonathan Lost Time" stands as a lasting legacy, celebrating a life devoted to capturing the human spirit through his lens.

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Closing Remarks

Dan Rubinstein wraps up the episode by thanking Jonathan Becker and acknowledging the contributors from Phyden and the editorial team. He encourages listeners to engage with the podcast through various platforms and to support its continuation.

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Key Takeaways

• Authenticity in Photography: Becker emphasizes the importance of genuine, unaltered images, advocating for the traditional film approach over digital manipulation.

• Mentorship and Influence: His relationship with Brassai and other mentors was crucial in developing his unique style and approach to portraiture.

• Legacy through Lost Time: Becker’s monograph encapsulates his extensive career, showcasing his ability to tell visual stories through compelling portraits.

• Navigating Challenges: Becker's anecdotes reflect resilience and adaptability, navigating the competitive and ever-evolving landscape of photography.

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This summary encapsulates the essence of Jonathan Becker’s journey and insights as discussed in the podcast episode. For those interested in the intersection of art, culture, and photography, Becker’s experiences offer valuable lessons and inspiration.

Transcript

[Jonathan Becker]

You know, Brassai told me, never give.

[Dan Rubinstein]

A picture to them for 10 years. But there's a reason to it.

[Jonathan Becker]

First of all, they like the picture.

[Brassai]

Better, but much more likely to like.

[Dan Rubinstein]

The picture in 10 years. Well, also, you don't really know right away what is the good picture, you.

[Jonathan Becker]

Know, and I felt on assignments that.

[Brassai]

I really didn't get it somehow or something was wrong.

[Jonathan Becker]

And then I'll come back and I.

[Brassai]

Think, what are you talking about? This is great.

[Jonathan Becker]

And then sometimes, you know, right away I'll look at something and think it's wonderful and it's nothing.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Hi, I'm Dan Rubinstein and this is the Grand Tourist. I've been a design journalist for more than 20 years and this is my personalized guided tour through the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food and travel. All the elements of a well lived life. One of the great things about doing the Grand Tourist is getting to meet, even if for only an hour or two, some of the most fascinating figures in the world. Each encounter leaves a story behind and the podcast is a kind of portrait in MP3 format. The more people I get to meet, the more fulfilling it becomes. Like collecting signatures in a book with endless pages. So if you, if you judge someone's wealth by the incredible counters they've had in their creative career, my next guest is probably the richest guy you'll ever meet. Jonathan becker. Born in 1954 and raised in New York, Becker was one of those kids with talent and guts and found himself at the right place at the right time. As a young man, he traveled to Paris to become the protege of famed photographer and artist Versailles. And when he returned home, he found himself unwittingly at the center of a cultural revolution in 1970s New York. Later on, he found himself shooting for the likes of Interview, Women's Wear Daily, Vogue, and of course, Vanity Fair, where he was called upon to shoot society's creme de la creme. For decade after decade, his enigmatic photographs have now been collected in his first true monograph from Phyden called Jonathan Lost Time. Page after page you'll see both in black and white and color, soul snatching shots of everyone from Donald Trump and Mikhail Gorbachev to Madonna, Andy Warhol, Prince Charles, Francois Truffaut, Billy Wilder, Fran Leibowitz and Jackie O. All shot in a square format. Thanks to his trusty Rolleiflex camera. I caught up with Jonathan Becker from his house in the country to chat about how he met Brasaille working for editorial legends like Bob Colacello. What it Was like in the early days of the Vanity Fair relaunch with Graydon Carter. Why he thinks the art form of photography is basically over. And the time he gave Diana Vreeland a ride in his taxi.

[Unknown]

I wanted to start at the beginning with you. And I read that you were born in New York, but I don't know too much about your early life. So were you raised in the city?

[Jonathan Becker]

Yeah, I was born in the city. I think I was. Apparently, I was conceived in Allen Ginsberg's loft.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Really?

[Brassai]

Okay.

[Dan Rubinstein]

How'd that happen?

[Jonathan Becker]

Because my father was all involved with. His great friend was a fellow named Lucian Carr. And it was kind of. It was the kind of epicenter of the beatnik world. From St. Louis. They were both from St. Louis, and they moved. My parents moved uptown quickly to a railroad flat, which is where I was brought from the hospital.

[Unknown]

Oh, okay. And did you spend your youth kind of growing up on the east side?

[Jonathan Becker]

Yes.

[Dan Rubinstein]

The railroad flat lasted a year or.

[Jonathan Becker]

So because they were both career people, in a sense, in the arts. My father was a.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He was a drama critic at the.

[Jonathan Becker]

Time, but he moved quickly and went to work with a fellow named Roger Stevens, who was a big real estate magnet who produced Broadway shows.

[Unknown]

Okay, and what did your mom do?

[Jonathan Becker]

And she was. She was a. She was at the time a Martha Graham dancer.

[Unknown]

Oh, I see. Okay.

[Jonathan Becker]

She kind of the protege of Martha Graham and who was my godmother.

[Unknown]

Oh, I see.

[Jonathan Becker]

And so that answers your question about the arts.

[Brassai]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Becker]

So with Roger Stevens, it was. I mean, they produced west side Story. They all kind of bought and sold the Empire State Building. He was the kind of protege of Roger Stevens who was called to be Kennedy's advisor to the arts in 1960s, I think. And he lent my father some money, and he bought Playbill, built it up with editorial content. Leo Lehrman. He hired Leo Lehrman. Do you remember him? He was an editor at Vanity Fair for a little while. He was Vogue, so arts and editor for decades. And. But the earliest, he did this with Playbill, and then he. And then he. From some friends. My father was a big Harvard man, Rhodes scholar, doctorate at Oxford. Forever disappointed in me because I didn't go to college. And he bought Janus Films with the proceeds from Playbill, and he built that up. So he was a film distributor. And my mother went on to become a choreographer. And as they succeeded in their respective careers, we ended up in a proper apartment on 72nd Street.

[Unknown]

And did you take pictures as a kid? Like, do you remember?

[Jonathan Becker]

I did There's a picture of me and my sister running through Central park behind the then much smaller Metropolitan Museum. And I had a Brownie around my neck. I gu. I was always. It was fated somehow, something I could do.

[Unknown]

And did you enjoy it? I mean, you know, as a kid, did you think, like, this is what I want to do with my life, or, you know. Or was this just something that you did for fun or.

[Jonathan Becker]

Well, it always seemed magical, the idea of being able to review something that happened. But, you know, it's a form of documentation before. It's an art form. And in a sense, the more organized you are with it, the more magical it becomes. And there's a science to it. It wasn't until I began to use my own camera and keep the negatives and get them organized and have a dark room, which eventually I did. It always had a link to work and a livelihood for me because when I had to get summer jobs very early and I was a busboy in a sloppy Irish restaurant, everyone went there. But I saw what went on in the kitchen. I couldn't believe. It was awful. The manager of the restaurant was cruel. And I thought, well, I started to take pictures out on Long Island. I started to take pictures of children for their parents. That was my first portraits and things. And then I built a darkroom in the attic. And it worked. So, you know, I always knew I could. I always felt I could make this work somehow. From a young age, I never really thought about doing anything else.

[Unknown]

And at a certain point, you found yourself in Paris. And how did that happen?

[Brassai]

After secondary school, I didn't know. I really did not want to go to college because my father's kind of Teutonic and overbearing, full of himself, and I loved him, but he. And he was kind of a wunderkind. I just didn't want to stay in his arena.

[Dan Rubinstein]

His mother had died and left me.

[Brassai]

A Volkswagen, a little bug. And I fled. I drove out west to Colorado. I got as far as Colorado and realized that I had no means of. I turned around and went back to Harvard summer school because anything that had.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Harvard in it was okay and blessed.

[Brassai]

And it gave my father some hope. And. But, I mean, it was a random idea.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And I picked randomly three courses that intrigued me. The one that most intrigued me was.

[Brassai]

A postgraduate course on surrealism. It was taught in French, which I was.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I had grammar school French. I have a very good grammar school education.

[Brassai]

That's it. And so the professor accepted me for some reason. Came the fall, I still didn't know what to do with myself.

[Dan Rubinstein]

So I told my father I had to write a thesis for the course.

[Brassai]

And I remember, you know, he had.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Spent years writing his doctoral thesis.

[Brassai]

I thought, well, that'll buy me some time. I went out to Long island, and we had a house where my mother still is out there.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And I spent the fall writing about Bresailles, whose work intrigued me no end.

[Brassai]

And who was not a surrealist and.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Hadn'T been part of the course. And I wrote it in English.

[Brassai]

And.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Didn'T send it in until February.

[Brassai]

And I got a letter back from the professor who said that it was very late, the piece was in English. I flunked. And he made all kinds of comments in red. And then he said, but it just so happened that he had. He was an acquaintance of Brassail.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And he recommended that I send the paper to Brassail.

[Brassai]

And so I did.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And then Bresaille wrote me a letter.

[Brassai]

Back that said, in that April, I got it.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It said that the paper had given.

[Brassai]

Him, in French, he wrote, great satisfaction and that I had understood and expressed.

[Dan Rubinstein]

The spirit in which he photographed.

[Brassai]

And I thought, this is. This is. I mean, I can die now I've done something. And even my father was impressed.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And he found me a room in.

[Brassai]

Paris, a maid's room recently vacated by Jean Pierre Leo, Truffaut's main actor, and the kid. And it was in Truffaut's production house. You know, it was the seventh floor walk up. And I had it for a year. I could actually.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I could stay indefinitely.

[Brassai]

I think that was it.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He'd done with me.

[Brassai]

He thought I was getting rid of me would be that. And there I wrote science that I just happened to be coming to Paris, and.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And we had lunch, and the rapport grew over the 10 remaining years of his life.

[Brassai]

And we got very close. He had no children, and I helped.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Him and he helped me.

[Brassai]

His stock was kind of low at the time.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He'd had a big show at MoMA in New York.

[Brassai]

And since then he hadn't been able to publish books on photography.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He was writing biographies of his friend Henry Miller. He did a big one on Picasso called Conversations with Picasso. They were great pals. And he had written a book on Proust and photography. He was obsessed with Proust.

[Brassai]

And.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He had these pictures in New York. He had 200 beautiful prints, it turned.

[Brassai]

Out, in New York, with a literary.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Agent who was not getting them published.

[Brassai]

And they were the sort of naughtier.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Pictures from his Paris by Night period.

[Brassai]

Which was 19, sort of 29 to 32. And they were, you know, in bordellos, in opium dens and some nudes and all kinds of goodies that he couldn't publish in the 30s.

[Dan Rubinstein]

So I was getting homesick in Paris.

[Brassai]

In this walk up maid's room and I wanted to go home at Christmas. I wrote my great friend Elaine at the restaurant saying that I wouldn't be.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Coming home for Christmas. She got the message and she sent me Christmas card. And in it were three crisp hundred dollar bills. She used to keep big wads of cash in her brassiere.

[Brassai]

She was ample in all kinds of ways. And she said, take Icelandic, there's a.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Dollar left for cigarettes.

[Brassai]

And so I did.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And Breathail said, would you go get these prints for me? These 200 prints.

[Brassai]

I mean priceless things. But I went down, I was 20 years old. I went down and got the prints from the, recuperated them from the literary.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Agent, took them up to Elaine's. Everyone poured over them.

[Brassai]

Not drinks, eyes and I mean it was like they were finding some sort.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Of a holy grail.

[Brassai]

The writers that frequented lanes and it was principally writers were all enamored of.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Hemingway and the Paris between the wars.

[Brassai]

And this stuff was unseen trove and.

[Dan Rubinstein]

George Plimpton was there, the Paris Review founder.

[Brassai]

And oh, I can't remember all kinds of people, Elaine too.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Then I got them back to Paris.

[Brassai]

Safely and it became a book called.

[Dan Rubinstein]

The Secret Paris of the 30s. And so he was very happy with me to do that, that I had done that for him, was able to do it. Bressei was happy.

[Unknown]

And what would you say you learned from him as sort of like a protege, you know, what sort of. Now that. Now in retrospect, like what do you feel like he imparted to you?

[Dan Rubinstein]

It's very hard to articulate that because.

[Brassai]

It was a, you know, he was.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Not taking photographs anymore when he looked at my.

[Brassai]

He was. He did not elaborate on his work more than what he'd written.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I learned more from his writing than.

[Brassai]

I learned directly from him about photography. And when he commented on my own.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Work, the phrasing was very simple.

[Brassai]

He'd just say.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He'd either say nothing or he would say, c'est bon.

[Brassai]

And that was it.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It's good or nothing, that's all. And that's simple. And I always like to keep things simple.

[Brassai]

So he didn't belabor and belabor anything.

[Dan Rubinstein]

What I learned was from by osmosis.

[Brassai]

The way he was, the way he managed his life, which was exceedingly eccentric. Money was never a concern for him because he didn't. I mean, he had a dearth of it, but he'd make money selling something. Selling from a book or from magazines or selling a print or something.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And he would stick the cash in a book and forget which book it was.

[Brassai]

You know, it was like he had an odd relation with money and.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Which probably hurt me in some ways because.

[Unknown]

Because he didn't pay you?

[Dan Rubinstein]

No, he. No, I didn't.

[Brassai]

He wasn't.

[Dan Rubinstein]

We didn't have a.

[Brassai]

We didn't have a transactional relation in any way. He never.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He gave me prints and things, but I wasn't supposed to be working for him.

[Brassai]

I worked for.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I worked for a fashion photographer in Paris, Tony Kent. It was a big deal at the time. Joe Kremens's brother. He'd taken the Kent out of Kremens.

[Brassai]

K e N T and he was.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Photographing the Beatles and all the big models.

[Brassai]

And I tried to. That was recommended to him and.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I tried it. I broke his camera on the first day. It didn't work.

[Brassai]

No. I made a living in Paris playing backgammon at nightclubs and things like that.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I got into the underworld in Paris.

[Brassai]

I was always intrigued. And there was kind of a parallel.

[Dan Rubinstein]

With Bresai because he photographed so much of the underworld 50 years earlier.

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[Unknown]

At a certain point you come back to New York and you start shooting for magazines like Town and Country and Interview.

[Brassai]

That was later.

[Jonathan Becker]

No, I can't. Interview was earlier Interview. I got to Interview through Bridget Berlin.

[Dan Rubinstein]

She was also known as Bridget Polk.

[Brassai]

She was sort of Andy's right hand and she was best friends of friends.

[Jonathan Becker]

Where I had a darkroom in Christopher cerf's basement in 1983. He was the son of Random House founder Bennett Cerf. And I ended up keeping that dark room for 47 years. He was a great benefactor, but his.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Wife was great friends with Bridget.

[Jonathan Becker]

And so that was my introduction and Bridget introduced me to Bob Colicello and.

[Brassai]

And that was my.

[Jonathan Becker]

So I had my first real magazine assignment in 1974, I think early 74. And then for Interview. And then when I got to Paris.

[Brassai]

I was hired by W. Brand new.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Magazine was W. It was a big broad sheet collar version of Women's Wear Daily.

[Brassai]

I remember what I was recommended to it to the editor and I didn't.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Really understand anything about fashion.

[Brassai]

I thought it sounded like ladies underwear.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Women's Wear Daily.

[Brassai]

I didn't know what it was.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I thought it was must be some sordid thing.

[Brassai]

And I told him I wouldn't work under my real name.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I had to use a pseudonym.

[Brassai]

So I took my middle name.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He was furious. But I did covers and all kinds of things. I became the first Paris based photographer.

[Brassai]

For W. He fired me eventually. He couldn't stand me and I.

[Dan Rubinstein]

But I did a good portrait of Louis Mal.

[Brassai]

I did, I did other actresses and.

[Dan Rubinstein]

So forth, never any fashion. And that portrait of Louis Mao ended.

[Brassai]

Up running in the prototype of Vanity Fair.

[Unknown]

Louis Mal, who's the people who listen to the podcast? My nephew was a Frederick Mall perfumer.

[Brassai]

Yes, that's right. Yeah.

[Unknown]

He was also on the podcast and mentioned Louis Mall to me and we talked about that for a little bit.

[Brassai]

Oh, you had. Oh yes.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Frederick was on.

He's a pal. He's a great guy.

[Unknown]

Oh, well, hello. Another thing in common. And so what was shooting for Interview like back in the heyday? Did you actually. Did you interact with Andy on assignments as well or just with his team or how was that back then?

[Dan Rubinstein]

Well, Andy, I didn't see Andy have much to do with Interview.

[Brassai]

Bob Colicello was the editor. There was a. There was. They had very good art direction and.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It was anything goes, you know, it was a wonderful. Bob is a great editor.

[Brassai]

I mean it's a tremendously innovative and spontaneous and inspiring.

[Dan Rubinstein]

So I would bring things that I wanted to do.

[Brassai]

And.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I had.

[Brassai]

This was when I got back from Paris and I had done.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I had started to do portraits of people in Elaine's kitchen at the restaurant. Because there was.

[Brassai]

There was fluorescent.

[Dan Rubinstein]

There was light in there, fluorescent light.

[Brassai]

And I hadn't good lighting.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Well, it works.

[Brassai]

It was barely enough for Triac's film, but it was perfect. It was vaguely soft and there was always stuff going on in the kitchen. And the kitchen help enjoyed the diversion.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And people enjoy the diversion of being asked to come in the kitchen.

[Unknown]

And I remember seeing. There's some photos of the cast of snl, The Saturday Night Live.

[Brassai]

Yeah, I did dozens of people. Elaine, Everybody was going there then because she was, you know, I was the kid.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And she let me do just about anything that didn't piss people off. And so.

[Brassai]

And I knew them, the Saturday Night Live group, through a fellow named John Head, who was an early friend of.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Lorne's.

[Brassai]

At the invention of Saturday Night Live.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He was a writer.

[Brassai]

You know, it's not formal.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It's easy.

[Brassai]

It's a moment. So in everybody's game, it was a.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Game time in the 70s.

[Brassai]

People just did things on a whim, you know. And I caught it. Well, I mean, I caught that wave of whimsy. And I did. I don't know, I must have done.

[Dan Rubinstein]

30 portraits in the kitchen at odd times. And I wanted to make a book of it. Elaine didn't like the idea at all.

[Brassai]

She didn't like anything that might alter.

[Dan Rubinstein]

The chemistry of what she saw as her success.

[Brassai]

And so.

[Dan Rubinstein]

She gave me a bill. I used to stay with her there till sometimes I'd drive her home in.

[Brassai]

The Volkswagen and lock the place up.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Pull the gates down and everything. And we'd eat a lot of spaghetti and I'd play backgammon and so forth.

For what?

And she sent me a bill for.

[Brassai]

$500 for all this spaghetti.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And it was her way of saying, get lost. She knew I had no means.

[Brassai]

So I got back in the Volkswagen.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And drove to California.

[Brassai]

But Bob published half a dozen of.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Those portraits in Interview. That was the first place they were published. It was in a book.

[Brassai]

But I got to spread an interview and. And then he published later on an.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Interview I did with Brassaille when he came to New York. Important things. I mean, he was cranky at the time. Bob was very cranky.

[Brassai]

Difficult.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He had a lot of pressure dealing.

[Brassai]

With Andy and not much time for the perfunctory. Relationship we had at the time. We got much closer later at Vanity Fair.

[Unknown]

And there's a lovely portrait of Diana Rieland that you shot in 1981 that's sort of labeled just at your exhibition. Although we don't know much about the photograph. She looks like she's looking over some. Maybe some slides or some, like a tear sheet or something.

[Brassai]

Well, I had photographed her when I got back from Paris.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Well, I had to flee again with the $500 bill.

[Brassai]

I got back in the Volkswagen.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I went to California for three dark years.

[Brassai]

And before I came back to New York in 1979, I mean, it was.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I mean, I enjoyed California too much.

[Brassai]

But I was terrified of becoming a Californian. And I thought if I stayed there too long, you know, I better get.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Back to New York.

[Brassai]

I came back and started to drive a taxi. And it was the first real job.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Outside of photography and the only one I've ever had.

[Brassai]

And, I mean, I've moved. I did other things in California. I moved boxes.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I worked for sorted magazines, unmentionable things.

[Brassai]

And. But there was photography. And then I got into touch with W magazine, Women's Wear in New York. And it turned out that John Fairchild.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Had liked the work I'd done in.

[Brassai]

Paris and regretted that I'd been fired there. And they hired me. And one of the first assignments was Dan of Vreeland.

[Unknown]

Wow, okay.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Whom I didn't know. I knew her family.

[Brassai]

I knew her grandchildren.

[Jonathan Becker]

And Nikki I was very close to.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He's a monk now, Buddhist, and he still takes pictures.

[Brassai]

Great friend.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I knew his father, Freckie. I knew I'd met the uncle Timmy.

[Brassai]

In California, who's an architect. And I was driving down Second Avenue in my checker, and I was on my way to have dinner somewhere.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I wasn't a very good taxi driver. I didn't hustle. I like to stop. I spent almost all the money I.

[Brassai]

Made every night, but on dinners and things. And lo and behold, there's Diana Reeland.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Hailing a cab outside the Beekman Theater.

[Brassai]

The movie theater, a beautiful movie theater.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And she gets in my checker.

[Brassai]

And I talked to her. I introduced myself to her and talked.

[Dan Rubinstein]

All about her family, talked her ear.

[Brassai]

Off, and then dropped her at home. And lo and behold, like, a number.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Of months later, I had this assignment.

[Brassai]

To photograph her from Wizard Leontalli. That's where we. We really connected.

[Jonathan Becker]

And we were.

[Brassai]

He was a great friend. And.

[Dan Rubinstein]

So when I had my exhibition down in Chelsea, my first exhibition, she.

[Brassai]

Came and she came on her Own.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Day, she made a special appointment to meet me down there. She loved the portraits I'd done of her and that's what she was looking.

[Brassai]

At in that photograph.

[Unknown]

What was she like as a person?

[Jonathan Becker]

Oh, just.

[Brassai]

Just what?

[Dan Rubinstein]

Just what people imagine.

[Brassai]

She was. She was enthusiastic, she decisive, surprising.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Unique.

[Brassai]

And original and of extraordinary taste. I mean, just when I met her.

[Jonathan Becker]

I knocked on her door and I.

[Brassai]

Reminded her that I was the taxi driver.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Did she remember you?

[Brassai]

Yeah, of course, because I. Oh, the.

[Jonathan Becker]

Other figure, the other weird coincidence was that the movie she'd seen was Linocente, a Visconti movie, which had in it.

[Brassai]

Mark Perel, my friend from Paris, as he was one of the actors, he played a poet and he had this.

[Jonathan Becker]

Great full frontal nudity scene in it.

[Brassai]

And I reminded her, I told her that he and Jennifer O'Neill was the other.

[Dan Rubinstein]

She was one of the stars of Linocenti.

[Brassai]

And she and Mark ended up shacked.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Up in Bedford, New York.

[Brassai]

Where I actually. And I had visited them.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I'd stayed up there for a week with them. And.

[Jonathan Becker]

So I had told her I.

[Brassai]

Knew the actor and the this and that.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And so she remembered me for sure.

[Brassai]

And she. She said, oh, I just love people who work, you know, I think in.

[Unknown]

Her and in her line of work, she met a lot of people who didn't.

[Jonathan Becker]

So she met both kinds of people.

[Dan Rubinstein]

She worked.

[Brassai]

That woman, worked hard.

[Jonathan Becker]

And, you know, she made, she really did. I mean, she created the Costume Institute.

[Brassai]

You know, and she was resilient and.

[Jonathan Becker]

She came up from the ashes.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I admired her no end.

[Unknown]

And then in 83, you were involved with the relaunch of Vanity Fair and.

[Jonathan Becker]

Which was a little before that. I was still driving a taxi when.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I came back from Paris.

[Jonathan Becker]

Gilles Ben Simone, the fashion photographer, had sent me, gave me an introduction to Jean Paul Goud in New York, who was then the art editor of Esquire and doing these wonderful illustrations for the covers of Esquire and so forth. And he was working on his Jungle Fever book. I think at the time he was living with Tookie Smith and then later he was living with Grace Jones and fomenting her career. Jean Paul was like. It was a real hero to me. But Jean Paul sent me to meet Bea Feitler, who was a great, great art director and very young, beautiful Brazilian.

[Brassai]

And she had come up from Brazil.

[Dan Rubinstein]

In the 60s and gone to work for Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar, at Marvin Israel. And she was a partner of Ruth Hansel. And she just did unbelievably great and original work. And she fomented the careers of Dian Arbus. She worked with Avedon. She did Helmut Newton's first book, White Women.

[Brassai]

Annie Leibovitz. She was really fundamental in helping her.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Become a portrait photographer. And she lit on me. She loved my Elaine's Kitchen.

[Brassai]

And she's the one who really got me working because I didn't know how.

[Dan Rubinstein]

To make a career. And she guided me.

[Brassai]

I met her when I got back.

[Dan Rubinstein]

From Paris, and she's one of the.

[Brassai]

Reasons I came back from California, because.

[Dan Rubinstein]

She was trying to find me. Where did he go?

[Brassai]

And.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I worked with her at Rolling Stone.

[Brassai]

And then she was called by Alex.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Lieberman to do the prototype of vanity fair in 1981.

[Brassai]

And I introduced her to Nikki Vreeland.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Who became the photography editor. She did most of everything. And she put three of my photographs in this prototype launch. And everyone else in that prototype was very famous.

[Brassai]

There was Avedon, Penn, Helmut, Annie, Bill King, who was a big fashion photographer.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Dominique Nabokov, who was very well seen, and me. And she used my portrait of Louis Mal.

[Brassai]

She used a portrait I did Brassail.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And she ran a beautiful layout of Brassail.

[Brassai]

Portraits of artists.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Picasso, Matisse, whatnot.

[Brassai]

Giacometti, I think.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I can't remember the three that she used. And then she used the artist's work opposite beautiful layouts. So she sent that to the printers.

[Brassai]

And then she went back to Brazil.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And died of cancer within two weeks.

[Brassai]

And it was a. It was a big heartbreak in my life.

[Unknown]

That's terrible. And how did that. With Vanity Fair, like, how did that evolve and how did that. You know, because it was kind of a success or back then. I'm not familiar with those sort of early days of Vanity fair in the 80s.

[Brassai]

Well, that was the prototype.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It came out in 82, and then.

[Brassai]

The first issue came out in 83.

[Dan Rubinstein]

The prototype had no writing in it. It was all dummy text from Thackeray's Vanity Fair. The first issues were bumpy.

[Brassai]

And then they've got a new editor. Leo Lehrman came in, and I loved him. He was just great to work for. And I stayed working there.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It was really thanks to Cy Newhouse's determination.

[Brassai]

You know, he just kept. He kept.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He kept at it. He'd wanted to buy the New Yorker and the Fleischman family wouldn't sell. And so this was his idea to.

[Brassai]

Extract Vanity Fair back out of Vogue. It had been incorporated in Vogue when.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It folded in the 30s.

[Brassai]

You know, then Tina came quickly and, you know, it was really spoken about and, you know, it was. It had buzz in Tina's words. And it was another place where you.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Could do your own work.

[Brassai]

I was very lucky because I never did anything that was any more than, you know, all I really knew how.

[Dan Rubinstein]

To do, which was portraits.

[Brassai]

And no one ever told me what to do.

[Unknown]

They never told you, like, this is the look we're going for? No, it was always just, hey, go do this. Go shoot this person.

[Brassai]

I was given a subject matter and.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Left to my devices.

[Brassai]

I mean.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I think what I did.

[Jonathan Becker]

Was useful to the magazine.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It's also possible that people tried to.

[Jonathan Becker]

Tell me what to do and I didn't listen.

[Unknown]

Also possible. Only you would know, but. And shooting parties was also. And events and things like that was also kind of a part of things. Were those your first sort of like.

[Jonathan Becker]

Well, for W in New York, they started having me do that.

[Brassai]

I was still driving a taxi.

[Jonathan Becker]

I didn't.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I drove a taxi from 78 to 81 at night.

[Jonathan Becker]

And so they. They'd say go photograph some event. And it was in someone's house or in something. And I just parked the car, cab and then go in and photograph. I had a little rolly camera, a little 35 millimeter with a little flash on it.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And I just found it very easy to do.

[Brassai]

And I.

[Jonathan Becker]

And I don't know why, I just.

[Dan Rubinstein]

But it was very fluid.

[Jonathan Becker]

I'd go up the take some pictures of people, get everybody with this little camera and get back in the cab and keep going.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It worked.

[Jonathan Becker]

And because I was at ease doing.

[Brassai]

It later on, I didn't really enjoy.

[Jonathan Becker]

This, but.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Fully because it wasn't productive of very interesting pictures.

[Brassai]

Later I figured out how to extract.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Really interesting photographs from events.

[Brassai]

And the first place it happened really was at the Vanity Fair. Leo sent me up.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Lloyd Ziff was the art director to.

[Brassai]

The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Their annual awards and I mean, the.

[Dan Rubinstein]

People there were the highest names in.

[Brassai]

The arts and painters arvo, principally writers. I mean, and it was like ducks in a barrel. And they were. I had.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I decided not to take a 35 millimeter to use my twin lens Rolleiflex, which was really my staple.

[Brassai]

Always square format.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It's a camera that really. You don't change lenses.

[Brassai]

It's just.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It is what it is. It sees as close to the. What the human eye sees as any other as any. More than any other camera ever did. That was the object of developing that. That lens, particularly the 75 millimeter version.

[Brassai]

Of it in Germany and it was.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Like magic to me.

[Brassai]

And I was catching.

[Unknown]

For people that don't know that that camera is. If you're thinking of the one that I'm thinking of, you look down on it. Right? Like you're not.

[Brassai]

Oh, I love that.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Absolutely.

[Unknown]

That helped, probably, with party photography.

[Brassai]

Well, it's. You look down into it and people. You know, people aren't aware. It's not an aggressive stance. So people. And you're looking into a.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It's also reversed. The picture's reversed, so there's some remove.

[Brassai]

And it's almost like looking at your.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Own little theater down there.

[Brassai]

It's a whole different way of being.

[Dan Rubinstein]

In an environment because you're not necessarily communicating with people.

[Brassai]

And then, I don't know. Something. People always tell me that they're inspired as subjects because I'm looking in and.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I'm amused with what I'm seeing and.

[Brassai]

I'm not aware of it, but it.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Makes them happier too.

[Brassai]

I love that camera.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I still use it.

[Unknown]

And over the years, especially for Vanity Fair, I mean, you photographed a lot of important and famous people or people who are notable in different ways. Politicians, actors, artists, writers. Everybody that I could possibly imagine. Did you find shooting one or another required something different from you, or was your approach to shooting an older novelist the same? That it would be a young starlet or a politician or a society, a woman of society? Did you kind of have any kind of. Did you just approach them all the same on that?

[Jonathan Becker]

Well, I mean, I try to approach everything with no sense of prejudice. I mean, like prejudgment. You know, I do homework. I know more or less about each person, but I go in with pure curiosity. And so everything's different in the sense that a relation with any person is unique and it's really limited by.

[Brassai]

Time and the subject's openness to.

[Dan Rubinstein]

To.

[Brassai]

Because sometimes I have to figure out.

[Dan Rubinstein]

What I'm doing and I have to get to know people. And I don't take pictures for.

[Jonathan Becker]

Some people think, what's he doing?

[Dan Rubinstein]

He's not taking any pictures.

[Brassai]

And then sometimes I have to go about just. I mean, I've even used no film in the camera just because for a while, until I knew what I was doing, because at least they'll talk more and I can extract things and figure it all out. No, I don't have a. I mean.

[Dan Rubinstein]

My approach is of curiosity and attention to the subject.

[Brassai]

And theater is important. You know, what are they presenting? How are they acting? And.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Perception can't be a template.

[Brassai]

I mean, I Wish I could do that. I wish I could do overlays.

[Dan Rubinstein]

You know, I wish I did have templates. It would make things much easier. I mean, a lot of photographers, I.

[Brassai]

Mean, Penn developed a template. You know, Avedon had templates.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Annie has templates. In a sense, they're more.

[Brassai]

But I've never been able to just go in and overlay a lighting circumstance.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And a background circumstance and all that.

[Brassai]

I'm too interested in the environment of the subject and how they relate to whatever's going on around them.

[Unknown]

And what would you say is. If I had to ask you, what is your. What is the Jonathan Becker secret to taking a great portrait? What would you say?

[Brassai]

Oh, I have.

[Unknown]

It's a tough question.

[Brassai]

Well, there isn't one, I don't think. I mean, if you want to take.

[Dan Rubinstein]

A portrait like me, you have to be me.

[Brassai]

I don't know.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I mean, any photographer has their own.

[Brassai]

Perception, and I think that's what comes through in a portrait. On the other hand, when I did.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Martha Graham, they wanted me to photograph Martha Graham for Vanity Fair. I'll go off on a tangent. She was my godmother. I thought this would be very easy. It wasn't easy at all. I hadn't spoken with her in years. I called and called, and she never answered the phone. She had a sort of reminder who answered the phone. It was keeping her from drinking. When she got older and couldn't dance anymore, she drank.

[Brassai]

And finally she answered the phone and said, you can.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I said, where can we do this?

[Brassai]

And she said, I don't know. They won't let me do anything.

[Dan Rubinstein]

She said, meet me backstage after the performance at City Center. She always did come on the stage.

[Brassai]

While she was alive.

[Dan Rubinstein]

After the performance, she always took a bow.

[Brassai]

And I get back there and there were tons of people everywhere, and, you know, there were all kinds of admirers. And they put me behind a rope and with a phalanx of photographers, and I just couldn't understand how this was ever going to come to anything. And she was sandwiched between Calvin Klein and Madonna and singing there. And I was there with my rolly and I had a flash and she.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Found me in this group. She was looking for me.

[Brassai]

I could see.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And then when she found me, that.

[Brassai]

She locked eyes on me and my.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Camera and she posed like only Martha Graham can pose. And she didn't stop.

[Unknown]

So you couldn't get an intimate. You couldn't get anything candid from her.

[Brassai]

You felt like it couldn't have been more intimate because it was as if everyone else, it was like it was love. I mean, there was no one else in the room and they were all.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Going about their business and they were all ancillary and the picture was fabulous.

[Brassai]

I felt, because she was. I mean, so, you know, things.

[Dan Rubinstein]

You can extract portraits in any circumstance.

[Brassai]

This is what I got. I felt very good at.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And, you know, so you had Martha, you had.

[Brassai]

You had Madonna on one side and Calvin Klein on the other, but they were just. I mean, it's not a portrait, you know, people are intrigued with that, but.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It adds to the picture. It's a portrait of Martha Graham and you can feel her in the picture.

[Unknown]

And your new book is called Lost Time. And I'd love to ask you, you know, why the title of Lost Time and how the book come about. And you've done other books before, of course, but like this one, you know, tell me about that.

[Brassai]

Well, I was trying, in about 2009.

[Jonathan Becker]

I wanted to make a book of collective.

[Brassai]

A book of my work, collected work.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And I didn't know, have any idea.

[Jonathan Becker]

Didn'T have any idea how to do it.

[Brassai]

So Andrew Wiley, who was my agent.

[Jonathan Becker]

Said Mark Holborn, who was a designer and a sequencer of photographs, he's done all kinds of magnificent books. I think he also worked with Mapplethorpe and he did the democratic forrest Bill Eggleston, he's done books on pen.

[Brassai]

He did the catalog raisonne of Lucian Freud. And, you know, he's got great stature in the publishing world. And at the time he was working in house at Random House in London.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I went to see him at his.

[Brassai]

House in Sussex and I said I liked him and whatnot.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And he agreed to come to New.

[Brassai]

York to work with me for three days.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It was from a Sunday to a Thursday.

[Brassai]

And then when he.

[Dan Rubinstein]

So we went out to dinner that Sunday when he got there in June. And then Monday morning I got a phone call from London, said, you gotta.

[Brassai]

You've got to come to London.

[Dan Rubinstein]

This assignment for the 100th anniversary of Tatler come through. We got all the ten Dukes together tomorrow. So I left him there. He said, no problem, not a problem.

[Brassai]

I didn't really believe him, but I thought, whatever. And I came back a day later.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I did the whole thing in less than 24 hours.

[Brassai]

And he said, I'm not done yet.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I said, what about the collaboration? He just said, don't worry, I'm not done yet.

[Brassai]

Then it was Wednesday night and we.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Had another dinner and he handed me.

[Brassai]

This.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Compilation of photographs, a sequence and on A Thursday after he left, I looked at it.

[Brassai]

I didn't expect much, and I really loved it. It was a narrative sequence that told.

[Dan Rubinstein]

A story.

[Brassai]

That if one looked at.

[Dan Rubinstein]

The book from the beginning until the end, the way one reads from, you.

[Brassai]

Know, left to right.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Gave a satisfaction.

[Brassai]

That was akin to reading a short novel or something, but purely visual. And no one, you know, one was.

[Dan Rubinstein]

At a loss for words, but one felt one understood something.

[Brassai]

And really, it was my trajectory. And then no one wanted to publish it that way.

[Unknown]

Okay, why not?

[Brassai]

Abrams? I wanted to make a more conventional.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Thing with a portrait section, a landscape section, I don't know what, an artist section, writer section. So that Andrew didn't want to let.

[Brassai]

And I didn't want to. I wanted this book published this way.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And it didn't matter. I made a dummy of it. I put it on a coffee table.

[Brassai]

And forgot about it. Steidel agreed to do it, and then something happened with. His overseer was Karl Lagerfeld, and he.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Didn'T like it for some reason, so he.

[Brassai]

He got in the way of Steidel's printing it.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I kind of forgot about it for a long time until a friend of.

[Brassai]

Mine, Stephen Aronson, came by, and he looked at the book and screamed at me and said, you've got to get this published. You know, you've got. And then. And then he said.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He said, go to Fiden. And he said, go see Billy Norwich.

[Brassai]

And he was an old friend.

[Dan Rubinstein]

So I called Billy Norwich.

[Brassai]

The next thing I know, if I agreed to do it, I had published.

[Dan Rubinstein]

A book in the interim, about 30 years at Vanity Fair, which was very.

[Brassai]

Successful, but it wasn't collected.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It was Vanity Fair.

[Unknown]

Yeah. And so this has been cooking for quite a while.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Yeah.

[Brassai]

And so the lost time came about because I'd given Mark that book, that.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Breast written on Proust and photography, and he was keen on it.

[Brassai]

And then I asked Mark to write.

[Dan Rubinstein]

A preface to the book that he. That he'd sequenced.

[Brassai]

He's a. I mean, he. It's.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It's his book in many ways. It's his narrative. Just my pictures.

[Brassai]

And everyone said, no, you can't have the designer.

[Dan Rubinstein]

But he.

[Brassai]

You know, I did that. And then I read what he wrote.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And it was all about brassail and about Proust. I said, marcus, this is a book about moi.

[Brassai]

What's going on?

[Dan Rubinstein]

You don't hardly mention moi.

[Brassai]

And then I realized, well, why does he have to.

[Dan Rubinstein]

These are the whole. It's all my pictures. Why does he have to mention me?

[Brassai]

So much.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And what a great context he's put me in.

[Brassai]

And it's a context that I couldn't realize myself. And then he titled his essay Losing.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Time, which I didn't like very much.

[Brassai]

And then we were looking for a title.

[Dan Rubinstein]

He suggested other titles for the book.

[Brassai]

Plaisir was one that. It's French and that's, you know, everybody knows quite what that means. And it was, it was a, it was that portion of Rasay's work that.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Couldn'T be published for so long. He called it Plaisir.

[Brassai]

I don't know. Then I said, well, why not just.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Call it Lost Time?

[Brassai]

And Mark changed his, his introduction to Call Lost Time too.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I think it works.

[Unknown]

Is there anyone that you look back on the portraits in this book, I'm wondering that just give you kind of like a chill?

[Dan Rubinstein]

Oh, lots of people.

[Unknown]

There's one. One of my favorites is of a young Rupert Murdoch and Roy Cohn in shot in black and white in a party for Reagan's I think re election inaugural looking quite.

[Brassai]

They look like killers, don't they?

[Unknown]

Yeah, they sure do. That would, I would say that one is the one that I, that gives me the most.

[Brassai]

I mean I'm. I'm completely unaware of being in the.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Presence of dangerous people.

[Brassai]

You know, I'm intrigued with it.

[Unknown]

You know, photography is something that is, you know, continuing to have a little bit of a resurgence now in a sort of a post iPhone world or whatever you want to call it. And people are just rediscovering it and bending technology to their will and all sorts of things. I'm just curious, like, what is your take on the role of photography today?

[Dan Rubinstein]

I think it's over.

[Jonathan Becker]

I mean, I mean unless you really just stick to the film, you don't have any basis anymore for. And this has been a. I've been whining about this for. It doesn't do any good. I mean, I love the idea that what makes photography unique from any other form, art form or journalistic form or anything, is that it's a document and it's unassailable. And if you can alter a picture, it's no longer a document, it becomes meaningless. It's a very poor medium for illustration. I'd much rather see a drawing and, or a painting much more romantic than a digitally altered photograph. And there was a fellow up at, I think it was Cornell who was like minded, but it's really that it's Adobe that makes these Photoshop programs that become harder and harder to recognize as products that Alter, I mean, the alterations that at some point they made a system where you could reconfigure the pictures, pixels to make the whole thing, to make the fact of it having been altered undetectable to just simple magnification. There's no digital verification tool. I mean, I don't even know if the FBI can do it anymore that can tell you if a picture is altered or not. And so I'd rather, I mean, I have no use for that business.

[Unknown]

And so what is your shooting life like today? What kind of.

[Jonathan Becker]

Well, I use film still and I use digital. I don't alter it. But there's no if I don't have film, I can't prove it. I mean, people presume that everybody alters everything all the time. You have to scan even film, right?

[Unknown]

It's all laid out digitally, I guess so.

[Dan Rubinstein]

And everything's digital. Submissions have to be to magazines, have to be digital. I have to print from a digital file.

[Brassai]

So I mean, it's, it's all right.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I just.

[Brassai]

You know, it's not that I've, you know, it consumes, you know.

[Dan Rubinstein]

It envelops you, takes you in.

[Unknown]

And when you're just sort of like.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Not on assignment and you're just maybe.

[Unknown]

I don't know, taking a trip or just in your daily life, do you like to just bring a camera with you where you go, or do you kind of keep that professional?

[Brassai]

I mean, I take, I pull a camera out when I want it. I don't carry a camera around my neck.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I never did.

[Unknown]

Like, when you travel, like, what's your, what's your go to camera? I'm curious what, when you're kind of Rolleiflex, okay.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I still use it. I don't make a big distinction between.

[Brassai]

Work on assignment and work anything else I'm doing. It's just that I'm given an assignment, that's all.

[Dan Rubinstein]

I could go over there and do that.

[Unknown]

And if I had to boil your approach to photography to three words, what would, what would you say?

[Brassai]

Don't belabor it.

[Dan Rubinstein]

Keep it simple.

Thank you to my guest, Jonathan Becker, as well as to everyone at Phyton for making this episode happen. The editor of the Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don't forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, the Grand Tourist [e-mail] and follow me on Instagram @danrubenstein. And don't forget to follow the Grand Tourist on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen and leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Till next time.