1979

It was a 5-floor building with a penthouse and balcony. The first two floors were galleries and a bookstore. The third floor was deemed for education as well as the basement where the darkrooms resided. On the fourth and fifth floors were administrative offices and empty rooms for squatters like me. I wasn’t the only one sleeping there, but having the first titled position of a “live-in janitor” I naturally took over the penthouse and strung up a handmade cactus hammock I brought from the Guajira Indians, the same people the famous French legend Papillion, lived with in Colombia. I remember waving at Robert Redford’s kids in their apartment window across the street and jogging in Central Park’s resovar and seeing Jackie O (who was an ardent supporter of ICP) running, always against the flow of runners.

There were basically three of us living there. We are close friends to this day, we were the Capa surrogate kids. The Hippie Steve Rooney, became the CFO of ICP and recently retired. David Kutz, my 6’7” brother Jew became head of Education and then there was me, the 6’3” Chinaman.

There was a rally in Chinatown one weekend. David and I decided to go shoot it. I did not have film so he loaned me half a brick of Kodachrome (10 rolls) because he decided he was going to shoot B&W. It was a rally in support of normalizations with China and I ended up having three pages of photos in Newsweek the following week as well as the cover for their international edition. Needless to say David will never let me forget that it was his film and I loved to remind him that he wanted to make “Art”.