Conversations with Eric Kroll

After shooting with Renee Wednesday night and into Thursday morning, I drove her up to Eric Kroll's place in Silverlake, from which she would leave for New York City.

Eric Kroll is not to everyone's tastes, but I was glad to meet him and thrilled just to be inside his home: on one wall, the huge Helmut Newton portrait of Andy Warhol; elsewhere, work by Larry Clark, Bunny Yeager, Eric Stanton, John Willie; a nude of the late model Gia.

We had a lot to talk about, since we've been shooting a lot of the same models, and from the moment we met he was insisting I show him my work. Of one piece, he said, "I think I've shot this girl." (True enough: she had worked with him the same day she shot with me.)

Looking at the image with his editor's eye he decided that, "this is good, I think." He liked my work but worried that the technique was getting in the way of the message. I'm supposed to send him more images at Taschen Books.

Renee was mostly silent as we sat on the porch and talked, but when he went into the other room to fetch a handful of vintage Bizarre magazines she said that she was seeing him in a different light. I wish I had a better idea what she meant.

Around 1:30 in the morning, when she announced that she was going to take a shower, she may have been a little scared when he said he would take one too . . . at least until he clarified that he'd wait until she was done.