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PETER SCHLESINGER A Photographic Memory 1968— 1989 INTRODUCTION BY HILTON ALS
The “drunken lunch� at Ma Maison Restaurant, Los Angeles, 1979.
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Take This BY HILTON ALS
The eye travels to what is familiar and what is unfamiliar. As a child I loved black and white films, perhaps because they did and did not feel “real” to me, living, as I did, in an atmosphere that was not so much absent of color as occasionally drained of it. Still, in my rather closed East New York universe, there was the glamour of my four sisters, and their apparel, and the men who admired their bodies and clothes and the entire gestalt meeting on a dance floor in Manhattan, maybe, or someone’s basement in Brooklyn, tights and skirts rising up as those girls danced like there was no tomorrow because there was no tomorrow. I was a child then, so I only learned of those dance parties in the semi-privacy of my sisters’ bedrooms later on—rooms that smelled of powder and something old and new at the same time. That aroma was sweet to me because it was redolent of an aspect of life I did not understand and can never pretend to understand—certain rituals between men and women, and how appearance contributed to that particular frolic which felt less like “fun” when described the morning after than a primordial responsibility, leading to what? When I first saw Peter’s photographs I thought of my sisters not just because they grew up in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, too, and were stylish and thin like some of Peter’s subjects—Celia, Paloma, Tina, Lucy, and so on—but because my sisters, as did the majority of Peter’s subjects, lived, for the most part, in a childless universe. Indeed, one of the striking features of Peter’s photographs, certainly the ones assembled here, is the relative freedom that frames Peter’s frame. The days and nights his friends sit in, or move through, seem to go on past the frame, and their energy—the energy of self-discovery—is, I think, part of what’s going on in the pictures, which excludes mundane habit. At their core Peter’s images are anti-bourgeois. Not a whiff here of the responsibility inherent in parenting, bills to pay or avoid paying, houses, and so on, but getting up is, and laughter is, and the first moments of a new marriage are. Despite the fact that some of his friends were, at the time the pictures were made, already Mums and Dads—certainly the fabric designer Celia Birtwell was—Peter’s diary-like focus is society, but not in the quotidian sense; rather, he’s interested in the emotional connection his often fashionable people have to one another, despite their chic, or because of it. There is nothing chilly about the now world renowned shoe designer, Manolo Blahnik, say, spreading his legs in his harem pants as he looks up at the photographer with something like joy and just a little cheek. Blahnik is raising his glass in praise of—who can say? But it’s fun to imagine why, and that’s part of the pleasure Peter’s pictures impart: every gesture, every moment, ranging from the dancer Wayne Sleep trying on a ball gown, to Peter’s partner, the photographer Eric Boman, walking along with a smiling, shy-seeming Grace Coddington in a long ago universe filled with light and style, inspires questions, reflections. What are Peter’s subject’s doing? What are they rushing along to? And what happens to a world that vanishes the
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minute the photographer clicks the shutter and turns his gaze elsewhere? I first saw Peter’s pictures in his previous book of photographs, 2003’s “Checkered Past.” What impressed me there, first, was the color, the nuance of his pinks and blues; they were not too far off from the vibrant but almost-faded colors one saw in color field paintings, or a delicate, slightly worn color film. His prints also reminded me of the color that haunts memory—colors that are present but receding. Looking at those pictures I was a child again, haunting my sisters rooms in my sometimes black and white world as they pulled their stockings on before dancing on and on into the night. Partly trained as an artist in his native California, Peter moved to London in 1968 with his friend, the artist David Hockney. He was twenty years old. In Great Britain Peter was introduced to a wide range of people, most of whom were fashionable, or involved with the arts. At first he used photography as a sort of sketchpad— notes for future paintings and so on. But, as time went on, the photographs became just that—photographs, entities unto themselves. Now known, primarily, as a sculptor, you can see, in Peter’s photographs, the sculptor’s interest in space, and how objects—people—live in space and make the atmosphere different in the process. There are two sides to every picture Peter takes. There’s the real world—the world in which the photograph is taken—and the world the subjects make of themselves, and their environment. A particularly powerful example of that is a photograph Peter took during Paloma Picasso’s wedding party. The women are freshening their lipstick; they are totemic in their youth, beauty, fashionable thinness and absorption in the task at hand—remaking their faces for the next round of play, gossip, and confidences bubbling over like champagne. Peter’s pictures aren’t really part of any tradition I can think of—he is not a “street” photographer in the Cartier-Bresson sense, even though some of his more interesting images do take place on the street. Not the street, exactly, but the deck of a yacht in one case and there’s the writer Fran Lebowitz standing on a New York city sidewalk, her famous face partially hidden by a placard advertising her famous name. These on the fly images are distinctive because of the design Peter finds in them—“art” revealed in a moment. But they wouldn’t have been recorded if Peter was not an artist and one of the chief features of these pictures is Peter’s commitment to the life of the artist, that which is often lived in the company of a society that supports its own. The world was a much more open place when Peter started taking photographs, and his subject’s fame was not so much a given, but it is part of the group’s heritage. Peter’s subjects wear their privilege lightly and Peter photographs it lightly, without judgment, because he was a young man when these pictures were made, and you can’t be an artist and young without being something of a romantic. I wonder if he thought during those years that the times he photographed would elapse and evolve into other times, and I wonder, too, if he knew that one day some of the people he loved would no longer be here, making him and the world a different place, too. Maybe not. The work of the young is to be alive to the present, and the present after that. That’s the work of the artist, too—to immerse himself in the moment. Peter’s pictures document not only his openness to the current events and fleeting wisdom of the past, but to what he saw and what he made of it.
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Self-portrait by match, Santa Monica, 1968.
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Telephone by my parents’ pool, Encino, 1970. TVs in the den, Encino, 1968.
Artist Kathy Huberland, Encino, 1968.
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Tom Cuthbertson, author of Anybody’s Bike Book, Point Reyes, 1969
Tom in the San Lorenzo River, Santa Cruz, 1970.
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Rock and roll photographer Andee Cohen at an abandoned house on Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills, 1968.
Parked cars behind our house, Encino, 1970. Driving in the San Fernando Valley, 1972.
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Christopher Isherwood on his terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean, 1968.
Walter de Maria in a recording studio, New York, 1968. Walter in his own studio, New York, 1968.
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David Hockney photographing me on the Pont des Arts, Paris, 1969. David in Powis Terrace, London,1968.
David at the Museo Correr, Venice, 1970.
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Sandy, David, and Mark Littman walking on the frozen Zeller See, Austria, 1969.
David on the Zeller See, 1969.
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Natasha Spender throws a chair on the fire, Provence, 1970.
Ossie Clark and an angry waiter, Paris, 1969.
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Artist Patrick Procktor at Le Nid du Duc, Provence, 1968.
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