It's about the community

Dustin Pittman with Anne-Katrin Titze and Ed Bahlman holding up New York After Dark (by Roger Padilha and Mauricio Padilha with a foreword by New York Dolls David Johansen, aka Buster Poindexter, Rizzoli, 2024)

In the first instalment of our conversation with photographer extraordinaire, Dustin Pittman, and music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman, we start out with Gloria Swanson at her apartment (star of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard opposite William Holden), the early days with Danny Fields, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Mick Jagger (at Madison Square Garden), Patricia Field, Sex And The City, Susan Seidelman, Halston and the Halstonettes, Diana Vreeland, Liza Minnelli and US First Lady Betty Ford at Studio 54, the Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren connection to Mariann Marlowe and Frankie Savage’s Ian’s, staying with The Pretenders in London, Lucy Sante and her books, the shop 99, Max’s Kansas City, Ungaro’s, Régine’s, The Odeon, Lutèce or La Grenouille, and Dustin Pittman: New York After Dark, by Roger Padilha and Mauricio Padilha with a foreword by David Johansen (Rizzoli, 2024).

Dustin Pittman inscribing New York After Dark to Ed Bahlman

The Dustin Pittman

New York After Dark exhibition at Eerdmans at 14 East 10th Street in New York City runs through Wednesday, November 13.

From New York City, Dustin Pittman joined us on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on the personal backstory for some of the photographs in New York After Dark and his life in the fast lane.

Dustin Pittman: Hi everyone!

Ed Bahlman: Hey! There you are again!

DP: Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Anne-Katrin Titze: Lovely to see you. What a great opening you had! It felt very Rear Window, very Hitchcock, with the courtyard garden.

DP: Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, that opening? I love that townhouse, because when I first visited the townhouse for an opening event, I felt the vibe of the Parisian salon, like Alice B Toklas, and that I wanted that kind of intimate setting with my community of friends. Because that's what really the book is about, you know? Instead of - nothing wrong with Chelsea, four white walls gallery in Chelsea. But it was a little bit more intimate with the outdoor garden, and the way it was set up. I really like the way it was set up, and the way it was designed.

Dustin Pittman New York After Dark inscribed to Ed Bahlman

AKT: Yes, very Alice B. Toklas and instead of the portrait of Gertrude Stein by Picasso, you had Gloria Swanson over the sofa!

DP: I love that!

AKT: I love the Gloria Swanson picture! Are these her hands on top of a sculpture of hands?

DP: Those are her hands on top of a brass sculpture. I forget who did it. Some famous sculptor, but she was very proud of it. Boy, she'll tell you she was. She's part of everything in her apartment. I was in her apartment in New York, and we spent the whole day together. That picture is great, but it's not the best of the pictures of that day, because while we're having lunch - she made me lunch - and while we're having lunch, she asked me if I wanted to see a trick. And I said, sure, Gloria!

I mean, we were together for so long. And she's telling me about all her loves in Hollywood, and Sunset Boulevard, everything, you know. And I was absolutely thrilled. But she said, do you want to see a trick? I said, sure. She got up from the table and she went to this huge vase, and she pulled out this very, very long-stem black carnation and she balanced it on her false eyelashes and I'm snapping away with my camera, and I said, oh, that's really great, Gloria! But what a trick! She really had a sense of humour. She really didn't want me to leave. We spent about nine hours together, and we had a really great time.

Dustin Pittman photo of Gloria Swanson in her apartment, 1980 at Eerdmans Photo: Dustin Pittman, Anne-Katrin Titze

AKT: Sunset Boulevard was in 1950 and she was only 50 then. That’s why I know she was born in 1899. So when you visited her in 1980, she was 80 years old!

DP: Yeah, she was. She was in good shape. What kind of surprised me is how short she was, how she's only like 4 foot 5 or something.

AKT: Oh really?

DP: And then to see this woman on the silver screen, she's larger than life. Most of the early movie stars were very short. They weren't really tall. It was amazing, a really great opportunity, a privilege to be able to be with her, and I wrote a story about it later, a backstory, and I compared myself to Joe Gillis, you know, the journalist who stayed with Gloria, who wound up in a swimming pool.

AKT: William Holden!

DP: Yeah. I really didn't want to leave that wonderland of Sunset Boulevard, the big screen, and when I opened the door it was 5th Avenue, outside of The Plaza, you know. It was crazy.

EB: Kudos to your DJ that night.

DP: Yeah, Julio. I just saw him yesterday. He was incredible, the DJ, just incredible. Everyone great. A lot of people asked me about the opening, but the book is about you. It's about the community, it's not about me. It's about the community. So my gatherings, or my kind of community that I like to bring together, is an eclectic crowd of everybody. It's people that are known, people that are unknown. And that's exactly what I photographed, you know, unknowns and knowns. Whether it was Studio 54, or whether it was whatever it was, wherever I was at The Met, or Régine’s or downtown at the Mudd Club, or the social ladies wherever it was. Whoever was really important for me to be passionate about, to be in relationships with people. And to photograph the people that I really felt were exciting, were electric.

Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond with Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard

EB: It's beautiful that Iggy is on the cover.

DP: Yeah, thank you. That was taken in 1970. And that was a really memorable moment. Because it's so funny. Danny Fields is a road manager of Iggy and the Stooges, and also he was a road manager of The Ramones and the MC5, and a lot of other people. I was very good friends with Danny in the late Sixties, and I used to go over to his house on 21st Street here in Chelsea, and Iggy would come from Detroit. This is the beginning of Iggy and the Stooges. It was Funhouse and Iggy and the Stooges. He would come from Detroit with Ron and Scott Asheton, the musicians, and just a couple amplifiers, and James Williamson. They would all get into their van, drive from Detroit, you know it's 18 hours, and Iggy would crash on Danny Fields’ couch.

We would go over, and Iggy would start playing concerts at Max’s Kansas City upstairs and at Ungaro's. So I befriended Iggy and we would sit there and drink and smoke with Danny, and then we'd walk over to Max’s or we would take a cab to Ungaro’s. But Iggy had one rule. He kind of established with photographers that if a photographer got too close to Iggy, Iggy would smash their cameras. So Iggy told me, he said, Dustin, you can get as close as you want, and I won't break your camera.

Dustin Pittman in the middle of the action at the lively opening reception at Eerdmans Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

So I got pictures so intimate. I called it unguarded moments, because those are the days that you didn't have PR. You didn't have bouncers. The boundaries down the stages, weren't 80 feet high. There wasn't 15 stages like at Burning Man or Lollapalooza and it was a more intimate setting. I remember when Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground played their last concert in 1970. I saw them before, but they played a residency upstairs at Max's in 1970 in August, and they played two shows a night. There was not more than like 20, maybe 25 people at best in the crowd, and the stage was less than half a foot off the floor. It was a concert that was very improv.

Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground would play Heroin and Sweet Jane, and Perfect Day, all these songs, but they would change it up every set and they played two sets a night for about three weeks, the month of August of 1970. And what was wonderful about it is that people didn't sit in the seat, but they got up and danced in front of Lou Reed, feeling that music. I mean feeling that music of Sweet Jane, going on and on that droning music from John Cale, and dancing to that music, it just went right through you. It was a really spectacular music moment, you know. I mean, I have many of those.

EB: They had the best hooks. They were underestimated for the hooks in their songs.

DP: Incredible, just incredible. Most of those lyrics, I heard that with Lou he wrote that stuff. When he was 17 years old. But I mean they were so far ahead of time, like Iggy and the Stooges, at that time 1969, and ’70. We were at the stage musically, of Arena Rock, groups like Jethro Tull and there was these big extravaganzas on the stage. And then all of a sudden, Iggy comes in his van with two amplifiers, and two, three musicians, and they set up. And it's raw. It's very raw, and the music critics in the beginning they didn't really like Iggy and the Stooges. They didn't like that kind of music. It was very hard to change the mentality of the music business. It's really tough. And it was before social media, it's very hard to get your 45 or whatever to play on the radio stations.

Dustin Pittman photo David Bowie has risen, Diamond Dogs, 1974 at Eerdmans Photo: Dustin Pittman, Anne Katrin Titze

EB: Also, Iggy liked to be in touch with what was going on. He would come in 99 and want to hear the new British music. What was ahead from Europe? He really wanted to know what other people were doing. He wasn't like, oh, it's all about me.

DP: Yeah, that's true. I mean, Iggy was a musician that worked with other people. He befriended other people in the New York area. He had a lot of friends, I mean, David Bowie, Lou Reed. The thing is, you touched on a really important point there. It's incredible. And that is what the book is about. It's about the ability in the timeline of 1967 to unfortunately the AIDS crisis, where it's a summer of love where you were able to get together, be in relationships and have one on one conversations with people, and just let things roll and boundaries were down, and people weren't as competitive. People would change and exchange and toss ideas back and forth. And that's where a lot of creative art came from, from building, from the community. I really believe that.

AKT: There's a photograph from Studio 54, with Liza Minnelli and Diana Vreeland. The gestures with their hands almost look like a Pietà that you captured. They're holding each other with one hand. Vreeland’s other hand is on Liza Minnelli's back. The expressions on their faces are so warm. It's a marvelous picture.

DP: It's great that you noticed it, because the book is about the dance of life. If you look at the book and the pages in the book, everybody is dancing. They're not necessarily dancing in the Studio, but I'm talking about body language, dancing, you know the movement of the arms, the nape of the neck, the way their backs are, the way they're stretched out. All that kind of movement, that juxtaposition is a dance of life. And so that's what I tried to capture in my photographs. You know, those unguarded moments where people are off guard and their body language is telling things about their personalities. And in a sense, I don't want to say soul, but their sense of spirituality.

Ed Bahlman in front of Dustin Pittman’s CBGB photo, 1978, downstairs at Eerdmans Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

AKT: Sophia Loren holding the necklace.This mysterious gesture when she's touching the necklace and her head is back, that's incredible. That is, as you say, somehow she's revealing some of her soul in this very gesture.

DP: Yeah, most of the pictures in the book, I mean, that's my style of photography. I'm not a paparazzi. I'm not an in-your-face photographer. I don't go up to you and say, oh, let me take your picture pose. I'm not saying other photographers are like that, but I look and I'm in the zone, and I just kind of wait and wait for a moment, and it's like the picture of Liza Minnelli sitting and the First Lady sitting on Liza Minnelli's lap at Studio. I mean, that's before the Betty Ford Center, you know, and there's no bodyguards around.

She's the First Lady, Gerald Ford's president, and she's sitting on the lap of Liza Minnelli, unbeknownst, just enjoying herself. Those kind of freedom moments, it's very hard to find today, because people are aware of iPhones. They're aware of technology. They've posed for their cameras a million times already. So they know exactly what they want to look like, based on a picture that someone took of them somewhere, some date or whatever. There's a picture of Halston and the Halstonettes coming in. And if you look at that picture, no one is looking at that camera, and everybody is in their individual, deep thought. That's a hard picture to get. They don't know I'm there. It's like I'm not there.

AKT: It's as if before iPhones, before everybody constantly has their face visible to themselves, the faces were different, the faces looked more individualistic.

DP: Yeah, I agree with you. I agree. I think it's even though we went through a lot of stuff, of course, in the Sixties and Seventies. Of course we did, but I think there was less of a sense of uncertainty. There was less of a sense of frenetic pent up energy that is hard to release today, because it's very hard to get people on the dance floor and dance. It's very hard to get people moving. And then when the people are moving, they're looking down on their phones. So they're not really escaping into some kind of meditative spiritual realm. And I think a lot of those times in places, whether it's Studio or clubs, or whether it's in restaurants, where you could have a relaxing time, three hour lunches, you know at Lutèce or La Grenouille …

Dustin Pittman filming Lucy Sante with Griffin Hansbury for her I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir Of Transition event at Rizzoli Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

EB: Or Odeon.

DP: Odeon, or any of those places, you know. It was a special moment that is very hard to find today. I was at the Odeon last week. I think it opened in ’82, I used to take polaroids. I used to take a lot of pictures in the men's room and ladies room at the Odeon.

EB: A riddle was solved with your book - the two photographs of Jagger. I was at the concert. I was on the ground level.

DP: Oh really? You were there?

EB: I saw the action. I didn't know what had happened. It's 1974, right? 50 years ago.

DP: Why, yes, you know, time flies. Jagger still doing his thing. He's still doing it. I saw him last year, he’s just incredible. I mean, once in a while, just like Iggy. Once in a while he'll give you those Jagger moves from before. Not all the time, you know, but once in a while you can see he just slips into that Jagger move just like Iggy will slip into that Iggy body language move, and that's the one you want to catch.

EB: We love New York After Dark! Fantastic! It was worth all your effort all these years.

DP: Thank you.

EB: To get that snapshot in time, tremendous.

Ian's co-founder Mariann Marlowe in her shop at 49 Grove Street, 1976 Photo: Ed Bahlman

AKT: And so beautifully put together …

EB: That the photos go right to the edge of the paper. That’s great!

DP: Thank you. I wanted the book the way I wanted. It is all black and white, and I wanted downtown elegant gritty, and uptown elegant gritty. And then the train meets. The train meets uptown and downtown, just like the subways. That colour yellow - in the Seventies there wasn't much colour around. So the colour yellow, that yellow is checker taxicab yellow.

EB: Oh great.

DP: You know, Seventies, Gerald Ford: “Drop Dead New York”. That kind of thing. No colour, you know. We had to invent. We had to create our own colour, our own colourful lives, our own colourful experiences, our own colourful vibes, our own colourful relationships.

EB: We have to stay in touch, Dustin!

DP: Yeah, definitely, I can't believe you talk about 99. I remember. 99. Wow! I can't believe it. Wow, boy, I tell you, I go back, way back in music. I love the music.

EB: Did you go to London in the mid-Seventies at all?

Mick Jagger at Madison Square Garden, 1974 from Dustin Pittman: New York After Dark Photo: Ed Bahlman

DP: I went to London in the Seventies. I used to photograph Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren clothes. You know, Let It Rock and Sex. But also I went to London a lot in the Eighties, and I stayed almost a whole summer with The Pretenders in Kensington, and I can't even remember an hour.

EB: That was a wild crew.

DP: A wild crew. You know staying with The Pretenders in their house. They had a big house.

EB: Also in the Seventies. Did you hang out at Ian's on Grove Street?

DP: Are you kidding me? Frankie! Yes, Frankie and Mariann, they were very good friends of mine. Ian's. In fact, Ian's was famous in the early Seventies for going to London and picking up Vivienne Westwood, I shot a lot of their stuff. They would pick up Vivienne Westwood stuff, they would bring them over. We shot all the stuff, the two guys in the bones, and the whole anarchy pants and all that stuff. The plaid. You name it, all that we shot, the mohair sweaters. I got all that stuff on film.

EB: That's fantastic, because I have some photographs of that time. Before 99.

DP: Wow, yeah! They were on Grove Street for a long time, and then they opened up a store up near the bridge. I know Marianne really well, now she does rockabilly stuff [at Enz’s on East Seventh Street], but I know Marianne and Frankie for years. I mean, we go back to ’71 from the beginning, just like Pat Field’s store. I knew Pat from the beginning. Pat used to be my stylist. I used to go to Pat and say, Pat, can you pull something together? And she would pull stuff together. It was totally unique, totally the future.

Garden at Eerdmans during the Dustin Pittman: New York After Dark opening Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

EB: Well, that's a connection to Susan Seidelman, who directed the pilot of Sex and the City.

DP: I saw that episode. But yeah, I know, Susan is amazing. There's just so many great woman filmmakers and I honour them all. It's a wide, open field. I really hope that the younger generation will really respect what is remembered lives, respect the past because the past is very important. I know my kids they know the history of cinema, the history of film, the history of literature, of art. Because knowing that history, as you know, you can pull from that, you can draw from that. You can be inspired from that. There's somewhere to go from there. You have your own vision. But there's something spiritual about the past, like it's almost like our ancestors from 3,000 years ago taught, sitting around a fire telling stories, tribal stories. You can't let go of that, because that moves the wheel forward.

EB: Beautiful. That's a great ending. You do know Lucy Sante?

DP: Lucy lives up near my house in the Hudson Valley.

EB: By Kingston?

DP: Yeah, she's up there, and I got her book, I got all her books. I love all Lucy's books, you know. I love her writing, her sensibility. I love the way she collects old postcards, and like little things, you know. I love that whole Ashokan reservoir book, it’s incredible. I go there all the time.

EB: Nineteen Reservoirs [On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City, published by Experiment in 2022].

DP: Yeah, you're right!

Dustin Pittman giving a hug at the opening reception for New York After Dark Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

EB: When we walked into your exhibition, the DJ was playing Flying Lizards, Money.

DP: Oh, wow!

EB: We just got a book in German called Punk.

AKT: By the author Eckhart Nickel. The chapter headings are titles of songs.

EB: And one of the songs is Money by Flying Lizards, and she had just gotten the book delivered that day, and we walk in, and there it is!

DP: Crazy, wow! Julio knows his music, that's for sure. He knows all eras, all genres of music, and he's amazing. I wanted a DJ, I wanted a person that I was in a relationship, and I knew. And what a lot of people say to me about the opening was the fact that it was a unique opening. When you went to a lot of these art openings, people don't dance and here people were dancing and having a good time. And that's exactly what the book's about. It's about a community of love. It's about the people, and like that's what I wanted to resonate to that whole townhouse.

Pat Cleveland at Regine’s, circa 1980 on the announcement for Dustin Pittman: New York After Dark at Eerdmans Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

EB: Dustin, we love you.

DP: Thank you so much. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it, I'm so grateful.

AKT: It was great talking to you.

DP: Thank you. Have a great weekend!

Coming up - Dustin Pittman on Liza Minnelli in Alan J Paula’s first film The Sterile Cuckoo, Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, being in James Ivory’s Slaves Of New York, Merchant Ivory Productions, Martin Scorsese and a Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute exhibition, designers Charles James, Azzedine Alaïa, Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler, and Jean Paul Gaultier, Jerry Schatzberg and Faye Dunaway, plus nature in the Adirondacks of New York State and more.