I was born in Manhattan on October 23, 1946. I played in the same park--Madison Square Park--that my first daughter Leah played in 38 years later. I moved with my parents to Westchester County and stayed there till I went to Bard College in September 1964.
I never visited Irving Klaw's Movie Star News when it was on East 14th St. But I did find some of his bondage photographs in my older brother's sock drawer. I mostly obsessed on Adam magazine. Thirty four years later I'm a contributing editor.
I always had a girlfriend. I always had a black moustache. In high school, at parties, I was sent to the cars of various older girls and made to perform oral sex on them. Since I was an underclassman they barely acknowledged me in the school hallway. That was fine with me.
During the summer of my freshman year of high school Jane L. fucked me. She ran the show. I found it very interesting. She was a blonde "bitch" with a beehive hairdo, nylons and heels. The following summer I went to L.A. to be near her and we did a lot more fucking. Years later she came to me and wanted me but I had found other women. She had shaven her pussy for me. I thought that was very considerate and rejected her. I'd like to see her now.
From early on I photographed women. It was an excuse to be near them. Soon enough, I realized, with some additional attention I could get them naked. I wasn't trying to fuck them. I was trying to be with them when they were near naked. Sounds kinky. My wife, Lynka says I can get a woman naked faster than anyone else. I recently told a beautiful lesbian that fucking wasn't so important to me. That I liked to do other things. I remember, while living in Taos, New Mexico at the end of the 1960's and early 1970's there was a famous actor who rode a famous motorcycle in a famous movie that told a woman friend of mine he thought he was a lesbian because all he liked to do was eat a woman. I understand what he meant.
I got interested in cultural anthropology and transferred to University of Colorado and graduated in June 1969 and moved to Taos, New Mexico. I opened The One Loose Eye Gallery of Photography and went broke. I did arty "one-of-a-kind" photographs because I hadn't yet become a good printer. Many of the shots were of naked women. One was published in Aperture magazine's Be-ing Without Clothes. My darkroom was in the basement of the local hip pizza place. The guy gave me free food for a year to help keep the gallery going. Every night I'd print using trays made from welded car hoods with gigantic springs to control the agitation.
I was thinner then. I got laid a lot. I met red-headed Suzie who introduced me to the deeper levels of sexuality. She asked me what I'd think about when I masturbated. My most secret thoughts. I told her. Then she went and did them sending me into a frenzy that I couldn't break out of for three years. We moved to Henry Street in lower Manhattan in the summer of 1971. I wrote a terrible erotic novel that never got published and Suzie moved to Santa Fe.
I continued to take an occasional sexual image but I was stuck on being a photojournalist and embarrassed by my fascination with erotica. I felt ashamed by my interest in girlie magazines. I'd buy Chic or Club magazine and hide them. I had a beautiful live-in girlfriend named Libby but I still enjoyed women in magazines and the lingerie ads in the New York Times Sunday Magazine weren't enough. Nude magazine models were the women I admired. Women that were up front enough to go against society's judgment. I threw away my first stash of girlie magazines sometime around the time Libby split and didn't start collecting again until I was secure in my relationship with the beauty I married--Lynka.
Before I write about Lynka I want to say that Libby had the longest legs and wore the shortest skirt I had ever seen, from the first time I saw her getting on a train in East Hampton, Long Island. She was seventeen years old. We lived together for several years until she grew up. She allowed me to practice my dominant side as she became a woman. We did some wonderfully wild things together and then she left.
During this period I was a struggling photojournalist making most of my money shooting industrial filmstrips around the country. One day while Libby was in class at the University of Denver I went across the street to a "nude" modeling studio. The woman was thin and pale and sadly beautiful. Her face was pock marked and her eyes shone when she smiled. I felt like I was capturing something special. For the next three years, whenever I was somewhere in America at the end of the long workday I'd drop the crew at the motel and drive the rented car to the local strip club, massage parlor, or nude rap studio. From 1974 to 1977 I did environmental portraits--strobe on camera--of women that worked in American roadside sex. These portraits became a book, Sex Objects, published by Addison House in Danbury, New Hampshire. It was partially funded by a $5000 CAPS fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts. It was poorly publicized and poorly distributed.
The pompous publisher told me "You'll never have a more beautiful book than this." He was wrong, but it did take seventeen years for the next one (Eric Kroll's Fetish Girls) to be published. Sex Objects had a print run of 10,000 copies and sold out. The publisher went bankrupt and I never got my full percentage. State Senator Marchi from Staten Island, hoping to get publicity for his re-election, attacked the book for being pornographic (it wasn't). On the front page of the New York Times various artists defended it. The next day New York City was hit with a winter blizzard and the publisher got cold feet. I thought the book would change my life. It didn't.
Paul Schrader hired me to interpret his film Hardcore starring George C. Scott and produced by Columbia Pictures. I brought a friend out to Hollywood with me and we booked a suite at the infamous Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Blvd., home to Tom Waits and Duke's Restaurant. Nash wanted to find a whore but the Hillside Strangler was loose and we couldn't find one. At midnight I gave up and retired to my bedroom insisting I not be disturbed.
The next day was my big day and I needed sleep. Hours later I awoke to someone feeling my balls and staring down into my face. I saw the face of a black man in a woman's wig. I mumbled something and fell back asleep until I heard Nash screaming "What did you say to her? You scared her away!"
Welcome to Jollyweird. I was to document the mix of real actors like Scott, Peter Boyle and Season Hubley, and the people in the porn business like redhead Serena, the woman with inverted nipples. I had a letter from Columbia Pictures stating that I worked for them and any assistance would be greatly appreciated. I spent sixteen hours a day exploring the sexual underbelly from San Francisco to San Diego. At the end of the six weeks I was fat, dazed, and dumped by Libby.
Panic. Who was I going to go to Studio 54 with? Me and six to ten of my artist male friends would go out every night to clubs like the Mudd Club, Danceteria, Xenon, and later Area, and still later the Palladium, looking for women. Because I was photojournalist I could get in to most places. During this period of the early and middle to late 1970's I worked for the German weekly Der Spiegel magazine and did portraits and product shots for the front section of Vogue magazine. I'd travel with an editor to South Dakota to photograph the Lakota Sioux Indians or a renegade chapter of the Klu Klux Klan in North Carolina. The photographs were reproduced very small. It wasn't very gratifying.
In October 1978 I went to have lunch with my photographer friend David on West 86th St. When I walked in he was photographing a blonde Zoli model named Lynka. I married her. One can see on David's contact sheet the difference in her expression before and after I arrived. Maybe she thought I looked like her dad. My luck. She went with me to the clubs; she had my two girl children Leah and Willa, and she collaborated on my ongoing series "The Family." When she was nine months pregnant she and I redid the Marilyn Monroe classic nude which I renamed "Move Over Marilyn (M.O.M)." When she was lactating with our first child Leah we made the image "George Bernard Shaw Drank Mother's Milk in His Coffee Every Morning" with Lynka squirting milk from her breast into my morning coffee. Eight month old baby Leah watched in horror.
On February 3rd & 4th, 1984 I had a one-man exhibition entitled "Fecundity" in the downtown club Danceteria upstairs in the Congo Bill room. I photographed for several years the artists of the lower East Side. Four years later I would no longer be photographing young emerging artists--many would be dying from the HIV virus. I began photographing women in fetish clothes. But first....
In November 1980 Lynka and I got married at the Grove Isle Hotel and Resort in Coconut Grove, paid for by a generous father-in-law. I don't remember anything of the ceremony except directing my photographer friend Stu with hand signals and eye contact. I was a jerk. Afterwards, thirty of Lynka and my friends from all over the United States got wild in the Jacuzzi. LSD, tequila, beer, and laughter. Stu took photographs using a flash. It wasn't until we saw the photographs that we realized there had also been sex. At dawn, many of the women were seen riding the glass enclosed elevator in their birthday suits.
We decided to leave New York for a year. I sold my West 29th St. loft and we bought a recreational vehicle complete with kitchen, bathroom and shower. On the last night we went to our Citibank branch ATM. Back then there were video monitors monitoring the machines. I placed Lynka on the counter and we fucked, then withdrew all our money and left the city.
I took black and white sociological photographs of everyday America. Eight hundred rolls of film shot in obscure places. For example Belle Glade, Florida, the winter vegetable capital of the world had Filipinos, Haitians, Blacks, and Mexicans working the sugar cane, orange and lettuce fields. Palestinians ran the stores. Twenty years earlier Edward R. Murrow shot his famous "Harvest of Shame" in the same Palm Beach County, America's richest and poorest county.
When I got back to New York I sold my photo essay as a feature in Fortune Magazine working with the editor Alice George. Other stories included collecting prize bull sperm in Lubbock, Texas. And learning Lakota Sioux alongside AIM leader Russell Means at the Yellow Thunder camp in South Dakota.
I was also taking standard nudes and lingerie shots of Lynka but it had no direction. In Washington State I bought a remaindered copy of Bunny Yeager's How I Photograph Myself. Many of the images were instantly recognizable to me from when I bought Cavalier Magazine and other softcore magazines when I was a kid. Lynka thought she went to school in Miami with a Yeager. I called Miami and found Bunny Yeager. It took years (until 1987) but I finally convinced Bunny Yeager to let me produce a limited edition portfolio--Bunny Yeager's Girls of The Fifties---thirteen archival contemporary prints made by me from the original vintage negatives.
I loved contact printing her negatives from the 1950's and 1960's. I studied her use of electronic strobe in daylight. When selecting for the 13 images for the portfolio Bunny insisted on including the model Betty Page. At first I was hesitant. I associated BP with Klaw photos of a sneering brunette. Yeager's images were much more approachable. I included one shot of a naked Betty on the stern of a small boat in the Keys in late afternoon warm light and a naked Betty sandwiched between two spotted cheetahs shot in the "jungle" of Africa USA. The response changed my life. People from around the world wanted anything and everything of Betty Page. Subsequently Bunny sent me a shoe box filled with hundreds of Betty Page negatives that hadn't been printed in over thirty years. It was difficult to concentrate on my own work knowing there might be a hidden "diamond" in that shoe box. I studied archeology in college and spent part of my summer of my junior year digging up Mimbre pottery in the canyons of Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado. I felt as though I was doing photo-archeology.
The first person I "uncovered" wasn't Bunny Yeager. It was a 90 year old woman photographer named Rose Redfield that I had had a walk-in portrait studio on the upper West Side of Manhattan for over sixty years. When she bent over her enlarger and counted out her exposure (no electronic timer for her) her body formed a figure S. To reach her 100 year-old enlarger she stood on a tiny wooden stool. Watching her made me think of Beatrix Potter's Miss Tiggly Wiggly. Rose was a master photo retoucher. If one couldn't afford an expensive wedding portrait of themselves she would do straight headshots of the customer and later transfer the person's head onto someone else's body who was dressed in formal wedding attire.
I arranged a two-person exhibit of her studio portraits and my artist series at the Neikrug Gallery in the Fall of 1986. I convinced the State Historical Museum in Albany to recreate Rose's studio in the museum but unfortunately Rose couldn't recall details of her early photos. They backed out. Under her darkroom sink were dozens of beautifully hand colored photographs that customers hadn't retrieved. A year later she was too frail to go to work and the studio was closed. Months later I visited her in the hospital but she no longer remembered me.
I arrived back in Manhattan in November 1981 in time for Halloween. Lynka went as a gray Jackalop (a bunny with antlers) and I went as Big Fig (the potbellied character on the Fig Newton package). We went to the music club Tracks and we ran into John Beluschi and Dan Akroyd dressed as the Blues Brothers. I had met John before and introduced my rabbit wife with enthusiasm. They looked at me--(a man in a bag with purple tights) like I was nuts.
I naively thought all my editors would be waiting for me. WRONG. One doesn't work freelance for a magazine . One works for an editor and when he or she gets fired I get fired. No one wanted black and white photographs. No one wanted reportage. Editors wanted environmental portraits in color lit by studio strobes.
I taught myself how to make color portraits on location. In late 1986 I moved into a large studio on East 28th Street just off Park Avenue. My lighting changed. I began doing controlled studio lighting using an umbrellaed strobe on a boom to light the hair, a mid-sized chimera soft box as my main light just off center, and an umbrellaed side light for definition with a card as "go-bo" placed between the light and my camera.
At about this time my vintage photography business was growing. I had seen in an early Fawsett publication on Peter Basch's work a classic nude he had done of Betty Page. He had no memory of the now famous icon. I promised him I could sell his images and I did. He also had fabulous shots from the 1950's of Jayne Mansfield, Jane Fonda, leggy shots of Julie Newmar, and baby-faced photos of Brigitte Bardot. Recently, he phoned just after the death of film director Fellini and reported he had B&W shots he had taken from the set of the film 8 1/2. I sold them.
As I became more and more involved in the legend of Betty Page (I wrote a column in Greg Threakston's The Betty Pages) I came in contact with interesting people that lead me to more vintage glamour photographs. On a visit to Hollywood in the late 1980's Bill Margold reminded me that the porno photographer Sam Menning had known Betty Page personally. I went to visit him. He lived with dozens of cats in a series of rooms in a condemned building across from Manny's Grumman Chinese Theater on Hollywood Blvd. With the neon from the theater beaming into his windows he and I drank beer as he told me of New York City in the 1950's. Of Cass Carr, the Black Jamaican that ran the Camera Club outings to Jones Beach with Betty and other women modeling in bathing suits. He also owned the Concorde Studio on West 47th Street. About "nickel" nights at a hotel on the upper West Side--an open call to all women to be photographed for $5 an hour. He suggested I visit his former assistant H.F. who lived one block from my studio in NYC (small erotic world). H.F. was very suspicious of my interest in girlie photography. At one point he exclaimed "You like this stuff. You really like this stuff." "Yes," I replied. "Well, look at this," and opened a four drawer file cabinet filled with thousands of 2 1/4 transparencies of bare-breasted teased-haired beauties shot in the 1960's and 1970's. Plus thousands of "file" B&W photos of the same beauties. My mind was in a blur. I told him I HAD to buy them and did. He had found this treasure in a dumpster in mid-Manhattan. A magazine gone out of business or a photo agency gone bankrupt?
Years later I was able to buy a million transparencies and prints to "flesh" out my enormous collection. Now I sell catalogues of small breasted women with tan lines or women shot from below, or transvestites at costume balls from the 1960's, or naturally big-breasted women from the 1960's, or pregnant women, or Spanish women or Black women. The list is endless.
I was developing a respectable salon of erotic and glamour art and photography just off Park Avenue in Manhattan. Presently the same atmosphere and the same art exists in my new salon just off Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. (Anyone out there with any more to sell or trade? My address is listed. Tall strong artist/model Anna Noelle will be glad to assist you.)
