There is nothing that can be said or seen about the internationally famed, New York City based, Rose Hartman or her iconic photographs, that hasn’t found its way into an interview, an article, or a juicy gossip column—be it in the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Women’s Wear Daily, New York Times, New York Post—or for that matter talked about on every major TV, cable and radio station, here and abroad. One only has to Google her name to be deluged by Hartman mentions.

 And let us not forget her countless appearances—we call them Hartman Sightings—at the plushest of openings, the most intimate suppers, and trendiest fashion orgies, where the Fashion Queen of Social Documentation—her realm is All Things Beautiful—inevitably becomes the center attention, if not the topic of conversation. Not that Hartman, a strikingly energetic blond bombshell, every bit as eye-intriguing as the subjects she photographs, insists on this. But this is how star power works. artes fine arts magazine

Last year Hartman’s 30 year retrospective held at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, a hot ticket with turn away crowds, was the talk of the town. And voilá, like a bat out of hell – nothing flies faster than the latest fashion news – Hartman’s suddenly exploding reputation, crossed the pond. Taking the very first bite out of the photographer’s substantial oeuvre by giving her a solo show, through December 30, 2012, was Narda Van’t Veer the renowned photography collector and proprietor of The Ravestijn Gallery, currently Amsterdam’s most hot and happening art space.

As luck would have it, being in the Netherlands on assignment, I got to attend the gallery’s celebratory champagne-drenched opening, along with Utrecht-based artist Jackie Sleper, Amsterdam’s arts writer, Tineke Reijnders, and a boisterous herd of art world movers and shakers, all hoping—judging from their dressed to kill finery—to be documented by Hartman herself. Alas, the closest they got to being immortalized was to have Hartman’s autograph her newest book Incomparable Women of Style, which is slowly but surely working its way up the best seller list.

The book is busy selling itself: Oh, those marvelous images! Hartman, very much in demand, can be found on any given day and night, with a ready-to-sign, copy of Incomparable Women of Style in hand, giving intimate small talks and Power Point lectures at galleries and clubs, like the very exclusive Soho House, of which she is a member. Not one to let grass grow under her feet, the tireless photographer is already working on her next book. It will be all about the numerous men in her life, at least those she has focused her camera’s sights on.

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer

Below is Alistair O’Neill’s introduction, as it appears in Hartman’s book. For a visual treat, as well as an autobiographical essay written by the photographer herself, Incomparable Women of Style is available for purchase at fine bookstores or online.

The Photographs of Rose Hartman

Introduction by Alistair O’Neill

“Of course what you want to do is make every reader feel Johnny-on-the-spot, in the centre of things.”

“As if she were having lunch at the Algonquin.”

“Not toda, but tomorrow,” added Ellen.

The desire to get to the centre of things lies at the heart of Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos’s novel set in 1920s New York. When Ellen, the book’s central character meets Mr Harpsicourt, the likely publisher of a women’s magazine, he explains the position he hopes she will take. Ellen’s reply lets us know that to sit at Dorothy Parker’s round table of wit and style is not enough, and that to really feel in the midst of it -to really feel wanted- you need that churn of anticipation and the assurance that a place is set and waiting for you. To look at Rose Hartman’s photographs is to get that ‘Johnny-on-the-spot’ feeling, in the sense that they’re not just fascinating documents of roped-off, at-the-heart-of-it moments; they also usher us in and sense our arrival. And what a blast that is.

For over thirty years Hartman has photographed what someone like Cecil Beaton might once have described as New York society, but her photographs show us how the definition of people at the centre of things has essentially changed. Take two photographs of people smoking. The first, of socialite Nan Kempner and jewelery designer Kenneth Lane, conveys the pleasures of social form, the observation of dress codes and the kind of assurance that produces ease- right down to the downward line of the cigarettes. This is the poise of the high life held at the wrist. Another, of Interview magazine’s Fred Hughes and jewelery designer Elsa Peretti, is a study in smoky detachment. Rather than acknowledging the camera as Kempner does, they pose for it sideways; their hands open as gestures that pull drags from cigarettes and cast eyes adrift. This isn’t style as nature, but style engineered as affectation.

If one photograph speaks of entitlement, then the other speaks of agency; but both are about the embodiment of style in 1970s New York, played across bodies, clothes and surfaces. Hartman came to prominence for her fearless portrait of the New York fashion industry, Birds of Paradise: an intimate view of the New York fashion world, published in 1980. But to consider it a pictorial account of the garment district at work (what Hartman liked to call the chiffon jungle), is misleading. For perhaps more than any other era in the history of New York fashion, this was when the acumen and design of the day was coordinated with the choreography and opportunities of the night. It is something of a paradox that New York secured its position as a fashion capital of international standing at a time when the best way for a publicity department to place a designer, was to get them photographed partying. Hartman characterised her area of study as “really about the irrevocable, intricately orchestrated pattern of events and energies that make fashion the heady experience that it is.” But fashion is only one of the many creative communities who feature in Hartman’s photographs.

She is one of the first documenters of what Elizabeth Currid has more recently defined as The Warhol Economy; how fashion, art and music in New York are networked through “the significance of New York’s informal social life in cultivating the fluidity of creativity”. Andy Warhol is credited for the way he contributed to and made his presence felt at the heart of this interaction. This is the man who started Interview magazine so that he could meet more people and get invited to more parties. Pick up any issue and it can be read as an extended conversation round a table, or at a party with all manner of people with something to say about being creative. (Incidentally, one of Hartman’s favourite photographs is of Warhol in conversation with the model Jerry Hall at anInterview party in 1977, unconventional according to the photographer because, “Andy never talked”.)

What is unique about Hartman’s contribution is the attention she pays to the role of women in this social world, not as accessories or mannequins but as active contributors through the agency of their style: as being beyond comparison. As a Kublah Khan of the creative imagination, New York in the seventies had Studio 54 as its Xanadu and the true surviving fragment is Hartman’s photograph of Bianca Jagger riding a white horse into the nightclub to celebrate her thirtieth birthday. Within all of the maelstrom that must have ensued is captured a still image of certainty and command, particularly for the way Jagger controls the horse without saddlery wearing the most fluid kind of jersey dress by Halston. And while she looks away with studied indifference, the horse’s eye remains trained on the camera.

That the photograph exists is because of Hartman being there, not as a photographer with a press pass, but as an invited guest with a camera. (She often hid her camera in a speaker if she wanted to dance.) It afforded Hartman the position of being one of the first photographers to capture these new forms of currency within an image orientated economy traded internationally. Writing in 1973 as the fashion correspondent of The New Yorker, Kennedy Fraser noted in an essay about modern style that Bianca Jagger was the example par excellence: “That even her most triumphant effect must be ephemeral- a unique combination of dress, light, and the evening’s particular mood in her eyes- makes the undertaking superbly dandylike.”

Borrowing from the dandy’s wardrobe by stylish women was nothing new. Chanel had mined the colour black for its poetic implication in the clothes she developed in the 1920s, but this new cult of appearance took the idea of duration as its theme- condensing a look into the fraction of a camera’s shutter speed. Hartman noted this new notion of dressing in Birds of Paradise after a conversation with Nan Kempner: “Kempner recalls one evening when she looked especially glamorous at a party and couldn’t help thinking, “It’s such a pity that Women’s Wear (Daily) isn’t here.”

As a self-taught photographer with a career bound by chance and opportunity, Hartman’s work has often resisted categorisation but this is in essence its strength and contribution. She started as a columnist in Soho Weekly News in the mid 1970s covering the gallery openings and events that marked the gentrification of the district; or as Robert Hughes, early devotee of Soho once put it, “Come the dawn, come the boutique.” After being abandoned on more than one assignment by an errant staff photographer, Hartman took the matter in her own hands and enrolled on a short photography workshop. One of her first commissions was to cover the wedding of Hemingway’s granddaughter Joan for the men’s fashion newspaper DNR, which prompted her work as a commercial photographer operating across diary pages and society columns, art features and fashion articles.

In there is an overarching theme to her photographs, it is an informality- a quality often found at art openings but always in short supply at fashion shows. What this reveals is a sense of Hartman herself, as a figure who moves between these distinct worlds with ease. In her continuing work as a New York columnist she is often referred to as Rambling Rose, with all it implies about her travels around Manhattan covering the latest events: from Bryant Park over to the other side of the High Line; or from Seventh Avenue up to Museum Mile. As a long time resident of Greenwich Village, Hartman shares her sense of the city with that other great downtown woman, Jane Jacobs. In her 1961 book, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jacobs describes the logic of Manhattan as not being the grid, but the sense of people on the move.

It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of pavement use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance.

Hartman is the great chronicler of this urban shimmy, as she shifts in and out of the city’s districts and into those momentary spaces and places that are not advertised nor located on maps, arriving at events that seem to light up as temporarily as her flashbulb. When interviewed for WWD about the donation of her archive to the Special Collections of the Library of the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2011, Hartman confirmed that it is the staccato rhythm of the city that she follows over any form of composure: “Basically, the photos you will see in the exhibition, these are moments. I was not really setting up anything.”

And this sense of things being loose -not yet ready, in process- is her legacy. Contemporary fashion imagery now pays as much attention to backstage at a fashion show, to what the models wear as they arrive, than what they wear on the runway. Unlike the photographer taking the catwalk shots at the end of the T-bar, or the one commissioned to do the look book, or those camped outside taking photographs of guests as they arrive, Hartman has resolutely remained a roving free agent- moving between chairs, sidling up to the make-up artist. Her position has been undeniably influential on how fashion shows are now managed and communicated as images to a global audience.

But the fashion show is only one kind of space. Be it the exhibition opening, the dinner, or the dance at a club, Hartman is there ready to rise to the open-ended proposition of the evening. To see her in action is to see an infectious sense of enjoyment at play, as she works the room as might any guest, with a sense of inquisitiveness at what stands for interaction at heart. So it might be calling out to Polly Mellen as she turns to greet her on a staircase, observing the solitary detachment that a cigarette brings to Chloe Sevigny, or that moment at which Daphne Guinness raises her eyes at a table. As moments they might be meaningless, but somehow they are also matchless.

Within these photographs Hartman delineates a quality particular to New York women of style. The kind of women who call the city home but who are familiar to many others; the kind who define an internationally followed lexicon of what it is to be regarded when looked at. It is a point of distinction first made by Cecil Beaton in his portrait of the city, that “the affectation is to be natural: not to be natural, but to affect being natural; the difference is more than subtle.” It is a subtlety learnt by studying how pose and gesture operate differently in an image than they do when performed without a camera. And these women have learnt this by studying Hartman’s photographs. Beaton also observed how New Yorkers lead their lives out and about with little recourse to what could be called a private life. In this he realized that the true rhythm of the city is its invitation, one to which Hartman and all those other women of style are still in thrall:

Life is never free and easy in New York. One has too little to do or too much. In no other city must existence be planned so carefully. Not to go out is to be forgotten, but one invitation out leads to a dozen more.

Alistair O’Neill is Senior Research Fellow at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, London

“Incomparable: Women of Style.” de Rose Hartman – by Anthony Haden-Guest, Rose Hartman & Alistair O’Neill – ACC Editions. 
Available from November 7 2012. English version only.
www.accdistribution.com

Hear Rose Hartman interviewed at a recent exhibition of her work: