Read Online Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s by Brad Gooch - Free Book Online
Authors: Brad Gooch
Ads: Link
The art director was also an art director for Warhol’s Interview. The female model was taller than I. We were photographed in high winds, tousled, next to a seaplane at the East Hampton airport. The final result looked goofy, I thought, in a magazine full of sewing patterns.
My next big break came equally effortlessly. “Hi, Brad. It’s Marc.” Marc Lancaster told me that he had been at dinner at Da Silvano, a one-room Italian restaurant popular with artists and dealers on lower Sixth Avenue. He’d seen Eric Boman, a Swedish friend working as a fashion photographer, and told him of my one-day modeling stint. Eric said he thought I could do it and would I stop by his place to do test shots. Eric was about forty but looked twenty-seven, with blond hair and glossy skin. He took pictures in what he said was “golden, Italian light” on his penthouse terrace. The next day he called and said the contact sheets looked good. He was shooting a New York Times ad for Bloomingdale’s in Central Park. Did I want the work? I spent most of the day of that job in a trailer, watching women being made up, and flipping through an After Dark magazine with Jon Voight on the cover. The other models, both male and female, were, again, taller than I, and seemed to have much more presence. Just days later, a check for $500 arrived. This job is much better than teaching, I thought. So I decided that I needed “to get my book together,” a phrase that I had impressionistically picked up on the shoot.
The only photographer I really knew was Robert Mapplethorpe, now living just around the corner from us in a loft onBond Street. Usually, I only saw Robert at night at the Mineshaft. Once we tried to have a sex date but whatever self-administered hallucinogenic date-rape drug I took made me think Robert was the devil and the chill paralyzed me. I superimposed him in my mind against an onyx Lucifer bust in a corner of his living loft and photographer’s studio. To pop the question about my modeling portfolio, I stopped by during the day. When I brought up to Robert the news that we had both just won New York State CAPS grants, me in fiction, he in photography—an award with a $3,000 stipend—he scowled, “That won’t even cover my overhead.” I’d never heard the word “overhead” and was impressed at how adult Robert was. I discovered that during the day Robert talked a lot about money, and his desire to work for Vogue magazine, so I felt comfortable bringing up my career schemes. He was a likely coconspirator. Robert had a black assistant that month who knelt down next to his Mission armchair to go over the day’s “to do” list. When I went in the bathroom, a silver-gelatin print propped above the toilet showed the back of the head of the assistant (or a very similar head) bent down into the bowl in front of me. Robert was proud of pictures he’d taken for the cover of Patti Smith’s next album, Wave. Then he showed me more scurrilous shots, done in the studio in the back, of a milquetoast guy being worked over, voluntarily (at first), after hours by Mineshaft friends wearing swastika armbands. The series was painful, but mesmerizing. “Sure, I’ll help you with your portfolio,” Robert agreed.
I showed up at noon a few days later with a garment bag. Robert and I were both pretty clueless about fashion photography. I’d brought along all the “formal” clothes I had, changing intocorduroys, brown shirt, thin tie, ratty, black cashmere overcoat, and a short Scottish scarf. Robert did what he knew how to do. He produced a box full of cocaine powder, seeming like a snuffbox, which he held in his fine, ivory fingers. Robert was a boy from Queens, but he channeled an aristocratic WASP manner—the side of him that collected silver and antique furniture. This combination of contrary traits was common enough at the time, as in the Mineshaft doorman, part-time fussy fine-furniture curator and part-time faux-uniformed cop. Both
My next big break came equally effortlessly. “Hi, Brad. It’s Marc.” Marc Lancaster told me that he had been at dinner at Da Silvano, a one-room Italian restaurant popular with artists and dealers on lower Sixth Avenue. He’d seen Eric Boman, a Swedish friend working as a fashion photographer, and told him of my one-day modeling stint. Eric said he thought I could do it and would I stop by his place to do test shots. Eric was about forty but looked twenty-seven, with blond hair and glossy skin. He took pictures in what he said was “golden, Italian light” on his penthouse terrace. The next day he called and said the contact sheets looked good. He was shooting a New York Times ad for Bloomingdale’s in Central Park. Did I want the work? I spent most of the day of that job in a trailer, watching women being made up, and flipping through an After Dark magazine with Jon Voight on the cover. The other models, both male and female, were, again, taller than I, and seemed to have much more presence. Just days later, a check for $500 arrived. This job is much better than teaching, I thought. So I decided that I needed “to get my book together,” a phrase that I had impressionistically picked up on the shoot.
The only photographer I really knew was Robert Mapplethorpe, now living just around the corner from us in a loft onBond Street. Usually, I only saw Robert at night at the Mineshaft. Once we tried to have a sex date but whatever self-administered hallucinogenic date-rape drug I took made me think Robert was the devil and the chill paralyzed me. I superimposed him in my mind against an onyx Lucifer bust in a corner of his living loft and photographer’s studio. To pop the question about my modeling portfolio, I stopped by during the day. When I brought up to Robert the news that we had both just won New York State CAPS grants, me in fiction, he in photography—an award with a $3,000 stipend—he scowled, “That won’t even cover my overhead.” I’d never heard the word “overhead” and was impressed at how adult Robert was. I discovered that during the day Robert talked a lot about money, and his desire to work for Vogue magazine, so I felt comfortable bringing up my career schemes. He was a likely coconspirator. Robert had a black assistant that month who knelt down next to his Mission armchair to go over the day’s “to do” list. When I went in the bathroom, a silver-gelatin print propped above the toilet showed the back of the head of the assistant (or a very similar head) bent down into the bowl in front of me. Robert was proud of pictures he’d taken for the cover of Patti Smith’s next album, Wave. Then he showed me more scurrilous shots, done in the studio in the back, of a milquetoast guy being worked over, voluntarily (at first), after hours by Mineshaft friends wearing swastika armbands. The series was painful, but mesmerizing. “Sure, I’ll help you with your portfolio,” Robert agreed.
I showed up at noon a few days later with a garment bag. Robert and I were both pretty clueless about fashion photography. I’d brought along all the “formal” clothes I had, changing intocorduroys, brown shirt, thin tie, ratty, black cashmere overcoat, and a short Scottish scarf. Robert did what he knew how to do. He produced a box full of cocaine powder, seeming like a snuffbox, which he held in his fine, ivory fingers. Robert was a boy from Queens, but he channeled an aristocratic WASP manner—the side of him that collected silver and antique furniture. This combination of contrary traits was common enough at the time, as in the Mineshaft doorman, part-time fussy fine-furniture curator and part-time faux-uniformed cop. Both
Similar Books
