Right on the brink of my commitment to working full-time in assignment photography 100%, I contracted this job with Avenue Magazine. I had a few jobs under my belt already where I had applied my fine art photo collage style to commercial ventures. It was not always a comfortable or sensible fit. That is to say, where the solutions would often work, I still felt slightly like a…. sellout? Those feelings would go away upon close inspection whereupon I would discover that absolutely no one cared about this except for myself…. I forget exactly why we chose black and white, but it looks good to me now. Avenue was then still in print, now it is online. It is a very highbrow lifestyle magazine appealing to the happy healthy affluent elite of NYC, who were absolutely brimming with wealth in the Eighties. What better topic for the magazine than an article about wealthy rare tree collectors living in the East Hamptons. I had a particularly fun time photographing the late Mr. Alfonso Ossorio, heir to the Domino sugar fortune, an artist who owned a wee 60 acre estate in the Creeks in the Hamptons with his partner Ted Dragon, at a time when a single acre would fetch around 9 trillion bucks. He couldn’t have been any more cordial and interesting, showing me not only his collection of trees, but his art and sculptures which were all over the grounds.
I was fortunate enough to visit him again along with olde pal Jerald Frampton, at which time I created a handful of collages, including some new 3X3 format collages I’d been experimenting with, some of which can be seen here. As for the tearsheet, I think I only ever received one copy, and cannibalized it for the portfolio, so only half is visible here. Also here is an example of Mr. Ossorio’s assemblage work (or as he preferred to call them: ‘Congregations’)
David McGlynn 