One of our writing mainstays at Esquire was Elizabeth Kaye; one of her passions was the ballet. She’d finished a piece on Nureyev, and asked if I could shoot this young newcomer to the New York scene, Angel Corella. She wanted to help him get a gig. She swore he was going to be big, big, big.

Below is a gumbo of personal, assigned, and semi-assigned stuff. Author photos fall into that last category; for a while, I was a go-to guy for these (i.e; fast, free, and in the immediate line of sight). In here somewhere is one of my favorites: Rust Hills. As a rule, writers hate being shot; Rust really hated it, but he had a book coming out, so he was on the hook. After one stilted authorial pose after another, I asked ‘Hey Rust, would you like a cigarette?’ ‘Oh God,' he said with that Rustian voice, 'could I?’ And with the snap and hiss of a match, there was the Rust we all knew and loved.

Jonathan Bowra: dancer, yoga instructor, meditation teacher, former Zen monk from the Kwan Um Korean lineage. To me, he embodies the muscular paradoxes of Zen: this sort of pure kindness, braided with iron rigor.

Little kids are the best; I’m a big fan of how they live magical realism, moment to moment. And how you, and we, are all magic, too. Of course.

Unnamed firefighter, NYFD Ladder Company. If you had the contact sheet, you’d see he’s all teeth, gusto, and bravura in the frames before and after this one. But the thing is, sometimes, in spite of ourselves, the photo machine captures these interstitial moments; something the eye never saw, never would have seen. This one happened on assignment. The picture’s since taken on this particular poignancy: me, today, looking at him, then, me knowing, now, that 9/11 is just over his horizon. Like he’s preparing.

Blood, Los Angeles. The craziness of the ‘colors’ era was coming to a close; Bloods and Crips had days before made a very public truce, and were sealing it with a rap album collaboration. I was in LA, shooting street portraits of Angeleno cultural ‘tribes’. It was a very American moment: real-life gangsters taking control of their brand.

Will Blythe. Writer, editor, Tar Heel till death.

The Will here was the defacto Fiction Editor at Esquire. His office was a fire hazard, waist-deep in drifts of could-be books, should-be books, would-be books, stapled books, galleyed books, nearly books, book books, and were books. Sometimes, in the stairwell, he’d play awful blues harmonica while I strummed execrable blues guitar. But the true object of his love: his Friday lunchtime street basketball, worn smooth like a #5 billiard ball.

Stephen Saban. Founding editor, DETAILS Magazine (before it was GQ lite, and now R.I.P.), post-Warhol, pre-Giuliani denizen of the night, chronicler of all things NY clubby.

Anna Forrest. Yoga instructor. Yes, those are her feet under her chin. Now you try.

Rust Hills. Another Rust story: in a lot of ways, Rust was Last of the old-school magazine editor Mohicans. Editing a manuscript called for a sharp pencil, scotch tape, a pair of scissors, and a big conference room table. He’d cut the thing up into all sorts of tessellated bits, then rearrange them, ransom-note style, on the table, and Frankenstein them back together with tape. Like watching archival Jackson-Pollock-at-work footage. In your eye, MS Word. [For more, see Terry McDonell's recently published memoirs.]

Tad Friend. Staff Writer, The New Yorker. One of the aforementioned can-you-fog-this-mirror-great-you’re-it contributing editor photos. I remember Tad as having completely zero affect. His sleeve once brushed a candle at a party, and caught fire. When someone pointed this out to him, with some amount of urgency, you’d have thought he was just checking his watch. Good man to have in a pinch.

This is Cheryl; I don’t think I ever knew her last name. She was girlfriend of the drummer for a friend’s band. She was over six feet tall. We shot this in the tiny studio/darkroom I shared with some folks on Avenue B. Going for that old-timey, Daliesque femme fatale vibe.

This is Daniel. He had the best Roman nose. Ever.

Steve Marcus. Cartoonist, illustrator, honorary Rasta. I’d seen some of Steve’s promo spots for MTV, and looked him up to do a cartoon to go along with a poem I’d gotten from Allen Ginsberg. He was living in a tiny storefront on Elizabeth Street; summertimes he’d put a TV on a chair outside the door and the little kids on the block would come squat on the sidewalk and watch shark videos. If you’ve ever participated in the gentrification of a neighborhood, you can thank Steve for the kick start. Priced out of NoLita, he moved to Williamsburg. And so on, and so on –

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama. Mark Jacobson, fresh from Dharamsala, was doing a followup interview for a profile of, as he called him, ‘The D.L.’ I blagged my way into accompanying him as photographer. This was shot in the DL’s hotel suite in Chicago, where he was keynote speaker for a world religions convention. To break the ice as I was getting him situated, I made a lame joke. Not even a joke. But by the volume and pure sincerity of the giggling laughter that came back, you’d have thought we were old buddies who’d been up all night together. Re. Markable.

Portraits