Walking with Peter
I've been walking around with Peter Cunningham for thirty-five years. I got his name out of a book when I was looking for work as a photo assistant after I returned to New York from South Africa in 1989. It was raining like hell when I arrived, drenched, at his studio in the Meat Packing District (which really WAS the meat packing district back then). He came down in the rickety cage-elevator to pick me up; he had a towel in hand, anticipating my bedraggled state. We quickly connected, and here, more than half my life later, I owe an enormous swath of my social life to him (he introduced me to some of my dearest friends). He also taught me a bunch about photography. More than anything, though, he taught me about being open to possibility and connection and being embracing of pretty much, well, everything. For better, most of the time...
So it was a pleasure bordering on the sublime to take one of our classic walks downtown a couple of days ago. Peter's life is replete with incredibly larger-than-life characters. We met one of them, our mutual friend Danny Goldberg, for lunch at a redoubtable Soho standard, Bar Pitti. And then Peter and I meandered off, as we will, and kept meandering for a few hours, through Soho and down to Foley Square, Chinatown, a flirtation with the East Village and then to our respective home bases, his on Bleecker Street, mine up in the frozen north.
To walk with Peter is to engage the street. It was slightly disconcerting that he wasn't carrying a "real" camera (he was just shooting with his phone), but if anything this allowed him to do what he does best, if possible even better than he's always done it, which is to talk to people. Anyone, everyone. Like, for example, the simultaneously brash and furtive west-African guys who approach you on Canal Street because you need, just NEED, to buy their (guaranteed genuine) Chanel perfumes and Gucci bags and Nike sneakers and oh, did I forget to mention Rolex watches? Hustlers, to the core, the kind of people one shies away from, clawing at ones wallet all the while. Not Peter. The shiftiest member of this gang, reeking slightly of some intoxicant, decided to become our best friend, and Peter agreed that this was an excellent idea. "Hey, you guys need shoes!" "We've GOT shoes!" we both pointed out in unison. "You call those shoes?")So we spent some engrossing minutes with this charming, raffish and undoubtedly roguish fellow who professed to being the ringleader of the seven or eight guys working that part of Canal Street. They're all from Burkina Fasso; they treated him with the kind of deference that suggested he wasn't blowing smoke.
The point here being that it is extremely unlikely that I would have engaged this guy—or the haircut guys in the photo below—had Peter not initiated the conversation. We all walked away from it with backslaps and high fives, friends for life (well, the lifespan of a fruit fly at least).
For the two of us, this walk in this neighborhood is freighted with significance at every step. We've done it dozens of times, most wrenchingly and heartbreakingly on September 11, 2001. We had taken taken to the streets—our streets—where we walked down to Spectra, the photo lab on La Guardia; every other photographer in New York was running film, making deals on the phone, frantic, in shock, down Broadway, the towers burning ferociously, then to try and give blood (we couldn't) and up to the emergency room at St Vincents, where dozens of hospital workers in scrubs stood in the vehicle bay with gurneys, awaiting the wounded. No ambulances showed up. We got back to his loft on Sullivan and stood on the roof watching both towers plunge into oblivion and history, aware that thousands of lives were being extinguished as we watched.
It's been many years. We're much older, possibly a little wiser. How many more times do we get to do this walk? Who knows? There are other walks, though, and I hope that Peter and I make many of them together.
For me, and I suspect many who know both you and Peter, this blog entry is exqusite, funny, and moving. A moving history, one foot after the other, one image and new friend after the other and old friends, always. Ara