Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/643518
194 BAL HARBOUR ve been talking too much," says Jonathan Becker, photography's unsung hero. He's been on the phone in his car, spinning yarns that match up with photographs in "A Fashionable Mind: Photographs by Jonathan Becker," at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) FASH, the new fashion and film museum on their Atlanta campus. The stories are all fascinating, though, and he tells them drolly: about his first job as an event photographer for W magazine while moonlighting as a cabdriver; the one about the Prince of Wales personally hiring him to shoot a dinner at Buckingham Palace; about taking a photo of a feeble Robert Mapplethorpe at his last opening before he died from AIDS; the one about sneaking a photo of his godmother, the legendary choreographer Martha Graham, backstage after her final bow, against her controlling caregiver's wishes—the only time he had to toil in the photographer's pit. "Sure enough, they put me behind a rope with all the other photographers, dozens of them," Becker recalls. "I thought, What am I going to do? I'll have to be Houdini to get my picture. I put a slightly longer lens on. I was there shoulder-to-shoulder with these fellas, but lo and behold, she saw me. And she kept her word, and started posing. So it didn't matter where we were, because she never took her eyes off of me." Many of the images were taken covering events or shooting portraits for Vanity Fair or Town & Country (the former where he made his name and the latter where he got his start), so to him, it was work. But it was also personal, so he shied away from art direction. "I don't much like it when people tell me what to do," says Becker, revealing his staunch independence. "You hired me because you want what I do. Advertisers are often selling so literally. And I'm not much of a salesman." Becker was attracted to a mixture of artists and other creative people—but rarely actors. His mother was a choreographer and his father had been a drama critic, so he had more than enough of actors in his day. Plus, they got in the way of his liberated shooting style. "I didn't try to shoot movie stars too much, because there are often tight constraints there," he says, "but with artists, there seems to be a common ground. It's most enjoyable to collaborate with artists. They're image-makers, too." The SCAD retrospective came about when fashion icon and Vogue contributing editor André Leon Talley dropped by Becker's studio. "I had come out with '30 Years at Vanity Fair' but I had another book in prototype that was more difficult to publish," says Becker, who hadn't shown at a museum or gallery in 30 years. "It's a sequence of images that was done by the great editor Mark Holborn, a visual narrative that tells the story of my work through pictures. André saw this book and that led into the idea of doing an exhibition. It turned him on. It's not much more complicated than that." Becker's no-nonsense nature harks back to his time spent studying under the tutelage of the legendary artist Brassaï. Paula Wallace, the founder and president of SCAD, thinks it's this time spent with the Hungarian master—who was best known for his achingly romantic photographs—that most informs Becker's work. "To be surrounded by Jonathan's work is to be immersed in the full spectrum of the human experience—only amplified," says Wallace. "In the presence of Jonathan's oeuvre, I recall the lessons that his mentor, the Brassaï, imparted when he urged Jonathan to study humanity—to build rapport with subjects to reveal their inner light. The total effect is illuminating and intimate. Through Jonathan's photography, we can peek over Prince Charles' shoulder at a royal dinner or pal around the kitchen with Andy Warhol at Elaine's restaurant." The portraits Becker takes are full of their own sort of romance of a time gone by. Which may be why the most striking thing about his work is the journey through time on which his pictures take us. "What is greater than time?" Becker asks rhetorically. "All you're doing is documenting a little piece of it, but it's always in the context of greater time, so when you look back at a picture—even when you look back a minute later at a photograph that's digital or a Polaroid—the magic of photography is that it gives the illusion of freezing time, that you can take a moment and examine it. Time is primordially important to any art." Becker captures Martha Graham backstage at New York City Center in 1990, after her final bow, with Madonna and Calvin Klein. "I'