Jean-Paul Goude and Grace Jones, Long Island NY, 10 Aug 1992 by Jonathan Becker

Strictly Archival Print, processed at the photographer’s studio on 100% cotton rag paper and
varnished to further increase longevity/resilience, tested @ 250 years equivalent UV exposure.
Print cost includes wrapping/packing for shipment in double-tubing.
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An archival pigment print of this photograph (28″ x 28″ / 1992.027.I – Nº 1/9) hung in a solo
exhibition of Jonathan Becker’s work entitled “A Fashionable Mind” from September 2015 to
January 2016 at the André Leon Talley Gallery, SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah College of Art
and Design).
The same archival pigment print of this photograph (28″ x 28″ / 1992.027.I – Nº 1/9) hung in a
solo exhibition of Jonathan Becker’s work entitled ‘A Fashionable Mind’ from January to April
2016 at the SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion and Film in Atlanta (Savannah College of Art and
Design).
The same archival pigment print of this photograph (28″ x 28” / 1992.027.I – Nº 1/9) hung at
the Royal Academy in Madrid (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando) in a solo
exhibition of Jonathan Becker’s work entitled ‘Vanity & Time’ from November 2016 to January
2017.
The same print will hang at the Huntsville Museum of Art from 25 October 2020 to 17 January
2021 in a solo exhibition of Jonathan Becker’s work entitled ‘Jonathan Becker: Social Work – 4
Decades of Movers, Shakers, and Thinkers’.

Jonathan Becker
(Steven Kasher Gallery bio by Mark Rozzo)
Literate flair, acute visual intuition, love of mischief and spontaneity, and global wanderlust:
These are among the hallmarks of the work of Jonathan Becker, whose photography spans
four decades and includes iconic portraits (often for Vanity Fair) of a multiplicity of subjects,
including Robert Mapplethorpe, Martha Graham, Madonna, Elia Kazan, Prince Charles, Eudora
Welty, André Leon Talley, Ai Weiwei, Diana Vreeland and Jack Kevorkian.
Becker – whose work was first published in Andy Warhol’s Interview in 1973 – was born in 1954
and raised in New York City. In the mid-1970s, he moved for a year to Paris, where he was
mentored by his hero, Brassaï. Upon return to New York, Becker drove a cab, toting his camera
and parking to complete magazine assignments. A 1981 exhibition of Becker’s work at New
York’s Rentschler Gallery included a series of arresting images of patrons taken inside the
kitchen at Elaine’s, the storied hangout on New York’s Upper East Side. This exhibition, curated
by art director Bea Feitler brought Becker to the attention of Frank Zachary, editor-in-chief of
Town & Country. Zachary invited Becker to work for the magazine, where the young
photographer further developed his passion for journalistic portraiture alongside Slim Aarons,
who, after Brassaï, became Becker’s guiding light.
Becker was then enlisted by Bea Feitler to contribute portraits to the prototype of Vanity Fair’s
1983 re-launch. His participation led to a highly prolific association with the magazine as
Contributing Photographer, continuing to this day. Becker has also contributed portraits and
reportage to The New Yorker, Vogue, W, The Paris Review, amongst truly most major
publications. In complement to his editorial work, Becker has accepted a limited number of
private and family portrait commissions each year, some accompanied by privately published
books, and in the course of his three-years-long project for the Rockefeller Foundation, Becker
documented its vast array of philanthropic grant recipients on four continents abroad.
Six trade books comprised entirely of Becker’s photographs have been published including
Bright Young Things (Assouline, 2000); Bright Young Things London (Assouline, 2002); Studios
by the Sea: Artists of Long Island’s East End in collaboration with Bob Colacello (Abrams,
2002) and a monograph, Jonathan Becker: 30 Years at Vanity Fair (Assouline, 2012).
A Fashionable Mind catalogues Becker’s 2015-2016 retrospective exhibition at the Savannah
College of Art and Design (SCAD), curated by André Leon Talley. Becker was subsequently
awarded an honorary doctorate by SCAD. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid
presented a retrospective of Becker’s work in 2016-2017 entitled Vanity and Time. It focused
on large prints of Spanish subjects including the Duchess of Alba and King Juan-Carlos, which
the museum then acquired in a modern complement to the Academy’s permanent collection of
Goyas.
Becker’s prints reside in many public and private collections including at the Whitney Museum
of American Art in New York.