MELLON’S STORY
Weegee was the first encounter I had with an iconic photographer. He said “I am Houdini, and you are my Trilby. You must come and work for me.” I was a student at NYU’s Washington Square College of Arts and Sciences. He said “I’m going to teach you photography, dearie.”
I bluffed my way into a stylist job working for the still-life photographer Tosh Matsumoto, booking models and running around the city with a pocket full of credit cards. Tosh said I have a good eye. Instead of being in front of the lens I should be behind the lens. He said “You can use all of my equipment but I don’t have the patience to teach you photograhy.”
Accompanying my husband, John Tytell, who was writing Naked Angels about the Beat Generation, my first photographs were of the survivors of that era -- William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlingetti, Joyce Johnson, Huncke, Ken Kesey, and others. I especially loved visiting Allen Ginsberg and Peter Olovsky at his farm in Cherry Valley.
A neighbor who lived across the street, convinced me to show him my work. He bought a print to send as a Christmas card for Chaps, the jean division of Ralph Lauren. He asked me to deliver the card to the Polo Ralph Lauren’s office on W 55th street.
I was snacking on a bowl of M&Ms when Buffy Birrattella said she needed someone by tomorrow to photograph Ralph for the Boston Globe. I piped up “I’m a photographer!” She said to be there at nine in the morning. I arrived at Polo with one Nikon FTN camera, one 120mm lens, and a light stand sticking out of a shopping bag.
When I delivered the photographs Ralph asked me if I had ever done fashion. He said that he had just finished designing his first Men’s and Women’s Collection. Would I like to photograph his creations? I jumped! I shot 54 rolls of TRI-X film that day and was up for four days developing the film and printing the contact sheets.
Ralph once joked that I left him for the Amazon. He said if I had stayed I “could have been rich and famous like Bruce Webber”. I left for three months to take a two hundred mile journey in a dugout canoe along the Saramacca River in Suriname all because of a dream. I woke up one morning and I had the word Surname on my lips. In the dream I was in a foreign country where people had golden faces, houses were on stilts, and there were lemon and orange trees. I was alone with the navigator who didn’t speak English except for saying “Looko Looko Monkey Monkey.” I camped out in a lean to and photographed the Djukas, Afro-Caribs who had been living autonomously in the forest for two hundred years.
The photographer Robert Frank once said that I use photography as a witness to my life. My work has taken me on many adventures. I’ve been published in a potpourri of publications...the Magazine of Natural history, W Magazine, Stern, Geo, Figaro and even Swank Magazine. My archives is a treasure trove of celebrated personalities, marginal subjects, exotic female erotica and fashion.
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