Yesterday Minnette had a little brunch for Judy Dater, just returning from her honeymoon in Paris with her umpteenth husband. Judy’s this uber famous photographer, whose tender nude studies and shimmering gray scale influenced me as a budding photographer. I’ve since moved away from that tradition, but all of the other photographers in attendance were still shooting traditional nudes or street scenes, all talking dismissingly of digital photography and the scramble for replacing their no-longer-manufactured gelatin silver papers.
I was talking to Judy about our favorite Paris museums and what she was currently working on, just falling in love with how accessible and glowing she was, but ended up being drawn away by the most bitter of the bunch. This guy, wearing the hunting jacket and sun hat of the seeker of the “decisive moment,” was still upset about the shift caused by Szarkowski’s Arbus, Winogrand and Friedlander “New Documents” show—that was 40 years ago—even referring to Arbus as “that woman who killed herself.”
“So what do you do?” he finally asked me. “I photograph big hairy guys very closeup and put the images together in large abstract arrays, providing an intimate access to a body that we don’t generally look at very closely.” He didn’t know what to do. “What size are your prints?” So we chatted about process and papers, and I finally pulled myself away and ran to gather some lemons from Minnette’s tree. I came home and made lemonade.