Angie is my most photographed subject. Shooting her for over twenty years now… a dear friend, brilliant actor and one of the great peoples.
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Her unique beauty and spirit grows with each passing year.
We always shoot alone, no hair, no make-up, nobody . . . just us.
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. . . 860 Broadway in the formal dining room. This changed the trajectory of my life, 19 years old, 1975 being invited to The Factory to photograph Andy from a letter I wrote him asking to shoot his portrait.
As a beautiful gargoyle… West End Ave. Manhattan, circa 1990.
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Nineteen years old when I shot this… quite in awe of him.
getting her hair dyed
. . . platinum blond
Shot in my bedroom / studio, 18 years old, still living at home, our family brownstone on the upper west side, manhattan, 1974.
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Lighting test for a video I was prepping to shoot.
Our routine for many years was meeting for coffee, chatting about everything and then wander the streets or back to my studio to shoot.
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my place . . . just hanging, shooting . . . always shooting
“Take your broken heart and turn it into art” she said.
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Carrie affectionately chokes Debbie . . . last frame of the shoot.
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19 years old in my bedroom studio.
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The face he’s making was on the punchline of a joke he was entertaining us with.
Barack Obama was not the first black candidate for a major party's nomination for POTUS and Hillary Clinton was not the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Shirley Chisolm was on both accounts. As a nineteen year old kid I was quite in awe of meeting her. One of the heroes of my youth growing up in New York City. Loved her, an amazing lady.
East 14th st., Alphabet City, Manhattan . . . a few blocks from his apartment. On our way to the post office to get his mail. He couldn’t have it delivered to his building because the mailboxes were routinely broken into.
fun house mirror outside Howard Johnson’s , Times Square, NYC
…at a private party in Little Italy, NYC.
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Shot in his hotel room, NYC. He was in the city on a press junket for “The Boxer”. Three days of photos and interviews, the same obvious questions over and over again. I got him towards the end of it all and he was pretty fed up.
At the Chateau Marmont . . . waking up, initially too hung over to shoot when he arrived, so he crashed out in the bedroom for a while.
. . . at the Chateau Marmont, looking east on Sunset Blvd. I too am standing on that ledge with a camera in my face.
Cruising up the Pacific Coast Highway in her Cadillac.
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mirror test for a video we shot
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still from the video
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On the rooftop of my final residence in NYC. Looking west on Houston St. from Avenue A, Manhattan.
Film noir series for Showtime.
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Los Feliz
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Venice Beach . . . our first shoot, about a year before “Pretty Woman”. We became friends and were hanging a lot which evolved to my unofficially being her personal photographer for several years. Shot on most of her movie sets, lots of behind the scenes stuff. It was extraordinary access I had to her private life . . . at the time one of the biggest movie stars in the world.
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heading downtown on the subway, LA
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Mr. Halsman was my teacher & mentor . . . one of the most sought after and revered portraitists of his era. He shot over 100 Life Magazine covers. His subjects were a who’s who of world leaders, scientists, writers, legendary artists, actors, musicians, athletes . . . an extraordinary archives. He often asked his subjects at the end of shoots to jump, a psychology he developed that how people jumped, as he explains it . . . “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.” This is the only jumping photo I’m aware of that he joined in . . . with Marilyn Monroe. The photo on the right I shot of him and his wife and life long assistant, Yvonne, against the same wall as Miss Monroe was shot, at his studio on the upper west side of Manhattan. I was 19 years old. I had recently completed his first “master class” he offered to his favorite students from years of teaching his “Psychological Portraiture” class. Ended up being his first and last master class, as his failing health caused him to stop teaching.
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At The Factory, 860 Broadway, Manhattan. My studio was right across the street, 873 Broadway. I was shooting every month for Interview Magazine, also located at 860 . . . so I was in & out of there a lot.
For my new acting class, my first scene, from the play "RED", about artist Mark Rothko, I painted this 9 foot mural. Took up half the stage. Inspired to start painting again, I so enjoyed this.
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The owner of what was once the largest taxi cab fleet in NYC, “Scull’s Angels”. He was a famous patron of the arts whose collection included works of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, James Rosenquist, Barnett Newman… among others.
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hotel room
hotel room, NYC
On set of 1989 television production of “Sweet Bird of Youth”. Flipping off the director, Nicolas Roeg, just because.
On set of Sean Penn’s directorial debut, "Indian Runner", Omaha, Nebraska.
“Indian Runner”
“Indian Runner”
Little did we know the tsunami of a year that was heading our way. She was coming down with the flu that night but rallied to let me shoot her final photos to close out the decade.
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in my bathroom
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. . . at the family compound on the edge of a swamp, Florida.
I’d shot photos for REM’s “GREEN” album. We got along very well. Michael asked me to come hang out, shoot stills on set of a music video. Don’t remember what song it was.
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I never shot anyone so drunk and stoned as Harry was. I didn’t know if he couldn’t talk or wouldn’t talk, but he didn’t. Which I was fine with, a welcomed change. Cause I didn’t have to talk either. Just shot him like he was a statue… drinking, smoking and not giving a shit.
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During Broadway production of “Burn This”.
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From the last roll of black & white film I ever shot.
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santa monica beach
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Christopher’s daughter . . . a brilliant actress, won a Tony award for “Agnes of God”. Thought I was in love with her, I don’t know, deeply infatuated.
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at her Prince St. apt., Soho, NYC
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We were rehearsing something . . . then one of those gorgeous moments shows up.
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My first shoot for Interview Magazine, 1976
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The Wicked Witch of the West from the original Wizard of Oz.
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Shot in her dressing room, backstage at theater she was performing at. Don’t remember the play. Just two weeks before receiving academy award, best actress for “Trip to Bountiful”.
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wedding guests
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CBS studios, west 57th St, Manhattan
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18 years old . . . 1974, NYC
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My third shoot for Interview Magazine....Plaza Hotel, NYC....he was so intrigued by my old style Hollywood lighting, which he hadn't seen in a long time, he made his jabbering entourage leave the room so we could be alone, give me all his attention. Amazing gesture for this twenty year old photographer from someone who truly was a living legend at the time.
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waiting on the subway . . . Arlington, Virginia
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From a facebook post, January 8, 2021 . . . Thank you Bill for all the love & joy you brought into my mom's life. You have been such a blessing to our family and will be so deeply missed.
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Outside the offices of SNL at Rockefeller Center.
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When I was still in high school… an assignment for a photography class to shoot a double exposure inside the camera on the same frame of film. Found myself an empty billboard, found myself a fish.
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An absolutely gorgeous work of art, it seems, that someone painted elsewhere on sheets of gray paper then put it up on this plywood barrier of an empty lot around the corner from my building. Then on site further worked on it blending into the decaying poster already there. I spotted it walking home from my parking lot and was blown away. Ran to get my camera before anyone could vandalize it. Had to shoot it in sections, five frames to get it all. It is quite beautiful if you look closer.
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She needed a “full body” shot for the SFX department of a film.
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Pretty sure this is the first formal portrait I ever shot....with his Pentax Spotmatic....in the backyard of our brownstone on West 85th, Manhattan, circa 1972. Was starting to think about this as a career.
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An unhappy day . . .
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My earliest surviving photo, shot the summer my family moved from the suburbs to Manhattan, 1969.
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When the entire race was still held in Central Park, it’s 4th running. Norbert is the only NYC resident to ever win the men’s race.
I got the wedgie of a lifetime when I stepped in front of a Daily News staff photographer to get this shot blocking his. A big guy, he hoisted me up by the waist of my pants and tossed me airborne into the crowd.
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locker room entrance
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Christmas visit . . . 2019
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My favorite room in her new house, the walk in closet.
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At Shambala, her animal preserve for rescued big cats.
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In her dressing room, Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”.
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in the make-up trailer
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Shot for the cover of his autobiography… “Nevertheless”.
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Portrait I shot in NYC, 1986. He’d been out of public view for a long time at the onset of his Parkinson’s Disease. It was unsettling seeing him in the very diminished condition he was in, this once great warrior. He’d never seen this photo until I presented it to him at the Time Magazine shoot, during a break we took for lunch in his house. I handed it to him. He stared at it for a while… a very uncomfortable silence as his eyes water up. Everyone from the shoot, I could sense… thinking this was a big mistake. He handed it back to me. Made a gesture with his hand I didn’t understand. His wife said he wants you to sign it, please.
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At his home gym . . . Indiana, 1999, Time Magazine Cover . . . “Athlete of the Century”.
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Time Magazine shoot.
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I shot thousands of photos of Julia. I was unofficially her official photographer during the Pretty Woman era. We were good friends and she allowed me intimate access to her life.
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The farm right next to where I lived. The horizon peaking through the undulating landscape is the Pacific Ocean.
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Alvarado Street, LA
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from the backyard
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This gorgeous wild beach, that was often peopleless, was about a half mile walk along a sandy road from where I lived for a year.
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spins . . . . . . .
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from the back yard
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rubbernecking
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In the living room of his upper eastside town house, Manhattan. Of all the photos I’d ever seen of Mr. Hirschfeld, not one in front of this amazing mural he created, I believe, in the 1950s. Could I be the only photographer who ever thought to shoot him there?
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I never shot much in the music business. Much more interested in movieland. But the day I shot these guys was one of the most fun, silly, playful times I ever had.
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When I was 16, to shoot William F. Buckely Jr. & Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson behind the scenes at “Firing Line” for WNET (national education television), channel 13, NYC. The senator was on the campaign trail, the democratic nomination for president, at the time. A friend of my dad who did PR for the show, hired me.
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Hotel bar in Pittsburgh during production of “Hoffa”.
Co-founder & frontman, Studio 54
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rehearsals . . .
dressing room, backstage Broadway… don’t remember what play
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my nextdoor neighbor
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Shot in NYC on the balcony of his hotel room. A strange looking photo. In my constant efforts to create dramatic lighting and composition it can easily fail. The man in the foreground was directing one of Tennessee’s plays for Broadway. Shot this for Interview Magazine. Andy (Warhol) was just out of frame to the right doing his Q&A.
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Backyard concert at rich person’s estate in Malibu . . . campaign fundraiser for Marianne Williamson when she was running for Congress. I had volunteered to be the campaign’s photographer.
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Interrupting me from my morning meditation… an urgent call from her car across the street… “I’ve got this great dress. Can you shoot it!?”
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shot this in a very dark room, very under exposed, hardly anything there…. in photo-shop cranking up the exposure all the way, several times…this is what emerged
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Boyle Heights, LA
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with star model patti hansen, the future mrs. keith richards and sandy linter, make-up artist and gia’s girlfriend at the time
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Creator of the Addams Family, long before the movie or television series.
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The last portrait shot of “The Great One”.
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set shot . . . Cambridge, England
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Two blocks from where I grew up, 85th & Columbus Ave.
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Shot during production of “The Burning Bed”, Edmonton, Canada.
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us reading the play “Blackbird”
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. . . at my mom’s place, guest bedroom, Arlington, Virginia.
my loft, MacArthur Park, LA
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My longest surviving friendship. April and I go back to the mid 70s in NYC.
As far as I know, his last formal portrait shoot, about a month before he passed.
mixed media
sixteen years old . . . hotel room, NYC
At the time I thought she was one of the most beautiful women in the world, truly. A mutual friend asked if I’d like to shoot her. YES! How it happened that her clothes came off, I don’t remember. I know I didn’t ask. I’d never asked anyone to pose nude. Too shy about something like that to do so.
dressing room, backstage Broadway… I think it was “Long Day’s Journey into Night”
rehearsals for stage production of “Hurly Burly”, LA
Getting ready for a formal evening event . . . the team assembled to make her beauty more beautified.
Off to the Emmy Awards . . .