The crisp autumn air, the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot, and the ethereal beauty of mushrooms pushing through the damp earth — these are the hallmarks of a magical time for photographers, especially those drawn to the mysterious world of macro photography. But capturing these delicate wonders often presents a unique challenge – low light.

This year, I embarked on a mushroom photography adventure, armed with my trusty camera and a secret weapon: the Hobolite Micro. This compact, versatile LED light proved to be the perfect companion for illuminating my subjects without disturbing the tranquillity of the forest. This little 8W pocket power was the perfect companion.

Size Matters: Lighting Up the Macro World

Traditional lighting setups can be bulky and cumbersome, especially for delicate macro photography. The Hobolite Micro, however, is a game-changer. Its pocket-sized design fits comfortably in the palm of your hand, making it easy to maneuver through the undergrowth and position the light precisely for targeted illumination.

Unveiling the Details: Color Temperature Control

Mushrooms can come in a breathtaking array of colors and textures. The Hobolite Micro’s adjustable color temperature allowed me to fine-tune the light to perfectly showcase these details. Whether it was the warm, earthy tones or the cool of Jack-o’-Lantern mushrooms, the Hobolite Micro ensured each subject was bathed in the most flattering light.

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Unleashing Creativity: Diffusion & Light Shaping

The Hobolite Micro’s included frosted dome diffused the light beautifully, creating a soft, even glow that eliminated harsh shadows on the delicate mushroom caps and stems. Additionally, the light’s magnetic barn doors allowed me to further control the light spread, shaping it to highlight specific features or create dramatic pools of light.

Endurance is Key: Capturing the light

Autumn light can be fleeting, and the last thing you want is your light source dying on you mid-shoot. The Hobolite Micro boasts an impressive battery life of up to 50 minutes at full brightness, allowing me to capture a variety of mushrooms without interruption. It actually comes with three mini batteries, each lasting at least 15-20 minutes each. Even longer f you turn it off between shooting. I used a single battery on this single 1.5-hour trip. This reliability was crucial in capturing the fleeting beauty of these wonders. Especially when many are found on the show sides of trees or undergrowth.

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Beyond the Light: A Perfect Match for Macro Photography

The Hobolite Micro’s versatility extends beyond its impressive lighting capabilities. Its compact size makes it ideal for minimalist macro setups, eliminating unnecessary bulk and allowing for a more natural approach. Additionally, the light’s intuitive controls ensured adjustments could be made quickly and efficiently, keeping pace with the ever-changing light in the forest and it fits neatly in your pocket or bag too.

My recent mushroom photography adventure was a resounding success, and the Hobolite Micro played a pivotal role. Its portability, adjustable light, and long battery life made it the perfect companion for exploring the world of fungi. Whether you’re a seasoned macro photographer or just starting your journey, the Hobolite Micro is a great option for capturing the magic of the forest. I’m just starting to play with this light and will do a full review shortly.

Canon USA has released a short video highlighting the beautiful landscapes and wildlife of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The entire film was shot on the EOS R5 C, Canon’s hybrid camera body, by Nathan Lee Allen, the company’s creator.

The film follows Canon Explorer of Light, Charles “Chas” Glatzer, and sheds light on the ongoing seismic shifts the park undergoes and emphasises the importance of preserving its fragile ecosystems and the animals and plants that live there.

“In Yellowstone, preservation isn’t just a concept; it’s a collective and collaborative effort. Every visitor, staff member, and admirer play a crucial role,” said Sam Barkley, Chief Development Officer, Yellowstone Forever. “Canon’s ‘Seismic’ reinforces this, reminding us that we all share responsibility for the park’s future. As stewards, it’s up to us to ensure that generations to come can experience its wonders, thanks to our dedication to preserving its natural beauty and protecting its wildlife.”

Canon USA has partnered with the foundation Yellowstone Forever since 1997 to contribute to the continued protection of the park and its inhabitants.

It’s certainly a beautifully evocative short film, showing all the dramatic scenery you’d expect from such a varied and impressive location. The interview with Glatzer shows the immense dedication that is part of being a wildlife photographer, and we are treated to some of his beautiful images interspersed with all the glorious B-roll of the video.

From bison to bear cubs, this video is almost a love letter from a photographer to the park. And yes, it might also sell a few EOS R5 C camera bodies in the process!

Two decades ago, when the photojournalist Kate Medley was in graduate school in Oxford, Mississippi, she would often frequent a local gas station with an off-menu offering: Tupperware containers full of home-cooked Indian food, made by the owners, for whomever knew to ask.

Though it would be years before she began a long-term series on the gas stations and roadside stops of the American South, Medley’s pit stops intrigued her; she grew to recognize the spaces as vital foodways in both urban and rural areas.

Though many provide simple goods and services — like coffee, hot dogs or an oversized bathroom key — others offer diverse, unexpected offerings: crawfish etouffée, tamales, Cajun-style bahn mi, all-you-can-eat barbecue, or even an entire country ham to purchase along with your cigarettes.

Often overlooked because of their perceived liminal nature, these quick stops can be lifelines for the communities they serve, Medley pointed out, as well as opportunities for people to strive for the so-called American Dream. (In 2013, the Fiscal Policy Institute reported that 61% of all fueling stations in the US are independently owned by immigrants.)

“Increasingly, as I traveled, I felt like there was this big gap in scholarship that did not take seriously the role that these spaces play,” Medley explained in a phone call. “And I found it super compelling — the people who work there, the food that they’re cooking and the community they’re creating. I see as integral to who we are as Southerners and what this region has to offer.”

Now, “Thank You Come Again” is both a photo book of 200 images, published late last year, and the subject of Medley’s first museum exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, where she grew up.

Scouting across the South

For a decade, Medley took the images while on the road, at first on the side when she was on assignment, then as her main focus as the project progressed. She visited around 150 gas stations and quick stops in total, finding the unique curation of each space compelling.

“There’s this sort of mystery of these spaces,” she said. “As you approach them, you open that little glass door and hear the bell jingle. What will be inside? What will it smell like? Who will be there? What’s on the menu that day?”

These hidden gems include Saint Louis Saveurs in Greensboro, North Carolina, an outpost for Senegalese food in the back of a Circle K that serves up jollof rice and the grilled lamb dish dibi. The modest restaurant used to be a Dunkin Donuts, Medley noted — the door handle was still a “D” when she photographed the space. Then there’s the Hammond, Louisana-based Icebox — a Punjabi dhaba, or gas station-adjacent foodery, that stripped out its convenience-store goods in favor of a full Indian buffet.

The owners positioned Icebox at the intersection of two interstates in order to serve long-haul truckers, Medley learned after speaking with them — particularly those recruited from India, she explained.

“They have found tremendous success,” she said. “But actually, when I was there, they were telling me that their new business plan is to rip out the dhaba and return that to a convenience store. They’re going to move the dhaba to a standalone restaurant building, because they decided that rich people will never eat in a gas station.”

Changing landscapes

For every success story, there are businesses struggling — a lot of them, Medley noted, particularly in rural areas where the population has declined.

In one station in Elaine, Arkansas, she said, the gas pumps have been discontinued and the grocery shelves are bare; a local farmer bought the space purely to offer hot food options to local farmworkers hot food each day, who bring in consistent revenue.

“The closest gas is 30 miles away,” Amanda Simonson, the general manager, told Medley when she walked in, according to Medley’s book. “But I can offer you smothered pork chops.”

In Banner, Mississippi, the owner of Pop’s gas station explained to Medley just how important his business was to nearby residents, pointing out a local customer who was there for the lunch plate.

“Since his wife died last year, he eats at Pop’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” the owner, Jeff Poynor, told her.

One of the advantages of these small businesses is their adaptability, Medley argued. Though not all have been able to stay in business over the years, she’s found that many others have transformed. Gone are the Slim Jims and Red Bulls — instead you might find a little nightclub, or a ham-curing enterprise that ships out around the country. (She’s seen both.)

“I feel optimistic that they’re continuing to pop up,” she said of the stores. “I don’t think these places are going away… What that’ll look like, in 50 years with electric vehicles or self-driving cars or whatever’s next — I’m not sure.”

“But I feel confident it will be something,” she added, “that these buildings will persist, and that entrepreneurs will persist in finding a way to make them work.”

Have you ever seen the entire universe in someone’s eyes? “It’s the eye contact that moves people,” said explorer and National Geographic Photo Ark founder Joel Sartore, and I have to agree with him. It takes guts to hold a deeper gaze, I guess because it’s the closest we can get to touching someone’s soul.

Sacred, mysterious, destructive, melancholy or absent: the expressions of our eye have fascinated everyone throughout centuries. Thanks to new technology, stunningly detailed macro images can finally unveil the deepest parts of them. Many companies around the globe are inviting us to discover those unique, colorful galaxies hidden inside our own eyes and Irisphoto is one of them.

More info: Irisphoto

Photographers from all around the world are creating different captivating artworks by taking close-up photos of the eyes

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Mitchel Zeer started Irisphoto after studying photography and psychology. Fascinated with macro photography and manipulation of lighting, he created Iris Photo Box – a mini studio to capture the beauty of the iris. Later on, joined by his brother Braden, they expanded the business to multiple locations across Australia, capturing the uniqueness of thousands of people.

“Everybody’s eye is different. Our eyes are more unique than our fingerprints. Especially when we get this close, we can see all of the detail, all of the different colorations. People generalize their eyes with one color but it’s rare that there’s actually just one color in there,” explained Mitchel.

“Once the eye is illuminated, we can capture the detail and capture the depth within the iris itself. And then, of course, with a very very powerful camera, very good lens – all the rest,” he added. Then, just in a matter of minutes, the eye is printed out to the size of people’s choice.

With the brand’s footprint growing in Australia, the franchise has also been booming in the USA and Canada.

Iris photography is the new trend in professional portraits that is rapidly spreading around the globe

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“I used to think people had just green, brown, or blue eyes,” said Andriana from Bulgaria, who runs Moonlight Photography. “But with these pictures you can really see all the different lines and areas of the eye, everyone really is unique. I find them truly beautiful and fascinating. They look like something from outer space, almost like planets by themselves.”

She found out about the iris photography trend a few months ago in a big international business fair. “It is becoming more in demand here too, so I thought I’d give it a go and it is proving popular with people wanting a different family portrait,” explained Andriana.

Through macro photography, she makes the eyes look like some kind of planets, yin and yang or connected like wheels on a bike.

New technologies allow photographers to capture the depth within the iris itself in an ultra-detailed way

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Image credits: Irisphoto

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Named after the Greek goddess of the rainbow, the iris controls the amount of light that enters the eyes and also determines their color. There’s research showing that as many as 16 different genes could be responsible for eye color in humans; however, the main two are OCA2 and HERC2, and both are based in chromosome 15.

New studies unveiled that with approximately 79% of people, brown is the most common color, while green with 2% and grey with less than 1% are the rarest among the entire human population.

In 1893, a Hungarian scientist named Ignaz Peczely (1826–1911) produced the first known anatomically accurate drawing of a human iris. At the time, he claimed that the unique features of an iris can help to detect disease or weakness in the body. What is even more amazing is that Peczely had discovered this link between iris features and health at just 11 years old! In later years, he produced a full map of the ridges of the human iris and paired them with specific medical issues.

In the late 1800s, photography was not yet good enough to produce iris photographs like the ones available commercially today, though images were made for identification purposes. For example, M. Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), a French police officer and researcher, observed that everyone’s ‘iris-print’ is as unique as their fingerprint; therefore, in 1886, he suggested that irises could be used to catch repeat criminal offenders.

Nowadays technology finally allows photographers to capture the eye with stunning clarity and detail, so it’s no surprise that it is becoming more and more popular around the globe to capture the unique patterns and colors of the human iris and transform the results into beautiful works of art.

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Image credits: American Academy of Ophthalmology

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Image credits: Alphonse Bertillon

Another magnificent example of capturing people’s uniqueness through the eyes could be one of the greatest French living photographers, Francis Giacobetti, and his enchanting exhibition of triptychs named VISION.

Giacobetti has been making these triptychs for the past 12 years and to date, he has photographed 150 famous people from around the world, including Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Luciano Pavarotti, Stephen Hawking, Mikhail Gorbachev, Buzz Aldrin and others. The exhibition is composed of giant pictures of black and white portraits of faces, hands and colored irises. “I wanted my record of special people, deeply intelligent people, to be more than just a sequence of conventional pictures – a single image, snap! – no, I wanted them to be… a meditation,” said Giacobetti. “I plan to make a total of 300 portraits and I hope the project will be completed for the turn of the century. It has ended up as a kind of millennium project, although that was not the original intention.”

“I invented my own device for taking photographs of the eyes,” explained Giacobetti. “It is a little secret, but what it does, more or less, is to shine light across the side of the eyes rather than directly into them. In this way, we can see the pattern of eyes in relief, which is not possible if you shine light directly into them. Of course, this is not some sort of optician’s device. My pictures have nothing to do with science, medicine or anatomy; my interest is only in their beauty.”

This exceptional exhibition was presented for the first time at the Procuraties on the San Marco Square Venezia on 18th of November last year and now will travel the world over 5 years, starting with Paris.

Being as unique as our fingerprints, irises are becoming a new way to capture the essence of the soul

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Image credits: Francis Giacobetti / Fidel Castro

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Image credits: Francis Giacobetti / Dalaï Lama

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Image credits: Francis Giacobetti / Louise Bourgeois

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How beautiful it is that there are over 7 billion people and not even a single eye is the same. Marina Abramović spent 8 hours a day, 6 days a week for nearly 3 months staring into the eyes of over 1,500 strangers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of her 2010 performance, The Artist Is Present.

“There’s so many incredible things when you look in somebody’s else’s eyes,” the artist shared at the time. It’s the sense of aliveness, the real deep presence that makes gazing into each other’s eyes so special: like suddenly in silence, yet so loudly, two galaxies would collide.

Dragan Tapshanov once said that “photography is about capturing souls”; therefore, what could be a better way to do so than through the deep gaze of the eye?

23XI Racing driver Bubba Wallace’s wife Amanda has hollered her husband’s official photographer Nicolas Banda after the 22-year-old graduated from The University of Texas, Austin. Nicolas is heading toward his third season with Wallace and hustled during his college days to keep up with the demanding NASCAR schedule.

The Texas native has had an affinity for photography since middle school. From using his smartphone to capture portraits for leisure, to purchasing his first camera during high school, Banda discovered his passion for photography early on.

During weekdays, Nicolas went to college and during the weekends, he packed his bag and traveled with Wallace and his team to capture the Alabama native during the races. Moving forward, Banda has completed his graduation, and shared an update on his Instagram, outlining his eagerness to work with Bubba Wallace for a third straight season.

An excerpt from Banda’s message read:

“The end of the beginning! Stoked to share that I’ll be moving to Charlotte, NC this week continuing to work at @prosportmgmt for my 3rd NASCAR season as social media/digital content manager for @bubbawallace & @chaseelliott9.”

Nicolas’ update caught Amanda’s attention, and she acknowledged him as Bubba Wallace’s “full-time” photographer. She posted the celebratory message on her Instagram, tagging Nicolas and writing:

“Proud of @banda.tx. FINALLY graduated college and will be with us full time 🤪 he’s been hustling the last few years doing college full time and traveling the NASCAR schedule on the weekends 😅😅”

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Bubba Wallace lauded Nicolas’ “legit” work during the latter’s first year with him

Nicolas kicked off his photography passion by clicking pictures for his friends, editing videos, and indulging himself in a similar line of work. When he was a junior in high school, Banda used his pocket money savings to buy his first-ever camera, a Canon T6i.

Since then, Bubba Wallace’s photographer has produced outstanding work for his college football events, attracting the attention of numerous key players in the industry and increasing his clientele significantly.

During his first piece of work for Wallace in 2022, Banda managed the social media side, posted a few pictures from his trip to North Carolina during the summer, and tagged the 23XI Racing driver.

Wallace was quick to note Banda’s work and didn’t hold back from praising him (via X):

“Nico BANDAAAAAAAA. I feel like that’s how I HAVE to say his last name. He’s legit, good work kid👊🏾,” the #23 Toyota driver wrote.

To date, Nicolas Banda has collaborated with notable people and organizations. This includes NASCAR, logistics magnate FedEx, 23XI Racing, Denny Hamlin, Apple-owned music company Beats by Dre, Chase Elliott, and many more.

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Grandma Ruby and Me from The Notion of Family, 2005
Art: © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone gallery

As long as she could remember, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s hometown had been in trouble. She was born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, in 1982, too late for the theaters, shops, and stable jobs at the steel mill that her Grandma Ruby remembered and just in time for the decline of American steel and the “war on drugs.” The Braddock that Frazier knew was exhausted, as were her great-grandfather, her grandmother, her mother. But she wasn’t exhausted yet. Not quite 20, she got her hands on a camera and started working. In clear-eyed black and white, she put her own frame around her life. At first, her photographs and videos captured what was already there: Grandma Ruby smoking Pall Malls in the living room, the broken face of the town. Then she started building what she needed to see. Raised by her grandmother, she reconciled with her mother in posed double portraits, their profiles overlapping and switching off. When she shot herself alone, her face was commanding while her eyes were soft, and she leaned toward the camera like a yearning new lover. It was her first major body of work, the one she used to teach herself to be an artist — and helped her find out that she already was one. She called the series “The Notion of Family.”

There’s a reason why sophomore slump is so common. The first big thing you put out tends to be the one you’ve been making all your life. When Frazier started showing “The Notion of Family” toward the end of the aughts, she ripped out of the gate with a series so airtight that it created its own atmosphere, one where the raw fact of Braddock’s steel mill hangs over her family, their strength, their illnesses, their fight, their comforts, their humor, their deaths. Her pictures of abandoned buildings aren’t ruin porn: They’re Braddock’s phantom limbs. An entire world can be found in one image. In her pulled-back 2010 photograph Mom and Me on the Couch, we see a 20-something Frazier and her mother sitting on opposite ends of a sofa, both wearing white tank tops and jeans, both looking down or away, hands to temples, worn out. An argument hangs in the air; Frazier’s photographs hang on her mother’s walls. (We know they’re hers because some are part of the same series.) The fact that Frazier’s first solo exhibition at MoMA, “Monuments of Solidarity,” starts its two-decade-plus survey of her work with “The Notion of Family” makes sense. It also sets the level for a show which — if you can make it all the way through — you’ll leave feeling both elated by the clarity of the images and totally pummeled by the avalanche of text that accompanies them. If only the rest of the show trusted photography as much as “The Notion of Family” does.

Frazier has said that when she started photographing seriously in college, she was both inspired and infuriated by the work of Farm Security Administration photographers like Dorothea Lange: As she saw it, they were deployed by the government to make images of the bottom that could support the policies that came from the top. She wanted to get out from under — to make pictures that Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in Migrant Mother, might’ve made if she’d been given the camera instead. Frazier never stopped looking at workers: Organized labor and its ghosts are all over this show, which includes series made everywhere from Flint, Michigan, to a GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio. But when she wrapped “The Notion of Family” and started photographing people who weren’t related to her, she had to redefine the notion of agency. Now Frazier is the Lange in the scenario, the successful artist telling other people’s stories with her camera.

At MoMA we see her wrestle with this change. In a couple cases, she does find ways to turn her subjects into true collaborators, nesting their point of view in hers. In others, she tries to bridge the gap by pairing her portraits with long — very long — transcripts of their words. The show is full of these text panels, set up on placards next to Frazier’s photographs in the middle of the galleries: lopsided duets that, if you were obedient, would take hours to read.

Do you have the bandwidth for that? Does a family of dehydrated MoMA-attending tourists? “Monuments of Solidarity” is a show that makes you think hard about venue and scope, and how (or whether) an artist of Frazier’s commitment and range is really best served by a sprawling survey that by its nature privileges breadth over depth. Frazier is so good at working deep that doing both here feels like trying to swim Lake Superior. If you leave the galleries thinking This should’ve been a book, you and those tourists are in luck: The book is for sale in the shop downstairs.

Frazier made more work in her hometown as she was wrapping up “The Notion of Family,” including a kind of zine that both protests the closure of the town’s only hospital and critiques a Levi’s campaign shot in Braddock around the same time. (The brand was invited in by then-Mayor John Fetterman, who was happy for Braddock to be painted as a postindustrial, denim-clad frontier town.) But the next-strongest series here is another that Frazier worked on for years, “Flint Is Family in Three Acts.” It started in 2016 when Frazier took an editorial assignment from Elle magazine to photograph women living through Flint’s horrifying, government-inflicted water crisis. She turned this brief contact into a long-term alliance with two of the locals she focused on, Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan.

The first act is presented here as a film projected on the wall in which Cobb reads her own poem over a sequence of Frazier’s photographs. The second act is what Frazier has called “the real story”: when Cobb accepted her father’s invitation to take her daughter, Zion, and move down to the family land in Mississippi. (He convinced her by sending her a snapshot of her own young self drinking from a freshwater spring there with the words, “This water won’t kill you. Come home.”) Frazier followed, and the images she made of the family on their land are stirring and sublime. In one photograph presented here as a luscious four-foot-by-five-foot gelatin-silver print, we see Cobb; Zion; and Cobb’s father, Mr. Smiley, from the back, leading us deeper onto their property. Ahead of them, we see a grazing horse and a barn, its sides wide open and generous. Above them an ancient tree stretches its branches, protective. The third act was direct action, documented. Frazier used the money she made selling prints at the influential gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (plus matching funds from the Rauschenberg Foundation) to acquire an atmospheric water generator, a machine that turns moisture from the air into drinkable water, which she, Hasan, and Cobb transported to and installed in Flint.

This is just one of the many times in the show you might start thinking about the price of things. To be a successful working artist in the U.S. means selling both your story and your work to a class of people who have never in their life worried that their city would care so little about them that it would poison them and deny it. These are people who have likely never made contact with a community health worker — some of whom Frazier photographed in Baltimore in 2021 and 2022 — whose role is to connect locals with the medical services they desperately need. Nor have they endured the arbitrary shuttering of their workplace, as the subjects in Frazier’s project “The Last Cruze” did when their GM plant in Ohio was closed in 2019. Sadly, this particular project, which includes portraits of UAW workers and accompanying panels of their words, is presented in a way that sets it up to fail. The curators chose to mount this work on a series of red panels meant to evoke an auto assembly line, stretching down the center of a long hall. They are installed so close together, like library stacks, that you have to shuffle through them sideways to see the work.

Perhaps knowing whom she needs to convince, Frazier endeavors to make her subjects heroic. An intriguing corner of the show is the one dedicated to former Pittsburgh steelworker and self-taught photographer Sandra Gould Ford, who broke her plant’s rules to save documents and make haunting photographs of the inside of the mill. Prints of Ford’s photographs are hung alongside cyanotype prints Frazier made of the documents as well as monumental portraits Frazier took of Ford in 2017, clutching her hard hat and wearing a half-smile. Annoyingly, this is all presented in a neon-lit niche, where the overhead lights waver from bright white to blue to red. This means that a corner dedicated to exposing work conditions is hard to actually see. The weakest part of the exhibition is the most obviously iconic: a small room at the end dedicated to Frazier’s recent photographs of Delano, California, and the legendary labor organizer Dolores Huerta, who co-founded what would become the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. Huerta is beyond worthy of recognition, but this section felt rushed and half-baked, the photographs of Huerta stiff and posed.

The title of the show, “Monuments of Solidarity,” is meant to ennoble Frazier’s subjects and collaborators. But the word monument implies a rigidity, a distance from the mess of life, that you don’t really feel in these images. Frazier has said that she wants to “stand in the gap between working-class and creative-class people,” which reminds me — a creative-class person — of the first time I encountered her photographs. It was around a decade ago, on a printed-out book proof that I was marking up with a pen: I was in my early 20s and working as a copy editor at the photo publisher Aperture, where we were preparing to put out the monograph for “The Notion of Family.” My bosses were very excited that we were doing the book. I understood that Frazier was a rising star. I was also barely making any money. So although I admired the book — was unnerved by it — when I got my staff copy (retail price $60) I kept it in the plastic, thinking its value would increase and I could sell it if I was ever short on cash.

Before going to MoMA last week, I took that copy out of the plastic in a gesture of financial stability. (I checked the price for this first edition online; one copy was going for $375.) I was knocked sideways by the tenderness of the images, by their toughness — by Frazier’s obvious feel for what she wanted to show us and how. After I walked through the show, I couldn’t stop thinking about what a strange fit her labor-celebrating, inequality-exposing vision was for MoMA, perhaps the New York museum that feels most like a department store. You might agree even if you don’t know, for example, that MoMA’s current job listing for a full-time security officer offers an hourly wage of $23.80 — which nets out to less than $50,000 a year in one of the most expensive cities in the country. You don’t need to think about the workers standing in the gallery with you to feel tension from seeing these pictures, in this place. But what would happen if you did?

The roof terrace where one tenant played sax and another took calls from Pierre Cardin.
Photo: HighDomain LLC

Harold Krieger built a career — and a real-estate portfolio — off a sharp eye for beauty. He started out as a commercial illustrator, basing his drawings on photographs of his subjects, but became more and more interested in the photography itself, switching mediums just as magazines were cutting illustrators and printing more photos. He made a point to never turn down an assignment, and started getting breaks in the 1960s. Over the next two decades, his news photos of blackened miners and gussied-up first ladies would run in Esquire and McCall’s while advertisers would pay to fly him to Paris to shoot models in bras and girdles or to Venice to photograph a Simmons mattress against a row of gondolas.

Krieger had grown up in New York City, the son of a grocer who was regularly going out-of-business and failing to make rent. He wanted stability, and, early in his career — before shooting covers of Lady Bird Johnson, Woody Allen, and Eddie Murphy — decided to buy his first home. 57 West 9th Street made financial sense. It was a 22-foot-wide Federal-style brick townhouse in bohemian Greenwich Village, where he was sure to find renters. Meanwhile, he could live in a downstairs duplex with his wife, Geraldine Krieger, a painter who showed gestural abstractions at galleries across town. But first, they had to renovate, and to build out a kitchen they hired a cabinet maker. That was an old boyfriend of Eva Whatley, who worked in publishing at the time, but remembers coming over to help build a patio and lingering to talk to the Kriegers. They remained friends for decades. “There was a tremendous hospitality always that came really from Harold,” she said. “He had a dry manner, and a way of leaning back and very dryly saying something extremely provocative.”

Over the years, Krieger bought more houses: a vacation spot in Fire Island, and another in East Hampton; a building on East 12th Street; and then another on East 31st Street — a mixed-use building that he turned into a studio and event space. It occupied two townhouses that had been gutted by a congregation of a Chinese Presbyterian church and combined to create a massive, light-filled worship space. (It now rents for $10,000 a day to Hollywood — recently playing an art-filled loft on the last season of And Just Like That …) And in the meantime, he and his family continued to live on the bottom two floors of the 9th Street house, while renting two units above. Over the years, their tenants included the actors Jason Robards and Didi Conn, best remembered for her role as Frenchy in Grease. On the top floors, in a duplex with a private terrace was an art director who would take calls from his boss, Pierre Cardin, as his pure-bred Abyssinian cat wandered through the legs of his Mies van Der Rohe chairs. Downstairs, the Kriegers hosted friends from the gallery and magazine worlds, including artist Anita Steckel and designer Milton Glaser. Krieger was close enough to Alice Neel to commission a portrait of himself and his daughter, and was known for mentoring his assistants, a group that included the photographer Peter Hujar. Shirley Glaser remembered Krieger as a “raconteur,” whose parties were only ever attended by what she called an “in crowd.” At one, she sat down next to a nice man and had a long conversation before learning his name: Andy Warhol.

When the Kriegers divorced, Harold moved out of West 9th Street. But he never sold the townhouse, using the rental income to float a retirement that coincided with the slashing of magazine budgets. He remarried a friend he had known for years, Roberta Russell, who was 18 years his junior and ready for a new adventure. She got her real-estate license, learning to write leases and check references, but found the work wasn’t easy. Property records show she rented to film producers who were accused of bouncing checks and skipping court. The author Michael Wolff rented the garden unit, and tenants remembered how he would hold small parties in the backyard with intellectuals and leaders, and sometimes extend an invite.

The building remained friendly and free in a way that seemed to belong to an older version of the neighborhood, said Shaun Osher, a real-estate executive who took the art director’s former duplex on the top two floors. “Everything that’s great about the West Village is encapsulated in that house.” Osher had first come to New York as a student enraptured by jazz, and had spent many nights wandering the neighborhood’s clubs. Years later, he was happy to have an actual terrace where he could practice saxophone. “Everyone was kind of cool about it,” he said. “You’d never have a neighbor shouting at you to shut up.” One floor down, the Hollywood costume designer Kirston Leigh Mann moved in with the art and books she had collected on shoots around the world, and turned a space with built-ins, a fireplace, and southern light into a refuge. “I was just like, I want to live in the prettiest apartment.” When the pandemic hit, Mann found herself reaching out to check on her former landlady. Harold had died in 2015, and Russell was living alone.

“I found some of the tenants very exciting,” said Russell. “They were people outside of the realm I would normally have access to.” After a career as a recruiter, Russell had gone back to school to study psychology and has since written books on the subject. As tenants have moved in and out, she has found herself noticing what draws them there, or what they choose to change. In many ways being a landlady has been yet another lesson in psychology. “You learn how people live,” she said.