The Nonfiction Artist: A Photo Essay by Max Vadukul

Never-Before-Seen Portraits of Gay Talese

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MAX VADUKUL

I shot these portraits of Gay Talese in the spring of 2015 and they’ve been unjustly sitting in my archives ever since. I shot them for a small men’s magazine, but for some reason they only ended up using two pictures, and I’ve always felt it was criminal these portraits never saw the light of day.

I still remember the afternoon that I visited Gay at his Upper East Side townhouse. He was wearing his signature fedora, bespoke Oxford shoes, and a Brioni suit. He’s someone who dresses for his role in the world, like a policeman, a monk, or a judge. And he was an agreeable subject, which can be rare with writers, as they can be surprisingly image conscious and difficult to work with. Gay wasn’t.

I descended the townhouse’s street-level steps to meet him in his famed bunker, his subterranean office lair. It was filled with boxes of his reporting notes, filing cabinets containing his magazine pieces, and collages of publicity clippings chronicling his fabled career. I was shocked by all the writerly clutter at first, but then I realized that I was standing in the map of his mind, that I was inside his private world. I started working portraits of Gay by his writer’s desk. Then we headed upstairs, where I photographed him everywhere: sitting regally on his couch, standing majestically in his shawl on the stairs, playing with his two Australian terriers.

Finally, he took me to his hat room, a walk-in closet filled with nothing but hats: Panama hats, homburgs, trilbies, Stetsons. It’s unusual to meet any man in modern New York who still wears a hat, but Gay just decided to never move on from this period in the 1950s when all men, practically without exception, wore hats. Maybe they moved on, but he didn’t. Gay didn’t even have a cell phone back when I met him and I’ve heard that he still doesn’t.

What I remember most about that day was Gay’s face. I found it striking. It was filled with the lines of his life. He’s one of those people who carries their entire life on their face, and it was clear to me he’d led an intense one. He also had these long, wise earlobes. When Gay took off his hat, his age revealed itself, and the portraits turned really intense. I just started shooting him straight on, to capture the life story on his face.

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Max Vadukul is one of photography’s signature image makers. He is a former staff photographer for the New Yorker and he has long standing relationships with Italian Vogue, Egoïste, Rolling Stone, and W Magazine. He is also a longtime collaborator to Yohji Yamamoto.