ICONIC FIGURES

Not long after my 1965 arrival in New York, I began in my free time to photograph painters, sculptors and illustrators then living in, or within commuting distance of, the city. Among them were such familiar names as de Kooning, Dine, Duchamp, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Rothko, Segal, Steinberg, Warhol and Wesselman. I don’t recall whom I met first, but a visit to one artist’s studio invariably led me to the next. Regardless of my inexperience then as a photographer, I was always warmly received and politely thanked for the portraits I mailed back to them.

Warhol subsequently appropriated my photograph of him to create a series of silkscreened ‘Self-Portraits,’ which have since commanded seven- or eight-figure sums at auction and now grace museum walls around the world. Unlike today, when copyright protection is automatic, the law then required formal registration with the Library of Congress and payment of a fee – a necessary step I neglected, as I could ill afford the cost. It was a vexing experience. Such flagrant appropriation has since been ruled unlawful in the United States.

Commencing in the late 1970s I was commissioned by Omni, a now defunct science and science-fiction magazine, to take portraits of various notable figures in that field, such as the Nobel prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, and the author, Arthur C. Clarke.  

Most of these individuals are no longer alive. I feel privileged to have met them, and hope that my portraits, taken almost sixty-years ago, prove to have some documentary value.