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Review. Der perfekte Moment
Ever since I got my first Kodak Brownie No. 2, I knew I wanted Say Cheese! to be a photographer. So when I read Eliot Siegel‘s want ad
looking for a helper, I immediately headed to his studio on Paradise Road.
By WIELAND HEROLD
There‘s no other way to put it: Siegel is a master. With his guidance, I‘m sure I‘ll soon be a portrait photogra- pher in London. Now, imagine my horror when I saw three other prospective candi- dates waiting outside the photo studio in response to his ad.
Siegel seemed pleasantly surprised to have four applicants at once. “Dear friends!“ he greeted us, “this is a fan- tastic fit. I got a big order in yesterday from the Mountbattens. The Marquess of Milford Haven wants four family portraits as soon as possible: one of them in front of the cliffs of Dover, another landscape shot here in Cornwall, and two interior portraits at the family estate.“
So, he sent us off armed with the lat- est Rolleiflex from Franke & Heidecke. The job on offer would go to whoever the Mountbattens were most pleased with. Still, Siegel did warn us about possible “eccentric wishes“ from the family. That was putting it mildly. George Mount-
batten and his wife, Countess Nadejda, were more attracted to their own sex and both wanted their lovers in the picture. One in particular, the American Gloria Vanderbilt, always pushed herself to the foreground. Elizabeth and David, George and Nadejda’s children, also disregarded etiquette, appearing once next to the large indoor palm tree, then again behind Aristotle, their well-behaved little dog.
Twelve people (both family and friends) had to be arranged, together with the palm tree and Aristotle, and all that on the beach at Dover. Not only was I dependent on the weather, but even more so on the clients’ particular wishes. On the day of the photo shoot I received three separate letters detailing their re- quests.
When I opened these letters, I was speechless. Each of the three letters list- ed three very special requests, and some of these were conflicting. What kind of a family was this? David, for example, didn‘t want any guests standing in front of him in the photo, but on the other
hand didn‘t want his face to be seen. Ugh! As for the other members of the group, I was in the dark about their wish- es for the time being.
Fortunately, my competitors felt the same way. Between dealing with the difficult family demands, we found time to exchange some of our envelopes. We even found two envelopes lying in the sand and included them in this swap. Unfortunately, the positioning requests could only be exchanged as a complete package. This left us unable to resolve several conflicting requests like David‘s. After six swaps and a rough recollection of the family’s demands, Siegel‘s Rol- leiflex finally went into action. At least everyone behaved appropriately for the photo when I finally got them to smile with “Say Cheese!“
The moment of truth came two days later, when all the photos were developed and Eliot Siegel compared them with the Mountbattens‘ wishes. He had devised a complex point system for this purpose. He awarded six points for the clients whose
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Photos: Becker, Herold, iStock.com/ZaharovEvgeniy