In early Summer of 1988 I was working in what would be my last restaurant job, at An American Place with James Beard award winner and pioneer of the new American cuisine Larry Forgione. I was extremely lucky to have worked at 2, 3, and 4 star restaurants in NYC during my 80’s waitstaff reign of terror. But I was done. Conde Nast’s Traveler Magazine was putting together photographers for a special London issue and I was in consideration thanks to friend and photo editor Kathleen Klech, who thought, though untested, I could be an interesting part of the mix, which was a group of considerably more experienced and seasoned travel photographers. After all, I was doing these interesting photo collage thingies. I had firmly decided that if I get this job, I’d go full-time freelance and never look back. I can vividly remember calling her from the payphone in the coat room every two hours for what must have been a pretty annoying stretch. When maybe turned yes, I gave notice, and off to London we went. We spent approximately a week there, me wandering about making photo collages during the day, then meeting up with the gang at night at restaurants and bars of London, all in all having a fabulous time. It became abundantly clear this was the more desirable employment scenario. While there I made over a dozen different collages, a handful of 3×3’s, some diptychs, some panoramic strips, etc. Back in NYC, I put together the various projects, and excitedly submitted them, and impatiently waited….. for the issue to come out…. to find that they only used a few frames extracted from one of the collages.
Crestfallen, all I could think of was the Star-Kist tuna commercials of the 70’s – ’Sorry Charlie, Star-Kist don’t want tunas with good taste, Star-Kist wants tunas that taste good’. What was I thinking? What were they thinking?? I really loved some of the images I made while there (some are attached here), alas, travel photography they are not. Having had plenty of photo jobs under my belt by this time, I was already reasonably jaded, so I took it all on the chin. No matter, I was launched. And I never looked back!
David McGlynn 