For a photographer whose camera has been mostly focused on capturing a glamorous world, Jonathan Becker’s concern has simultaneously wrestled with the stark realities of his subjects for 50 years. It’s evident when you flick through a copy of his new (and first) monograph, Lost Time, published by Phaidon, which features intimate glimpses of the most illustrious people and parties of the past half-century. His subjects are captured as they are, not as we think they are. “I always wanted to extract a form of truthful emotion,” Becker tells me as we settle in for a conversation. “When you look at the book, it reveals my sensibility. It seems like one piece. It shows who I am and that I always did exactly what I wanted.”
Fran Lebowitz sits it out, Vanity Fair Oscar Party, West Hollywood, 2000
The book, 15 years in the making, was curated with British editor Mark Holborn, who sifted through Becker’s archive in the US. The result was a “projection of a life” as Becker calls it. “There was a real visual narrative, and we would keep updating it across the years.” The front cover sets a pensive tone, showing an empty diving board at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Before we even get into the portraits, we’re met with a series of images from his travels around the world. From start to finish, Lost Time tells a story. We follow a young Becker experimenting with a Rolleiflex camera, to his experiences in Paris as protégé to the Hungarian-born French master Brassaï, and his photographs of 20th century icons for Vanity Fair, Vogue, Town & Country, and The New Yorker. As a magazine writer, and especially for a photographer, you can’t help but feel slightly jealous; Becker’s life is one that was most magnificently lived, but it is one that no longer exists. “When I revisit this book, I have a sense of ‘another time’ and life,” he admits. Photographs of Diane von Furstenberg or Gina Lollobrigida at home sit alongside shots of Frank Sinatra and Jean-Michel Basquiat partying. We see emerging playwrights and authors – now titans of literature – relaxed in Manhattan apartments. Members of the Getty family are shot so candidly that they almost look like regular people. Becker is able to portray a level of intimacy that makes each picture startling. He puts it down to his curiosity, but the author Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, who worked with Becker on a 2013 Vanity Fair profile of fashion designer Claude Montana, explained to me that on set he is “very kind and funny”. She remembers how he made the deeply troubled Montana, who was suffering with substance abuse, feel comfortable during their shoot.
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