The Portrait

If you've ever wondered "what does this guy look like?" or have thought that I'm am just a bit anonymous (like they did), this post is for you. A couple of Fridays back, a New York photographer named Ben Hider, came to take my picture. He sent me a link to some of the shots, from which I selected the two below (all photos courtesy Ben Hider). Despite the mid-day, overhead sun, harsh shadows and my self-conscious avoidance of any lens, I think he did a bang up job.

Ben has been a customer of Hudson Clove for three years running, and last autumn he asked if he could take some shots of me out at the Amagansett farm. For one reason or another, that never happened, and of course this year I am growing in the Rockaways, and the garlic has been harvested. Good enough, said Ben, and he made the journey anyway, first on the A train from the Financial District where he is the official photographer of the New York Stock Exchange, and then a bus from the last A station. We spent two hours chatting and maybe twenty minutes on either side of the lens. 

Harvesting hundreds of small Roma tomatoes and on the phone answering silly questions about life on Saturn and what I could do with a paper clip that isn't clipping paper (these are creativity questions and I dislike them). Why? I (and another) was being focus-grouped. That lasted about 24 hours, after which I excused myself, having little to say about a Unilever shampoo from a gardener's perspective. Had they read this, they could've saved us all some time. Had I remembered that experience, I could have simply said no.

I even smile when asked nicely.