In 1980 I was asked to photograph and interview the world-famous photographer Art Kane. It was one of my first serious assignments, and the experience left me with exactly one usable photograph and a story I have never forgotten.
One of my first important assignments as a young photographer for Zero Magazine was to photograph and interview the world-famous photographer Art Kane. For the editorial team of the magazine Zero, this was no small financial investment. Flying was expensive in those days. A dollar was worth four Dutch guilders. It was 1980.
I was very insecure about the assignment, because I owned nothing more than a worn Minolta with a single lens that frequently suffered from technical problems. I felt it would be difficult to photograph a photographer of that stature with such a camera. So I went to the bank, took out a small personal loan, and bought a Leica R3 Mot with two lenses. If that did not make a serious impression, I did not know what would.
Art Kane had very clear ideas about how he wanted to be photographed. Following his directions, I ended up standing on a small mezzanine so that I could photograph him from above. On the second exposure the shutter jammed, and for at least fifteen minutes I performed like a mime artist, pretending to take photographs. I had no desire to fail in front of my hero.
Fortunately the interview itself went well, and the next day I boarded a plane back to Amsterdam. I had celebrated a little too enthusiastically the night before, and sleeping on the plane was impossible. In the end I had exactly one photograph to deliver to the art director, and he was satisfied with it. I might not even have been able to deliver that single image if I had not put the roll of film in the pocket of my jacket. In my exhaustion I had left the bag containing the Leica and the lenses on the back seat of a taxi.
Not long afterwards Zero ceased publication, and with it that single photograph of Art Kane disappeared from view. Of course I still had the portrait as it appeared in the magazine, but scanning the printed image never produced a satisfying result. Recently I decided to run that scan through AI restoration tools, and to my surprise it feels as if I have recovered my old photograph again after forty-six years.