What Becomes a Legend Most by Philip Gefter

Author:Philip Gefter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2020-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

IN THE LATE 1960S, several junior assistants—those who reported to Gideon Lewin—passed through Dick’s studio. One of them was Claude Picasso. Dick had photographed Claude and Paloma, Pablo Picasso’s children, in Paris in 1966, and when Claude, who wanted to be a photographer, ran into Dick in London in early 1968, Dick invited him to come work for him. “New York is the place to be,” Dick said. Claude worked for the Avedon studio for a year doing menial tasks as well as darkroom work—sweeping the floors, setting out breakfast for the staff, printing contact sheets from film that was couriered overnight from Paris while Dick was shooting the collections. And, because he spoke French, Claude was enlisted to translate the letters Dick received from Lartigue.

By 1968, Dick’s Lartigue project was going full tilt. “All my spare time in the past few months has been spent editing and working on the layouts of a new book by Lartigue,” he wrote to John Szarkowski in the summer of 1968. “I arranged to have all of his pictures printed, then went to Paris to edit from thousands of them. The book will be divided into seven decades—it’s absolutely incredible the amount of work he has done and the beautiful photographs buried in his files. You realize, of course, that it was you who brought us together, and I can’t thank you enough. When the book is completed, I’d love to show it to you.”

Viking Press was interested in the book, and Dick had begun working with Bea Feitler on ideas for sequence and design. Dick wrote to Lartigue on March 28, 1968, explaining the fluidity of his working process with Feitler: “We think, we talk, we changed our minds. We are excited one day about a layout and two days later make it better. It is the nature of our working together, and a habit that has come to us from years of working on Harper’s Bazaar and on the Beatles posters and many other projects.” He wanted to convince Lartigue to “let us follow our dreams about your work to the end. On the other hand, as we work together we must all agree.” Avedon could be saccharine in his cheerleading and audacious with his demands, at one point explaining to Lartigue that the only way to sequence the book properly was to bring all of Lartigue’s negatives and contact sheets to New York. His argument was that it would be vastly less expensive to make copy prints in his studio than to pay Photostat houses or printing labs. In that same letter, as a further lure, Dick blithely reported to Lartigue that someone had given him an idea for the title: “Diary of a Century.” “I don’t think that’s a bad idea at all,” Dick wrote. “They explained to me how a book of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s called ‘Witness to Our Time’ sold 50,000 copies, because it was promoted as an historical book rather than just a collection of photographs.”

Another studio assistant that year was a young Brit named Neil Selkirk.

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