Jonathan Becker (New York, 1954) has been photographing the richest, most famous and powerful people in the world for more than 50 years in the privacy of their homes and parties. King Charles of England in his Highgrove House retreat; Donald Trump in his three-story Manhattan penthouse; Argentine President Carlos Menem at the Quinta de Olivos in Buenos Aires; King Juan Carlos I at the Fanjul family mansion in the Dominican Republic; Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise and Gwyneth Paltrow at the magazine’s party Vanity Fair in Hollywood; or Madonna, Martha Graham and Clavin Klein at the City Center theater are some of the names that appear in the almost endless list of characters immortalized by Becker. “I grew up surrounded by privileged people. I guess all those people let me in because they know I’m not going to betray them. They know me and they know that I will never harm them,” explains the photographer on the other end of the phone from his home in Bedford, a town of colonial-style mansions on the outskirts of New York.
The night before the interview with EL PAÍS, Becker presented his new book, Lost Time (Phaidon), at the Katonah Museum of Art, a visual arts museum a few kilometers from his home. “Most people look in from the outside, but Jonathan is always on the inside looking at what’s going on around him,” Robert Storr said during the presentation. Storr, famed art critic and historian and former curator of MoMA, spoke with Becker about this work that compiles more than 200 portraits of sacred monsters from culture, high society, royalty and the upper echelons of international politics. “This book is a visual narrative, it tells a story, the story of my life,” says the photographer. “The title, Lost Time [Tiempo perdido, en español] is a nod to In search of lost time by Proust. It is a very appropriate and poetic title, because this is the document of a time that has disappeared,” he says. Indeed, many of those portrayed have died – Jackie Kennedy, Gorbachev, Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Sinatra, Truffaut – and others have not been seen for years.
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Lost Time It begins at the beginning, with the black and white photos that Becker began taking at the age of 19 in the kitchen of Elaine’s restaurant in New York of celebrities such as Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Paul Simon and Ultra Violet. “I was determined not to go to university, so I started being on the streets very early,” he remembers. “My father was an academic who studied at Harvard, a doctor at Oxford, a theater critic and distributor of classic films… He was competitive and critical, so I decided not to study. He felt like he couldn’t enter his territory. What options did I have? I could play backgammon, which I was very good at, but I couldn’t make a living from it. I always knew I could make a living from photography. More than a choice, it was an instinct and I followed it.”
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman at the ‘Vanity Fair’ Oscar party held in West Hollywood in 2000. A year earlier they had starred together in the film ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, by Stanley Kubrick.
Jonathan BeckerMartha Graham with Madonna and Calvin Klein at the New York City Center in 1990.
Jonathan BeckerGwyneth Paltrow at the ‘Vanity Fair’ Oscar party in West Hollywood in 1999. That year she won the best actress statuette, which she is holding in the photo, for her role in the film ‘Shakespeare in Love’.
© 2024 Jonathan BeckerThe writer Mario Vargas Llosa at his home in Lima, Peru, in 1989.© 2024 Jonathan BeckerThe Duchess of Alba at her home in Seville in March 2010, portrayed by Jonathan Becker.JONATHAN BECKERBaron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza photographed in Madrid in 1989.
Andy Warhol poses with his corsets in his art studio The Factory, in New York, in 1986. © 2024 Jonathan BeckerJonathan Baker in a 1986 photo taken at the Lancaster Hotel.Jonathan Becker
Becker studied printing with photographer George Tice at Parsons and in the summer of 1973 took a course on Surrealism and Dadaism at Harvard. There he wrote an essay on Brassaï’s surrealist influences that found its way into the hands of the legendary Hungarian photographer. The almost octogenarian Brassaï was so impressed with the work of that twenty-something American that he sent him a letter congratulating him. This is how their epistolary friendship began. A year later, Becker was in Paris learning photography with his idol. “My friends have always been older than me. Older people are more interesting, more complex and more generous,” he reflects.
After a season in Paris as a photographic correspondent for the fashion magazine Wreturned to the United States. He worked for a few years in California and then returned to New York, where he combined his work as a party portraitist for W with that of a taxi driver. “Then the city was already expensive and I had to make money.” He also collaborated with InterviewAndy Warhol’s magazine. “Andy was the center of society, he mixed the upper class with the lower class, transvestites with socialities. He let us do our work. For him everything was great. Actually, Bob Colacello was the editor and did everything. Interview It was a great magazine, I miss it,” he admits.
Bea Feitler, legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar y Rolling Stonenoticed his work and signed him for the relaunch of Vanity Faira society magazine that had ceased publication in 1936. In the new first prototype issue, in 1983, his photographs shared pages with those of Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newtown, Bill King, Annie Leibovitz and Dominique Nabokov. Forty years later, Jonathan Becker’s name is still on the list of Vanity Fair. “I have worked with five directors of the magazine and my name is still there. Last week I received the October issue, where they dedicated a page to me for my book. “I got excited.”
Jonathan Becker in an image provided by the photographer.JONATHAN BECKER
Becker has been the official photographer of the parties he organizes for decades Vanity Fair at the Oscars. He has also portrayed all the “swans” of high society, aristocracy and royalty – Gloria Vanderbilt, Carolina Herrera, Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, Bianca Jagger – and the “beasts” of the world of business, art and culture – Baron Thyssen, Arthur Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Peter Beard, Ed Ruscha, Basquiat. He seems to have an anecdote about everyone. Donald Trump? “His attic is like the Ukrainian president’s house, all gold and white. This is how a person from Queens would decorate Versailles. Trump does not worry me, I am very American and I have a lot of faith in our Constitution.” The Duchess of Alba? “He had a great sense of humor and a lot of energy. She wasn’t a great beauty, but she liked to flirt. I liked it from the first minute. I told him: ‘Pose like Goya’s maja.’ And she answered me: ‘But I don’t eat her naked.’ “She liked to be photographed.” Isabel Preysler? “An intellectually powerful woman. They sat me next to her and Mario Vargas Llosa at a dinner. I told Mario that I admired his books and she asked me: ‘Yes? Which one is your favourite?’ I didn’t know what to answer. I still feel embarrassed about it. “She is very intelligent, very fast.”
The photographer has included an unpublished portrait of Juan Carlos I in Lost Time. He did it during one of the visits that the emeritus king made to his friend José Pepe Fanjul in the Dominican Republic, in 2017. He looks relaxed and informal just three years after his abdication. “I didn’t photograph him the first time I met him, several years passed,” Becker clarifies. “There is power in his face. When you are in front of him you feel that you are in front of someone who was an absolute monarch, who could do what he wanted and who chose to do good things for Spain. When I finished, he said, ‘Is that all? Are there no more photos?’ I was dedicated and wanted to do well. “I really admire him,” he admits. “King Juan Carlos has made mistakes and gone through difficult times, but he created a modern nation. He was the last absolute monarch on the planet. He inherited an absolute monarchy and turned it into a modern country. People think they can cancelarte because you have made mistakes, but no one should throw stones at their own roof.”
King Juan Carlos I, in a photograph taken in the Dominican Republic in 2017.JONATHAN BECKER
It would seem that there is no person left from the 20th century who has not posed for the American portraitist, but he disagrees. “I always wanted to photograph Fidel Castro. “I was close to doing it several times, but it couldn’t be.” Now he does private commissions for rich people. “Magazines have a new word: budget. They don’t have money to pay me. That’s the mistake of the media: they no longer want to spend money. If they spent, readers would return to the newsstands,” he laments. He is very critical of the current press. “Magazines continue to interest me, although they have made many mistakes. When the internet emerged, they were scared. Instead of using the Internet to attract subscribers, they gave away their content, offering it for free. They decided to pay more attention to advertising than to readers and that was a fatal mistake. Readers ran away because they did not want to pay to read advertising. And then the advertisers ran. So many magazines have been left with nothing.”
He is also lapidary with Instagram. “I don’t make sense of it. Before, in magazines you found well-edited stories and verified, first-hand information about contemporary culture. You don’t find any of that on Instagram. There is no editing or data checking there. It’s all promotional rubbish, a big distraction,” he concludes. However, he has a personal account on that social network. “I don’t publish anything. I’m there like a voyeurobserving.” As Robert Storr said, “Most people look in from the outside, but Jonathan is always on the inside looking at what’s going on around him.”
