Last week, I initiated 100 Cities to share Polaroids of cities that I have loved exploring. I started going through boxes, sorting images, when I found a few photographs I had taken of Robert Mapplethorpe’s hands at the Chelsea Hotel. The lighting was not very good, but they are from a time precious to me. I never took any pictures of his face. We were most always together and somehow it never occurred to me. Robert hadn’t started taking photographs, and when we wanted our picture taken we usually went to a photobooth on 42nd Street, where you could get a strip of four for a quarter.
For a time, I took photographs with an inexpensive 35mm camera that I picked up at a pawn shop. Most often I didn’t have the money to develop the pictures. I just liked taking them, freeze-framing a moment in time. I was, in part, as the young man in Alain Resnais’s film Muriel, just gathering information. Shots useful for a collage, to illustrate a poem, or merely pin on my wall of inspirational images. Most of those pictures vanished during several youthful moves, as I typically left much behind.
The earliest existing photographs I still have from that time are a few detail shots of the painting “Woman I” by Willem de Kooning. I fell in love with her at the old Museum of Modern Art, where she once held a place of prominence. As I wasn’t able to visit the museum very often and wanted a souvenir, I surreptitiously snapped her portrait. Very few people were taking photographs back then. It was too expensive and not yet commonplace. I remember only a handful of artists passing through the Chelsea with cameras. Diane Arbus, Judy Linn, Jonas Mekas, Dennis Hopper, Sandy Daley, and eventually Robert. When Robert started taking pictures I abandoned my camera. I had other pursuits on the forefront, and all our available money was invested in buying film for his work, which he took very seriously. I was fortunate to be his first model and privy to his photographic evolution.
When my husband died in 1994, I found it impossible to do anything creative, to write a single word. One afternoon when the children were at school, I noticed how lovely the light was and how it fell upon the mosquito netting over the window. Fred’s old Polaroid Land camera was on the shelf. I took two pictures that afternoon, both diffused in light. The first was Nureyev’s practice slippers and a second of the net falling on a Tibetan singing bowl. Just two photographs. But to me, proof of creative energy, some evidence that I yet existed as an artist.
When I went back on the road in 1996, my Polaroid camera became my trusted companion. Roaming foreign streets and taking photographs provided a sense of satisfaction in my solitude. The immediacy of the process—shoot, peel, reveal—amplified the pleasure of creating something on my own, a welcome departure from the responsibilities of touring. I had a happy run taking Polaroids until the film was withdrawn from the market. Although I dearly missed the process, I reasoned it an environmentally sound decision.
These days, I take most photographs with my phone. It doesn’t provide me with the aesthetic pleasure that my idiosyncratic Polaroid camera had, but it suits my needs. One can actually get really great pictures with a phone, the great equalizer. If Robert had lived, I would have certainly taken a picture of his hands with my phone, and then another of his face to capture his green eyes and his mischievous smile.
Patti, Just finished listening to your audiobook Just Kids. What an extraordinary gift for Robert and the rest of us. There are no words to express how moving this work is. I am going to listen again. As I listen, I have been researching the artists and others you write about in this book. Incredible time to be living in NY.
Yours, is the finest biography I have ever come across.
In gratitude,
Lisa Puma
Concho AZ
Thank you Patti! To be able to freeze a moment in time . . . incredible . . . . I moved last year, October of 2020 and I put my son's and my belongings in storage. I decided with friend's help it was time to let go of the storage unit and the monthly cost. In came 30 boxes into my tiny living room. When I opened the photo and book boxes I wept, these were the things I missed the most.