During yet another pilgrimage to Manhattan from New Haven, I had a surreal extended tea time with the famous Vogue and Vanity Fair photographer, Jonathan Becker. His two-storey Sutton Place studio is a converted doctor’s office with exquisite wood paneling, linen screens, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and shell-shaped folding doors reminiscent of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre in Paris. Becker’s world is of a day and age “When people wanted to work at magazines,” when Town & Country spreads possessed an understated elegance that had little to do with the demands of advertisers and more to do with visual quality and articles for the readers.

Dressed like a European gentleman and smoking a cigar, he chatted with me in the most leisurely and refreshing manner. With the idea in mind of researching for my senior essay on the society photographer, Slim Aarons, one of Becker’s mentors, we ended up talking for three hours about everything from his year in Francois Truffaut’s Parisian maid’s quarters, to good old boarding school kung foolery. Being in his studio was like being transported to another time when people could sustain a conversation without flinching at the buzz of their Blackberries.

The search for the secrets to Slim Aarons’ intriguing/garish/mesmerizing/glossy/documentary pictures continues, and I still miss old Manhattan—the one I never ever knew.

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