Late Portraits, 1985-2005
This is a group of diverse portraits I made between 1985 and 2005. It started with a nude portrait of Aaron Siskind and me made in my Houston studio, and culminates with a diptych of my friends Brenda and Stuart, before and after cancer. There are some 24x24” Polaroids, including one of me with my close friends Anne and Eve, a series of diptychs like the one of Stacy, a clerk in a camera store who fascinated me. There are a few NY portraits, my doorman on his retirement day, and a woman with her dog on the Hudson River; Portraits of my friend Cynthia with her dollhouse in Houston and a portrait of my friend Paul Monette, when AIDS had brought him close to the end, embraced from behind by his lover Winston; and one from Jerusalem of friend and survivor Lusia Schimmel, holding a precious child’s shirt. There are some from New Mexico including the girl in orange leaning against the car at the Tesuque Market. When I saw her standing against the car, I rushed home for my camera, came back, talked to the family to get permission to make her portrait. I wasn’t getting what I wanted so I said to her, “When I first saw you, you were leaning against the car. Would you please lean against the car?” Then she took the exact position I had first seen. There are portraits of artists living in Texas and of multi-cultural workers from Houston and re-enacted performative portraits based on dialogues between my former partner Malka and I during the early years of our relationship.
Writing this short descriptive piece, I can feel all the love I felt when I took these photographs: love for these people, love of photography, and a little melancholy about the past. Thanks to photography I am able return to those moments and my compassion and love for these people.
