'Hanging Out' - Harper's Bazaar June 1994
For one crazy, glitzy, gritty day, artist Jack Pierson photographed Naomi Campbell as they roamed downtown Manhattan.
Writer: Jim Lewis
The day began when Jack Pierson arrived at Naomi Campbell's apartment and I took pictures of her while she lounged around, chatted with friends on the telephone, and gradually got dressed They stopped by his place, then went out to a bodega, talked with men on the street, grabbed some lunch. Next they visited a Greenwich Village recording studio; and at last they dropped by Anna Sui's.
Think of it as a photoplay, a meeting in Manhattan between artist and model, with neither one fettered by the usual work habits: Campbell was hanging out more than she was modeling clothes, and though she's currently recording an album for Epic records, she was just having fun at the mike that afternoon. And Pierson was taking time away from his studio to fulfill a fantasy by playing fashion photographer for a day.
The boy came down from Boston in 1983, strung out, skinny, and carrying a camera. For the next eight years he kicked around, drifting to Miami and to Paris, to Provincetown and Los Angeles, before returning to New York for another day job. Along the way he took photographs—many of them out of focus, overexposed, or gaudily colored and produced dozens of desolate drawings. Together they form an indulgent, rapturous, somewhat ornery account of the way we live today, and by the end of the decade Pierson, then 29, had taken it to the art world and made a name for himself.
Think of the novels of Nathanael West, or the sunshine in an early Altman movie. It was as if, beneath the obvious glamour of the times, Pierson had found a deeper and more difficult glamour, and then discovered that it played as well in the rest of the world as the real thing. The following years brought the usual opportunities for a successful young artist—a change of galleries, shows in Europe. In 1992 he published Angel Youth, a collection of pictures; in 1993 he showed a dozen or so photos and built a small, rundown installation in a corner of the Whitney Museum for the Biennial. Next month his photographs appear in Real Gone (Artspace Books), an ode to Las Vegas.
Think of Edward Hopper. For American Dreaming: Edward Hopper and Jack Pierson, opening this month and on exhibit until mid-September in the Whitney's Lobby Gallery, Pierson selected works from the museum's enormous Hopper collection to show alongside some of his own. As Klaus Kertess, the Whitney's adjunct curator of drawings, puts it, "There's a kind of non-chalant, low-key futility and grace that he and Hopper seem to share, a sense of pan-American alienation."
As if in anticipation of his meeting with his aesthetic godfather, Pierson recently switched media, surprising everyone last month when he lined the rooms of New York's Luhring Augustine Gallery with ocean-blue abstract paintings. It was nonetheless very much a Pierson show, shabby and lovely and sweet. So are these memories of an afternoon with a model: a fen pictures, a few notes, a day in the life.
Everybody goes bananas when they see Naomi. "You're the most beautiful woman in the world," someone shouted at Bella's Luncheonette, where we made a pit stop for rice and beans before the "recording session."
"Thanks," she said, pulling a bottle of hot sauce out of her Chanel backpack and setting it down next her cellular phone. All day long, it was "Christy? It's Naomi. I'm at work." "Kate, it's me. She was? What, about Madonna?" Every time I reached for a loaded camera, my friend Clayton who was supposed to keep film in them for me, had his mouth hanging open and a glazed look on his face as he eavesdropped on her conversations.
At Electric Lady, I had some of my punk rock friends drop by and give it a real recording-studio feel. Arthur Hardy, who’s more doo-wop than punk rock came and helped by acting like a backup vocalist. Everybody (even the punk rockers) loved Omi’s song. song. Omi--that’s what you call her if you really know her. She’s a lot of fun. Later the limo dropped us off and I had had shot more film in one day than I had in my whole life, I thought "Oh my god. That was just so cool." - Jack Pierson
