The actor Hannah Waddingham was cheered by onlookers after she reprimanded a photographer who appeared to ask her to “show leg” as she arrived for the Olivier awards on Sunday.

In a video posted on X, the photographer’s comments are inaudible but Waddingham responds: “Oh my God, you’d never say that to a man, my friend.”

She warns that she will move on if they continue in that vein, saying: “Don’t be a dick, otherwise I’ll move off. Don’t say ‘show a little leg’. No.”

Waddingham was arriving to host the annual awards for excellence in theatre at the Royal Albert Hall when the comments were made.

The footage posted on social media shows her posing on stone steps, wearing a lilac beaded one-shoulder maxi dress with a semi-sheer skirt, before gesturing towards the photographer who is thought to have made the remarks. As she walks away, she points and adds: “Have some manners.”

The crowd is heard cheering after the actor’s comments. Waddingham appears to discuss the issue with the photographer as she continues walking towards the building.

She is best known for playing the Richmond FC owner, Rebecca Welton, in Ted Lasso, which won her an Emmy, a Critics’ Choice award and a Screen Actors Guild award.

Waddingham, from south London, also starred in Game of Thrones and Sex Education, and co-hosted last year’s Eurovision song contest in Liverpool. She also hosted the 2023 Oliviers.

Waddingham has also been a stage actor in the West End and on Broadway. She has appeared in a number of shows, including Spamalot, as the Lady of the Lake, and as Desiree Armfeldt in Trevor Nunn’s acclaimed revival of A Little Night Music, roles that earned her two Olivier nominations.

The Oliviers were established in 1976 to celebrate the “world-class status of London theatre”, according to the awards’ website, and are among Britain’s most prestigious stage honours.

By Joanna Crawley For Mailonline

Published: 12:33 EDT, 15 April 2024 | Updated: 14:21 EDT, 15 April 2024

Olivier Awards host Hannah Waddingham called out a photographer on Sunday night’s red carpet after she was asked to ‘show a leg.’

Video shared by a fan on X captures the moment the Ted Lasso star, 49, was posing outside the Royal Albert Hall before a photographer apparently requested she ‘show leg.’ 

The photographer’s remarks are inaudible but Hannah is seen shouting over to the crowd of photographers: ‘Oh my God, you’d never say that to a man, my friend.’

As fans applaud her she then threatens to leave if the comments continue saying: ‘Don’t say “show me leg.” No.’

Walking away Hannah continued to argue with the snapper, pointing at him and adding ‘have some manners’. 

Hannah hosted Sunday night’s Olivier Awards, which celebrated another stellar year of UK theatre. 

She wowed in a custom Marchesa gown, adorned with sparkling embellishments on the semi-sheer gown for her red carpet moment before making three outfit changes during the glittering ceremony.

Sunset Boulevard came out on top with an impressive seven wins, while Sarah Snook and Andrew Scott’s play also won big.

Nicole Scherzinger was handed the Best Actress in a Musical prize for her performance in Sunset Boulevard while her leading co-star Tom Francis took home the Best Actor in a Musical gong.

Jamie Lloyd won the Sir Peter Hall Award for Best Director and the show also won Best Musical Revival.

Elsewhere, Jack Knowles took home the White Light Award for Best Lighting Design; Alan Williams won for the Outstanding Musical Contribution award for his musical supervision & musical direction and Adam Fisher won the d&b audiotechnik Award for Best Sound Design.

Pop star Nicole joked that she first wanted to thank God for stopping her from tripping on the way to accept her Best Actress in a Musical gong.

The US actress and singer also said that she ‘was coming for blood’ on Broadway ahead of her taking Sunset Boulevard to New York. 

She said ‘thank God for saving me from that trip right there’, before adding that she was ‘nothing without him’.

The Pussycat Dolls singer also said that ‘coming from really humble beginnings I always wanted to be a singer and do musicals’.

She added that she wanted to do ‘so many roles’ and joked that the failing Hollywood star, Norma Desmond, depicted in the musical was not ‘one of them’.

After weeks of accolades it was almost inevitable that Sarah Snook might lead the winners as the 2024 Olivier Awards got underway on Sunday evening – and so it proved as the Australian star was named Best Actress, and rightly so. 

Snook – best known for her starring role in HBO series Succession – scooped the award for her mesmerising one-woman performance in a new West End production of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray. 

The Australian actress takes all 26 roles in the production, among them Basil Hallward, Sibyl Vane and of course Gray himself. 

Elsewhere there was triumph of sorts for Andrew Scott, who surprisingly lost out on the award for Best Actor but found himself among the winners after VANYA, director Stephen Simon’s contemporary rendering of the Anton Chekhov classic, claimed the award for Best Revival during the event at London’s Royal Albert Hall. 

Olivier awards 2024: Full winners list

Best actor in a musical

David Cumming for Operation Mincemeat 

Tom Francis for Sunset Boulevard – WINNER

Daniel Mays for Guys and Dolls

Charlie Stemp for Crazy for You

Best actress in a musical

Natasha Hodgson for Operation Mincemeat 

Caissie Levy for Next to Normal

Nicole Scherzinger for Sunset Boulevard – WINNER

Marisha Wallace for Guys and Dolls

 

Best actress

Laura Donnelly for The Hills of California

Sophie Okonedo for Medea

Sarah Jessica Parker for Plaza Suite 

Sheridan Smith for Shirley Valentine 

Sarah Snook for The Picture of Dorian Gray – WINNER

 

Best actor

Mark Gatiss for The Motive and the Cue – WINNER

Joseph Fiennes for Dear England 

James Norton for A Little Life

Andrew Scott for Vanya 

David Tennant for Macbeth

 

Best new play

Dear England by James Graham – WINNER 

The Hills of California by Jez Butterworth 

The Motive and the Cue by Jack Thorne 

Till the Stars Come Down by Beth Steel

 

Best new musical

The Little Big Things, music by Nick Butcher, lyrics by Nick Butcher and Tom Ling, book by Joe White 

Next to Normal, music by Tom Kitt, book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey

Operation Mincemeat, music, lyrics and book by David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts – WINNER

A Strange Loop, music, lyrics and book by Michael R Jackson

 

Best actress in a supporting role in a musical

Grace Hodgett Young for Sunset Boulevard 

Zoë Roberts for Operation Mincemeat 

Amy Trigg for The Little Big Things – WINNER

Eleanor Worthington-Cox for Next to Normal

 

Best actor in a supporting role in a musical

Jak Malone for Operation Mincemeat – WINNER

Cedric Neal for Guys and Dolls 

David Thaxton for Sunset Boulevard 

Jack Wolfe for Next to Normal

 

Best actor in a supporting role

Will Close for Dear England – WINNER 

Paul Hilton for An Enemy of the People 

Giles Terera for Clyde’s

Luke Thompson for A Little Life

Zubin Varla for A Little Life

 

Best actress in a supporting role

Lorraine Ashbourne for Till the Stars Come Down 

Priyanga Burford for An Enemy of the People

Haydn Gwynne for When Winston Went to War With the Wireless – WINNER

Gina McKee for Dear England

Olivier Tanya Reynolds for A Mirror

 

Noël Coward award for best new entertainment or comedy play

Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo and Franca Rame

Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Stranger Things: The First Shadow by Kate Trefry – WINNER

Vardy V Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial, adapted by Liv Hennessy

 

Best Family Show 

Bluey’s Big Play by Joe Brumm 

Dinosaur World Live by Derek Bond – WINNER

The House With Chicken Legs adapted by Oliver Lansley

The Smeds and the Smoos adapted by Tall Stories

 

Gillian Lynne award for best theatre choreographer

Fabian Aloise for Sunset Boulevard

Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf for Dear England

Arlene Phillips with James Cousins for Guys and Dolls – WINNER

Mark Smith for The Little Big Things

Susan Stroman for Crazy for You

 

Best Costume Design

Bunny Christie and Deborah Andrews for Guys and Dolls

Ryan Dawson Laight for La Cage Aux Folles

Hugh Durrant for Peter Pan

Marg Horwell for The Picture of Dorian Gray – WINNER

 

Best Revival

The Effect by Lucy Prebble

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Shirley Valentine by Willy Russell 

Vanya by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Simon Stephens – WINNER

 

Best musical revival 

Groundhog Day, music and lyrics by Tim Minchin

Guys and Dolls, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows 

Hadestown, music, lyrics and book by Anaïs Mitchell

Sunset Boulevard, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics and book by Don Black and Christopher Hampton – WINNER

 

Best Sound Design

Paul Arditti for Stranger Things: The First Shadow 

Dan Balfour and Tom Gibbins for Dear England

Adam Fisher for Sunset Boulevard – WINNER 

Gareth Fry for Macbeth

 

Outstanding Musical Contribution

Tom Brady for Musical Supervision and Arrangements and Charlie Rosen for Orchestrations for Guys and Dolls 

Matt Brind for Musical Supervision, Arrangements and Orchestrations for Just for One Day

Steve Sidwell for Orchestrations and Joe Bunker for Musical Direction for Operation Mincemeat

Alan Williams for Musical Supervision and Musical Direction for Sunset Boulevard – WINNER

 

Best set design  

Miriam Buether for Stranger Things: The First Shadow WINNER

Bunny Christie for Guys and Dolls

Es Devlin and Ash J Woodward Dear England

Soutra Gilmour and Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom for Sunset Boulevard 

 

Best lighting design

Jon Clark for Dear England

Jon Clark for Stranger Things: The First Shadow 

Paule Constable for Guys and Dolls

Jack Knowles for Sunset Boulevard – WINNER 

 

Best new opera production

Blue by the English National Opera 

Innocence by the Royal Opera – WINNER

Picture a Day Like This by the Royal Opera 

The Rhinegold by the English National Opera

 

Outstanding achievement in opera

Antonio Pappano for his role as Musical Director of the Royal Opera House – WINNER

Belarus Free Theatre Company for King Stakh’s Wild Hunt

Marina Abramović for 7 Deaths of Maria Callas 

 

Outstanding achievement in dance

Isabela Coracy for her performance in NINA: By Whatever Means, part of Ballet Black: Pioneers – WINNER

Jonzi D for his artistic direction of Breakin’ Convention 2023 International festival of hip-hop Dance theatre

Rhiannon Faith for her community focused conception of Lay Down Your Burdens at The Pit

 

Outstanding achievement in affiliate theatre

Blue Mist by Mohamed-Zain Dada at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court theatre

A Playlist for The Revolution by AJ Yi at the Bush theatre

Sleepova by Matilda Feyişayo at the Bush theatre – WINNER

The Swell by Isley Lynn at Orange Tree theatre

The Time Machine: A Comedy by Steven Canny and John Nicholson at the Park theatre

 

Sir Peter Hall award for best director

Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin for Stranger Things: The First Shadow at the Phoenix theatre

Rupert Goold for Dear England at the National Theatre – Olivier and Prince Edward theatre

Jamie Lloyd for Sunset Boulevard at the Savoy theatre – WINNER

Sam Mendes for The Motive and the Cue at the National Theatre – Lyttelton and Noël Coward theatre

 

 

PotatoJet partnered with SmallRig to create a tripod with a very interesting tripod, the Tribex Hydraulic Carbon Fiber Tripod. The Tribex is a fast tripod, and it’s similar in a way to the YC Onion Pineta peak and Sachtler Flowtech 75. Instead of having multiple height locks on every tripod leg, fast tripods control the height from just one lock on each leg. Except the Tribex takes the idea a step further, letting you adjust the height of all three legs from just one height lock.

The Tribex Hydraulic Carbon Fiber Tripod

The Tribex tripod uses what Smallrigs calls the “X-clutch Hydraulic Technology”. Its design lets you squeeze the clutch (which looks a bit like a bike handle) to extend or adjust the legs simultaneously for both height and angle. When you release the clutch, the tripod activates its self-locking system, which secures the legs instantly.

Each leg is made from carbon fiber and has a diameter of 29mm. In total, these legs allow the tripod to support up to 35kg of camera gear. Far more than enough for any sane filmmaker’s camera rig. The tripod’s height ranges from 27 to 168cm, which makes it useful in many different shooting scenarios. And, when you fold the tripod, it’s only 79cm long. This is short enough to fit into most standard luggage.

The Tripod kit comes with a compact fluid head with up to 5kg of counterbalance. It’s plenty for small and medium-sized movie cameras. The head also has a 360-degree pan, step-less 90 to -65 degree tilt, and a six-step counterbalance for precise control and smooth camera movements.

Price and availability

The Tribex Hydraulic Carbon Fiber Tripod will be available in early July. MSRP is not available yet, but SmallRig mentioned in our NAB 2024 interview it won’t be cheap. It’s a premium tripod made from high-quality materials, and its price tag will reflect that.

Sponsor shout-out: A huge shout-out for our #NAB2024 gear sponsors. They pick up the bill so you can get amazing free content: Nanlite, ProGrade Digital, Sennheiser, SmallRig, Ugreen, YC onion

Rosalie “Rollie” McKenna is best known for her work as an architectural and portrait photographer who documented the modernization of New York City and some of the most popular literary minds of the mid-20th Century. A 1940 graduate of the private college in Poughkeepsie, McKenna also took extensive pictures of the campus’ historic buildings.

Mary-Kay Lombino and Jessica Brier are the curators behind the new exhibit at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, called “Making a Life in Photography.” They believe it’s McKenna’s first career-spanning exhibition — which is surprising, because Brier says McKenna is the most represented individual photographer in the Loeb’s collection.

“That really sent us down the rabbit hole of finding out who this person was, and finding that she had this unbelievably rich and interesting career, [she was] extremely prolific, and [had] a huge archive that was basically untouched,” adds Brier.

McKenna, who died at age 84 in 2003, carved out a career as a freelance photographer at a time when women of her class were still largely expected to get married and stay at home. In addition to Vassar, McKenna boasted a long list of clients that included “Vogue,” “Vanity Fair,” “Fortune,” and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. While she did marry early in her career, the extremely short-lived union primarily benefitted McKenna by giving her an alias: she would still occasionally go by “Mrs. McKenna” to lend herself a certain legitimacy with customers who might have refrained from hiring a single queer woman.

Lombino says McKenna launched her business by taking photos for Vassar Professor Richard Kroutheimer, who needed pictures for his architecture students to reference.

“It’s interesting to think that he asked her to make a certain kind of photograph, and then she takes that on as her style,” Lombino notes. “You can see it in two different ways: was Richard Kroutheimer using this young person’s talent, or was she using his cache and his influence in the world to get her work out there? And I would say both.”

McKenna’s style was straightforward — after all, her work was literally meant to be studied. But that doesn’t mean it was easy. For example, while another photographer might walk up to the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and capture its famous dome from the ground-up, McKenna scaled the cathedral complex until she found the perfect floor and angle to depict the dome head-on and up-close.

Her portraits shared a similar honesty. Lombino says McKenna found family in a network of friends that included Vassar alum Elizabeth Bishop, fellow photographer Laura Gilpin, and famous poets like Anne Sexton and Dylan Thomas. She profiled each of them, and instead of posing her subjects in a manipulated studio, she followed them into their spaces and pulled from a list of tricks to make them feel relaxed.

“Someone described her as fiddling with her camera as though she didn’t know how to work it. And then the person who was being photographed would get a little concerned, try to help her with this issue, and she would realize, ‘Oh, they’re not posing anymore.’ And that’s when she would take their photograph,” Lombino explains. “So you’ll see them in much more relaxed states.”

McKenna’s portrait series of Thomas, captured shortly before his death in 1953, would become one of her most well-known works. She also contributed to MoMA’s first photography showcase of Latin American architecture in 1955, and photographed Helen Keller alongside her interpreter and companion, Polly Thompson, in 1958.

Brier suspects McKenna’s time with Keller and Thompson, and with couples like Elizabeth Bishop and Lota De Macedo Soares, was transformational: she saw how two women could live together and support one another. A few years later, McKenna met her longtime partner, Patricia Willson, and moved to Stonington, Connecticut, where the pair tore down the fence between their neighboring houses and raised three of Willson’s four children.

Despite an extensive resume, Brier says McKenna received little recognition for her work. Her photographs were often copied and printed without credit, and even when she contributed to a large exhibition, like the MoMA showcase, the subjects were the star of the show. However, Lombino says McKenna preserved her own legacy. In addition to keeping extensive records and copies of her work, McKenna published an autobiography called “A Life in Photography” in 1991. Brier and Lombino say they drew heavily from the book for the exhibit.

“We read every single one of her diaries, and she kept diaries for years,” Brier smiles. “She knew that, yeah, no one else was going to do this work. She was a woman who made a career in the 1950s — no one else was going to do this for her. And so she made sure that it was gonna happen, and she made sure that a project like this could happen after her lifetime, which is an incredible thing.”

“Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna” runs through June 2.

‘He made me wear white,” says Fran Lebowitz, down the phone from New York. The writer is talking about the day her close friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, shot her for Portraits in Life and Death, the only book he ever made. “Peter was very specific. It was in my apartment which was the size of, I don’t know, a book. And the light was a big thing – as it was with all photographers, back when they were actually photographers.”

This week, the picture of a 24-year-old Lebowitz smoking a cigarette, slightly slumped, in a white shirt and tight white trousers on the arm of a settee, goes on show at the Venice biennale, alongside the 40 other pictures from Portraits in Life and Death. Twenty-nine of them depict artists, writers and performers Hujar knew and admired from the downtown scene of 1970s New York – many of them reclining in a state of reverie that seems completely un-posed. There’s the writer Susan Sontag, supine on a bed with a pensive expression; the drag artist and underground film star Divine off duty and resting on some cushions; nightclub dancer TC, topless and drowsily seductive; poet and dance critic Edwin Denby with his eyes meditatively closed, his wrinkles mirroring the rumpled duvet behind him.

The book then cuts to a memento mori: a dozen startling shots of 17th-century skeletons in their graves, taken in 20 minutes when Hujar visited the catacombs in Palermo, Italy, in 1963. They seem to suggest that everyone pictured in the book is dying, the photographer and the viewer, too. In fact, Hujar died of Aids in 1987, aged 53. As Sontag says in her foreword, written in hospital while she was being treated for breast cancer: “We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably.”

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Published in 1976, Portraits in Life and Death got just four reviews, the most-high profile being in the Village Voice. It failed to sell many copies. Today, however, it is recognised as not only a priceless document of a vanished culture, but as a collection of some of the finest portraits ever taken. Hujar insisted on printing all his pictures himself, and his meticulous efforts in his darkroom on Second Avenue resulted in black-and-white images that marry psychological acuity with flawless technique. “There’s a richness about the shades of grey he coaxes out of each print,” says Grace Deveney, curator of the Venice show. “And the longer you look, the more you see.”

“He made me conscious of the importance of the photograph as an object – a print to be held, examined and appreciated,” notes Vince Aletti, photography critic of the New Yorker, and another of Hujar’s close friends. “A photograph is not just a picture on a piece of paper. It has variations of size, weight, tone, texture and clarity that can vary from print to print. I never thought much about these things before I knew Hujar. Now I can’t forget them.”

Hujar’s reputation has risen in the past couple of decades. Many people first encountered his work on the cover of I Am a Bird Now by Anthony and the Johnsons, a stunning shot of the trans Warhol superstar Candy Darling in a hospital bed as she was dying of lymphoma aged 29. Another classic Hujar image, a man’s face at the point of orgasm, is on the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s misery lit blockbuster A Little Life. Yet despite his work’s undeniable quality, Hujar never attained the success of his peer and rival Robert Mapplethorpe, not least because he had a habit of infuriating anyone who could have helped him.

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“He was sitting on a lot of rage,” says writer Stephen Koch, who was executor of his estate. As Lebowitz recalls: “I used to admonish him, ‘If someone is going to give you a show in Paris, don’t hit them over the head with a bar stool.’” Lebowitz is referring to an actual incident in which Hujar attacked two gallerists keen to exhibit his work. After Hujar died, Koch found a letter from the famous photographer Richard Avedon stressing how much he admired Hujar’s work and inviting him to get in touch. “Needless to say,” says Koch, “it was never answered.”

The reasons for this self-sabotage lay in Hujar’s childhood. “Peter was a born member of the underground,” Koch says. “He was a Manhattan street urchin. His mother was a waitress, his father was a bootlegger who abandoned her when she was pregnant, so she was without resources to raise him.” Hujar’s family were part of an influx of Ukrainian immigrants who came to the US after the second world war. His lack of English initially made his teachers think he had learning disabilities. He was brought up by his grandparents in rural New Jersey, but after his grandmother died, his mother moved him to Manhattan. Hujar left home at 16 after suffering violence and abuse during his teens.

Having experimented with his mother’s camera, he enrolled as a photography student at the School of Industrial Art. With the encouragement of his teacher Daisy Aldan, of whom he took one of his earliest great photographs, Hujar launched himself into the world of commercial photography. “His first job was walking the boss’s dog,” Koch says. “But he learned very sophisticated photographic techniques.”

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Hujar also became immersed in New York’s art scene – a small world according to Lebowitz. “Like really small,” she says. “The whole New York art world would fit in one restaurant.” Aldan, who was also a poet, held salons at which Hujar met the likes of the poet and critic John Ashbery and the painter Helen Frankenthaler. He had a relationship with Paul Thek, the painter and sculptor who is photographed in Portraits in Life and Death. The pair were filmed by Andy Warhol for a 1964 project called The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys. Despite this accolade, and the fact that almost everyone considered him handsome, Lebowitz says: “Peter was very insecure about his looks – which were dazzling, by the way.”

“He was immediately someone I could have a crush on,” agrees Vince Aletti. The friendship between Aletti and Hujar is palpable in Portraits of Life and Death: Aletti looks relaxed but watchful, his moustache and open shirt embodying the hip gay look of the day, the watch on his hairy forearm another nod to the passing of time. Meanwhile, the poet Anne Waldman is photographed crashed out on a patchwork quilt, her Mandarin Chinese robe spread around her. “I felt honoured to be included,” she says. “I also felt he could really see me.”

Aletti lived across the street from Hujar, took him to record industry parties, and spoke to him most days. This sense of an artistic community or tribe is one of the most appealing things about Hujar’s work, and it isn’t hard to see where the need for it came from. “A lot of the people around Max’s had had horrible childhoods,” says Lebowitz, referring to the restaurant that was the scene’s nexus. “People who were not just a misfit in their little town, but who were thrown out of the house – or who never had a house to be thrown out of.” Hujar was astonished when Lebowitz took him to her family’s home in New Jersey, because it was so far from his own experience. “He had never seen a middle-class suburban house,” Koch says. “A two-car garage, a lawn, a washing machine. He was amazed.”

Waldman vividly describes a downtown Manhattan neighbourhood that was a ferment of both radical art and radical politics: “You could wake up in the morning and see WH Auden jogging a little further down the block.” Hujar wasn’t a political animal – though he photographed an early poster for the Gay Liberation Front advertising New York’s first ever Pride march in 1970. But he was fully engaged in everything else the underground had to offer. His recreational activities ranged from avant-garde theatre to cruising the Chelsea piers for anonymous sex. He once told Lebowitz that he had probably had sex with 6,000 men, but that he hadn’t much enjoyed it, explaining: “It was just my way of getting close to people.” Hujar once smuggled Lebowitz into a gay S&M club so hardcore that she could only stand it for half an hour. “It was too brutal. I remember saying to Peter, ‘If everyone else knew what was going on down here, they would send in the national guard.’”

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Portraits in Life and Death was never intended to encapsulate an artistic era – the subjects were just people Hujar knew and was drawn to. Yet it captured a huge family of poets, composers, artists and drag queens engaging in creativity for its own sake rather than due to any commercial imperative, another reason why the book has such a charge. It is also one of many great works that underline the destruction wreaked by the Aids crisis. After Hujar was diagnosed on 1 January 1987, he never took another picture. When he died, on Thanksgiving Day later that year, his friend the artist David Wojnarowicz (who would himself die of Aids in 1993) took some shattering photographs of Hujar’s withered body in a hospital bed. It’s hard not to think of them when you see the skeletons in Portraits in Life and Death.

Hujar predicted that his work would become famous after his death, and his friends have mixed feelings about this prescience. “I absolutely don’t care,” says Lebowitz. “Peter was practically starving to death in his life. And see how expensive his work is now. It’s of no use to Peter.” Aletti agrees. “It’s sad that it’s happening without Peter here to appreciate it and benefit from it. But I’m so glad to see Peter’s name as part of the conversation about photography now, when he was hardly acknowledged or even known in his lifetime.”

Hujar’s sensibility is so finely honed, his portraits so intimate, his hand-crafting of the images so lovingly precise, that he still feels astonishingly present in Portraits in Life and Death. “Peter and I walked around together all the time,” Lebowitz says. “He would just suddenly stop in the street and say, ‘Look at the light on that fire hydrant. Look at that light!’ I don’t think I ever thought about light before I knew Peter. And I’ve been highly aware of it ever since.”

• Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death is at Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Venice, 20 April to 24 November

Once in a while Susan C. Larkin thinks about the moments in her life when she made life-changing choices. How did she decide to become a photographer? “My father, Tim Crane, was a chemist at Kodak in Rochester, where my brothers and I grew up. He was also a member of the Kodak Camera Club, and we helped with the movies he made at home. My mother, Sarah P. Crane, was a professional artist. She painted still lifes, portraits, and landscapes. Mother’s studio was in our basement, around the corner from my father’s darkroom. My parents made the Cranes’ Christmas cards at home, and when Tim Larkin and I were married, my father’s gift to us was a small Kelsey press from his father’s printing company in Vermont.” 

Apple touts how “water resistant” the iPhone is, good for droplets falling on the device without ruining it. But in its fine print, it cautions against taking the iPhone for a swim, a bath or anything like that.

I’ve taken the iPhone 14 Pro Max into fountains and under rainfalls, dunked it in a river during a rafting trip and in the water on the Narrows hike in Zion National Park without any issues.

I filmed my friends Zadie, Maia and Esme Kruglov swimming with their dad’s iPhone. I’ve shown the footage. People chalked it up to AI, or something like that. They didn’t believe it was real.

So I met up with the girls and their parents again recently at a Los Angeles backyard pool (more on that in a minute,) and gave them my iPhone 14 Pro Max to work with, to see how it would fare for a more extended time in the pool.

Would the iPhone recharge afterwards, or would the charging port fall victim to water damage? Were there any other issues that would come up?

The answers, dear readers, are all revealed in the latest video. And yes, the downsides are addressed as well.

Watch the video to find out how we fared!