The New York Times International - 29.08.2019

2 | T HURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

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than a year in advance, and by the time it opened, he was already moving up in the photography world. While at Compo, Mr. Suero had received a side assignment to photograph a children’s event sponsored by Hano- ver Bank. Max Lowenherz, who owned the Three Lions Picture Agency, saw Mr. Suero’s photos in the bank window, asked who the photographer was and hired him. It was Mr. Suero’s first professional job as a photographer, his son said, and he was eager to make his mark. So he proposed taking a series of pictures of the young Senator John F. Kennedy and his new wife, Jacqueline. Mr. Lowenherz was not interested because so many others were writing about the couple. But he said that if Mr. Suero could find a pub- lication willing to run his pictures, he would agree. Mr. Suero pitched the idea to McCall’s

He photographed Shirley MacLaine
dancing with Rudolf Nureyev at a party
in Malibu. He shot the actor Dennis Hop-
per and the singer Michelle Phillips dur-
ing their eight-day marriage, including
a joint-smoking moment in the bathtub
(both were fully clothed). And he caught
Princess Margaret all but swooning
over Paul Newman as Alfred Hitchcock
stared straight ahead.
The photographer Orlando Suero
chronicled the lives of stars from 1962 to
the mid-1980s, as the golden age of Hol-
lywood dipped into its twilight. He took
particular delight in capturing celebri-
ties with each other, in their element or
not. But he was perhaps best known for
his portraits.
Among his more stunning photo-
graphs was one of an elegant Jacqueline
Kennedy in a gown lighting candles at a
formal dinner table in Washington in

Mr. Suero called it his Iwo Jima
photo — his career-defining shot.
Mr. Suero died on Aug. 19 at a nursing
home in Los Angeles. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by his son
Jim, who said he had survived a number
of strokes.
Mr. Suero, a native New Yorker,
started taking pictures at 14 with a used
Kodak Jiffy camera given to him by his
father. He was soon working at camera
shops and photo labs, including Compo
Photo Color in Times Square. There he
printed images for “The Family of Man,”
Edward Steichen’s monumental 1955
exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art. He had printed the images more

magazine, which loved it. The young photographer ended up spending five days with the newlywed Kennedys at their modest red-brick home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washing- ton on the carefree cusp of an extraordi- nary period in American history. His photos showed Jackie kneeling in the living room, sorting her record al- bums; Jackie weeding the garden while Jack, in a T-shirt, read the newspaper; and, of course, several images of Jackie lighting the candles at her dinner table, one of them a frame so perfectly com- posed and luminous that it looks more like a painting than a photograph. Mrs. Kennedy herself was impressed and sent Mr. Suero a note. “If I’d realized what a wonderful photographer you were, I never would have been the jit- tery subject I was,” she wrote. “They are the only pictures I’ve ever seen of me where I don’t look like something out of a horror movie.” Mr. Suero later gravitated to Holly- wood, where he went on to make a name for himself photographing the beautiful people. His favorite subjects included Natalie Wood, Michael Caine, Sharon Tate, Claudia Cardinale and Brigitte Bardot, whom he photographed lounging on a bed by the ocean and, later, dressed as Charlie Chaplin. His lens also caught Jack Nicholson, Julie Andrews, Faye Dunaway, Robert Redford and Diana Ross. He served as a still photographer on movie sets, including “Torn Curtain” (1966), “Hell in the Pacific” (1968), “Play It Again, Sam” (1972), “Lady Sings the Blues” (1972), “Chinatown” (1974) and “The Towering Inferno” (1974). In the midst of all the glamour, Mr. Suero, who had served in the Marines

during World War II, suffered from post- traumatic stress disorder. He found comfort and joy in taking pictures, but when he wasn’t working he could sink into depression. “When you come back, the war does- n’t end for you,” he wrote in “Orlando: Photography” (2018), a collection of his photographs. “It stays with you for life for the most part,” he added. “Photography was my solace.” Orlando Vincent Suero was born in New York on May 30, 1925. His father, Vicente Andres Suero y Seoane, originally from Cuba, was a nightclub man- ager in Manhattan and Miami, and his mother, Ofelia (Dominguez Ayala) Suero, originally from Mexico, was a homemaker. Orlando’s first job was as a copy boy at The New York Times, where one day in 1943, at the age of 17, he got a surpris- ing break. He had been despairing at how clue- less the older writers sounded in de- scribing the red-hot trumpeter Harry James and his band, so the editors asked him to write his own story about a James concert at the Paramount. Mr. Suero joined the Marines that year and headed to the South Pacific with the Sixth Marine Division. He was shot in the arm, received a Purple Heart and was discharged in 1945. He returned to New York and attended the New York Institute of Photography, now an online school. He met his future wife, Margaret Ann Greenslade, after the war. They married in 1951. In addition to their son Jim, she survives him, as do their daughter, Wendy Breuklander; another son, Chris; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Jacqueline Kennedy from a series that Orlando Suero shot of her and John F. Kennedy, while he was a senator, at their home in 1954. Below, Mr. Suero in a self-portrait around 1974.

LOWENHERZ COLLECTION OF KENNEDY PHOTOGRAPHS, PEABODY ARCHIVES, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, ORLANDO SUERO, PHOTOGRAPHER

Chronicler of Hollywood stars

ORLANDO SUERO
1925-

BY KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Richard Booth, who collected a million titles to transform a fading 12th-century Welsh market town into a mecca for secondhand-book fanciers, and who cele- brated his improbable success one April Fools’ Day by crowning himself with a title he concocted — “King Richard Coeur de Livre” — died on Aug. 20 in Cu- sop, Wales. He was 80. An obituary placed by his family in The Hereford Times said that Mr. Booth “died peacefully at home” in Cusop, a village that straddles the border between England and Wales and adjoins his so-called kingdom of Hay-on-Wye, where he had made a career of playfully, and often constructively, disturbing the peace. “Booth is, with justification,” Jane Frank of Griffith University in Australia wrote in a 2018 study of regional eco- nomic development, “regarded as the person single-handedly responsible for reviving, with immense charm, this dy- ing Welsh country town and leading the international Book Town Movement with enormous dedication.” His face framed by mussed black hair and black-rimmed glasses, Mr. Booth was what The Guardian described ap- provingly as “a British eccentric of the best kind”: an Oxford-educated Barnum of books who, the newspaper wrote, “never reined in his passion for the eye- catching and entertaining, the wacky and the wonderful.” Tapping inherited wealth and capital- izing on fire-sale bargains offered by cash-hungry colleges, monasteries, bankrupt distributors and crumbling country estates, Mr. Booth in the early 1960s embarked on a quixotic wholesale buying spree. He imported hundreds of thousands of secondhand books to his adopted hometown, filling six of his own stores, spawning nearly 30 others and, in 1988, inspiring Hay’s first annual literary festival, which drew tens of thousands of visitors. Mr. Booth initially scoffed at the festival (“I never met an author who wrote a secondhand book,” he said at the time), but he agreed in 2014 to give his name to an annual award from the Hay Writers’ Circle. The festival elevated a hamlet on the River Wye that for hundreds of years had exported wool, corn and beef rather than books; was never home to more than 2,000 people; and lacked any dis- tinctive literary rationale into an inter- nationally renowned “Book Town.” (In fairness, Hay had been home to the au- thors Penelope Chetwode, Christopher Dawson, Jasper Fforde, Iain Finlayson and Jenny Valentine.) “Hay-on-Wye?” the playwright Ar- thur Miller mused, when asked to appear at one of the first festivals. “Is that some kind of a sandwich?” While establishing Hay worldwide as a used-book capital, Mr. Booth also de- veloped a reputation as a charming ide- alist, an indefatigable self-promoter and — despite being a former accountant — an inattentive businessman who often fell behind in paying his bills. Still, he inspired other small towns around the world to emulate his exam- ple by accumulating mounds of books to attract tourists and encourage eco- nomic revival. In 2004, Mr. Booth was named a mem- ber of the Order of the British Empire for

promoting tourism. Richard Booth Bookseller, with a stock of up to 1.1 million books lining 9.9 miles of shelves, was listed by the Guinness Book of Records in the late 1970s and early ’80s as the world’s largest secondhand book- store. His stores became inviting and quirky places that, as one book blog recalled, were “a reminder that sometimes if you let things be, something amazing that you were never looking for might just find you.” Richard George William Pitt Booth was born on Sept. 12, 1938, in Plymouth, England, to Philip Booth, an Army offi- cer, and Elizabeth (Pitt) Booth, an heir to the Yardley soap fortune. He attended the Rugby School (he said he was dismissed for cheating) and studied history at Oxford, where his passion for books, already cultivated from age 12 by a local bookseller, was rekin- dled at university by another dealer. After graduating and working for three weeks as an accountant, he quit and moved to Hay, where his parents had escaped to rural tranquillity in an estate that once belonged to a rich uncle.

“Buying a small shop in Hay-on-Wye meant that instead of playing a minor role in a major business, I could play a major role in a minor one,” he wrote in his autobiography, “My Kingdom of Books” (1999). He bought a former firehouse, then warehouses and a Norman castle, and began shipping in truckloads of books. Copycats flourished, too. “Booth was buying them at pennies on the dollar in the United States,” Paul Collins wrote in “Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books” (2003), a book about Hay, “as old seminaries went bankrupt, as ignoramuses staffing Peabody Li- braries sold off their treasures — because ‘nobody reads them’ — as New York institutions like Stechert-Hafner shut their doors, and as little old rich la- dies died and left libraries to half-liter- ate progeny.” Mr. Booth’s inventory was encyclope- dic. He furnished books for movie sets and supplied a German town with the manuals to replicate the Wehrmacht’s original archive. On April 1, 1977, Mr. Booth declared Hay an independent kingdom and named his horse prime minister, a stunt that he later augmented with passports and peerages. While he never abdicated, by 2005 his half-dozen stores had dwindled to one, which he sold. He continued to operate the King of Hay, which sold regal trump- ery celebrating his reign. His first two marriages were, as he described them, unsuccessful. In the late 1980s he married Hope Barrie Stu- art, a photographer, who survives him, as do two sisters, Joanna and Anne.

He crowned himself king

in an empire of used books

RICHARD BOOTH 1938-

BY SAM ROBERTS

Richard Booth in 1971. He is credited with reviving the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye and inspiring its literary festival.

IAN TYAS/KEYSTONE FEATURES/HULTON ARCHIVE, VIA GETTY IMAGES

scroll through the images. Accessing the
site at a basic level is free. But users can
also sign up for two higher-tier plans
(one at $15 a month and another at $
a month) that provide access to features
like passes to art fairs and the opportu-
nity to be interviewed for an article on
the site.
In addition to sharing, art collectors
are seeking tools to organize growing
collections, connect online with gal-
lerists and curators and, perhaps, to
humblebrag about what’s on their walls.
“Collecting used to almost be like a
private club with people who were very
traditional in their privacy and comport-
ment,” Ronald Varney, an independent
fine art adviser in New York, said in an
interview this month. “Nowadays, it’s
often, ‘How much publicity can I get out
of this?’”
Collecteurs is attempting to harness
the energy of social media without all of
its associated noise, and offer a window
into the secretive and exclusive world of
private collections.
Though the amount of art in private
hands is unquantifiable, art sales have
been increasing, reaching $67.4 billion in
2018, much of it passing between private
hands.
Mr. Varney called the world of private
collections a “murky universe” since
private sales are often not reported, and
auction houses are not required to di-
vulge the names of winning bidders.
“There was a work by a very promi-
nent contemporary artist, and this work
was sold at a major sale at Christie’s a
few years ago that was featured promi-
nently in the news,” Mr. Varney said.
“After it was sold, the piece was listed as
‘missing’ on the artist’s website, be-

cause they know who sold it but not who bought it, and that work has just van- ished into a private collection.” Merely by its nature, Collecteurs has an obvious limitation: The art can be seen only online. “Not everybody has the resources to open a private museum,” Mr. Oralkan said. “So people are looking for alternative options, and those are most likely going to be digital.” All at once, Collecteurs is trying to be management software; a social media platform; an online magazine with plans for print books; and, more nebu- lously, an online museum for the public. Its founders say that the platform isn’t geared toward buying and selling, but rather it’s another way of getting access to information about where art is. The concept of a digital museum isn’t new. Many museums have long been digitizing their collections to make the art accessible on the internet. But when does something grow from a collection of images online to an online museum, and does Collecteurs qualify? “This is really not a museum by any stretch of the definition,” said Claire Bishop, a professor of art history at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, who has researched and written about the effects of digital tech- nology on visual art. She said the lack of emphasis on re- search, the shortage of contextual information about objects and the absence of extensive curation make Collecteurs more social network than museum. The information on the website is self-reported, so it can be as robust or as lim- ited as a collector chooses; often, collectors include dimensions, medium, artist, materials and exhibition history. Sometimes, they add notes and can cu-

rate digital exhibitions of their works. “If the minimum definition of a digital museum is a collection of jpegs online, then an online archive like Artstor is the greatest digital museum on earth,” Ms. Bishop said, referring to a nonprofit digital library that has amassed millions of images for scholarly use. The use of the word “museum,” she said, is a misno- mer, and lends the project cachet while misrepresenting its aims. Mr. Oralkan emphasized that Col- lecteurs is a hybrid platform, one that’s driven by aspirations to change how art can be seen and shared. “I think we really have a chance to recreate the idea of what a museum can be,” he said. Ms. Oralkan said, “If we’re looking at either

not being seen at all or being seen dig- itally, digital is a very strong point to make.” In recent years, Instagram has be- come a favored way for collectors to share and search for new work. It has also helped some artists, like Cj Hendry, start careers outside of traditional chan- nels. Mr. Toscano, the private art collector, used to rely on Instagram to seek out artists, but he said he’s grown frustrated with the algorithm. “Every four posts, someone is trying to sell me something that has nothing to do with any of my in- terests,” he said. Collecteurs is semi-exclusive; anyone can join and post images, but some

members are preapproved based on the content of the collection, allowing them to show up in the site’s search function. (Quality matters to the founders: “We don’t want a Mickey Mouse collector showing Donald Duck art,” Mr. Oralkan said.) But not everyone is interested in showing off what they have in vaults or on their walls. “People aren’t necessarily looking for the sharing aspect,” said Justin Antho- ny, a founder of Artwork Archive, in Denver, a cloud-based inventory system used by artists, collectors and large institutions for organization and management. Users track what they have and where the works are, along with deeds of title and insurance papers.

“I would say there’s kind of a sexy, in- teresting aspect to this, and a practical aspect,” Mr. Anthony said. “The unsexy side, the management side, is a more common itch than the desire to share.” Often, in fact, clients would rather their collections not be shared. “We were just dealing with three dif- ferent political figures who don’t want to draw attention to their wealth, and they wanted to be assured that no one could trace it back to them,” he said. There is a function on Artwork Ar- chive that enables sharing artwork with the public, but the majority of users keep their collections private or between family and friends. Mr. Varney, the fine art adviser, said that there is a growing gap between collectors who post their work online and those who are “going radically in the other direction.” One client didn’t want auction houses to know what state he lived in. That kind of reticence has been the biggest challenge for the Oralkans in getting people to join Collecteurs. “At the beginning, we got a lot of push- back,” Ms. Oralkan said. “Like, No. 1, who are you? And No. 2, why do you want this information?” She said that Collecteurs had institut- ed a feature to allow people to share anonymously, and that as the platform has grown, it has been easier to per- suade prospective users to join the site. Mr. Varney said he believes social media will open up the art market and add transparency. “Things just sort of vanish into private collections,” he said. “When things appear on the market, especially older things that have been off the market for- ever, it’s almost like a discovery story.”

Sharing art once hidden in private collections

C OLLECTEURS, FROM PAGE 1

TOSCANO COLLECTION

From the Toscano Collection on Col- lecteurs: “Untitled, Pylamyra (4/16/12),” by Daniel Turner, left; and “TBT (Model & Plans for Munster)” by Oscar Tuazon.

TOSCANO COLLECTION

RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws

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Mr. Varney called the world of private

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The New York Times International - 29.08.2019

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Chronicler of Hollywood stars

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