Linda Yablonsky prowls New York looking for warmth and finding reminiscences for Scene & Herd:
Credit: Linda Yablonsky
“We actually sold eight pictures tonight,” dealer Howard Read told William Eggleston at the dinner following his opening at Cheim & Read, where the deadpan photographer, three sheets to the wind, literally held court in a back room, signing autographs between pulls on the ever-present cigarette in one leather-gloved hand. Film producer and Eggleston Trust executive director Cotty Chubb stood over his charge, directing traffic, while photographer Terry Richardson, camera in hand, seemed fixed to the spot. “I can’t take my eyes off him,” Richardson said. “That is the most elegant man I’ve ever seen.”
At the dinner, Eggleston was seated between collector Sondra Gilman and Elisabeth Sussman, curator of the recent Eggleston retrospective at the Whitney Museum (opening at the Art Institute of Chicago next month). Near midnight, when Gilman went home, Juergen Teller leaped to her place, reminiscing about the time he buddied up with Eggleston for a picture-taking tour of Teller’s native Bavaria. “We never even took out our cameras,” Eggleston said. “We had a beautiful time.”
