VITA

An Unconventional Vita

I’ve been making photographs for over half a century. In 1968, I worked for Weegee (Camera Arts Magazine,1980.)

In 1972, I received a B.A. from a special program set up by the University of Chicago at The Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School.

After Weegee, with no experience, I was hired by the still-life photographer Tosh Matsumoto to work as his stylist. With Mr. Matsumoto’s encouragement, I began taking my own photographs, accompanying my husband, the writer John Tytell, while he was researching Naked Angels, a biography about the figures of the Beat Generation. I photographed mostly all of the survivors of that era.

Concurrently, in 1971, I worked as Ralph Lauren’s first photographer, shooting his men’s and women’s collections for Polo. I worked for Ralph for four years, including location finding and styling. The Great Gatsby series taken at my parent’s friend’s home on Kings Point Road on the North Shore of Long Island, helped Ralph become the designer for the Gatsby film.

I left Polo Ralph Lauren for three months to take a two hundred mile journey in a dugout canoe along the Saramacca River in Suriname. I was alone, except for the navigator who didn’t speak English except for saying “Looko Looko Monkey Monkey.” There, I camped out in a lean to and photographed the Djukas, Afro-Caribs who had been living autonomously in the forest for two hundred years.

My first publication occurred in 1974 where I illustrated a story about the Indigenous people who grew flowers in the Mexican Oaxaca Valley. (Magazine of Natural History April,1975).

In 1975, I spent ten months in Asia on a photographic grant from National Geographic’s Magazine where I photographed opium in the Golden Triangle and other subjects.

Returning to New York in 1976 I obtained a small studio where I continued doing fashion and portraits.

Fantasy, female sexual fantasy, and erotic nudes have always been a subject. Playboy Press published A Bowl of Men for their book Female Sexual Fantasies. My Polaroids of nudes were exhibited in the Munchner (Munich) Stadtmuseum’s show The Nude in Photography (1984). I have an extensive collection of X Rated photography, exhibited in several shows at Neikrug Photographica and elsewhere. Marge Neikrug represented me at the time.

Then, from 1978 to 1982, I took 14 trips to Haiti for Time, Stern, Geo, and Figaro, photographing its painters (where the artist gets their inspiration), portraits of known artists, Voodoo and culture.

In my archives is a treasure trove of photography of celebrated personalities, and another trove of a variety of mostly marginal subjects. I’ve continued to do fashion photography throughout my career, including Givenchy, Zegna, Christian Dior, etc. I worked for W Magazine while living in  Paris in the 80’s.

The work that I’ve produced is highly eclectic. Editorial work has been published in over 60 countries through Gamma Liaison in New York, Black Star, Sipa Press in Paris, and independently. A record of the Beat generation of artists in the later years was purchased by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the International Center of Photography, and exhibited in the I.C.P.’s Permanent Collection Gallery in 1994.

I’ve lived in Paris and Venice, and have been immersed in French culture (fluent in French), both in France and the diaspora.

Besides the locations mentioned above my photography has been exhibited in the Villa De Medici in Rome, the French Institute in Athens, the Amerikahaus in Berlin, and the Agathe Gaillard Gallery in Paris and is included in the archives The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

In 1999, I contributed all the photographs for a book called Paradise Outlaws. (Harper Collins). In 2008 I wrote, took the photographs, and designed My Lucky Dog (Harper Collins).

Currently, I am completing Shooting Each Other: Robert Frank and Me, about my 36 year friendship with the photographer Robert Frank, my life as a female photographer, and what it was like to find my way in that world.