As a little kid I was passionate about pottery and photography. I attended high school during the 60s in the suburbs of New Jersey. It was a pivotal decade where girls like me went from wearing circle pins, a-line skirts, matching shoes and pocketbooks, to blue jeans, bell bottoms and mini skirts. Half my generation and I went from accepting what we were taught to protesting the Vietnam War. 

At 18, I left home for Alfred University in Upstate New York, a school that had the best ceramic arts department in the country. While I loved the pottery classes, it snowed from October to May and the college was in the middle of nowhere! 

So, I hightailed it out of there and went to George Washington University, which was affiliated with the fabulous Corcoran School of Art. Besides liberal arts courses, I took a class in pottery and one in photography. But D.C. was full of politicians and lawyers who supported the Vietnam war. My dorm room was four blocks from the White House and “Tricky Dicky” (President Richard Nixon). This was too close for comfort, so I skedaddled out of there as well. 

I transferred into New York University School of the Arts and there I found my home. After graduating with a BFA in film and television, I was incredibly lucky to land a job as an apprentice film editor on a James Ivory/Ismail Merchant feature film that was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. 

I lived on the infamous St. Mark’s Place block between Second and Third Avenues in a $54/month rent controlled studio apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen and a pull chain toilet. Then sometime during the 70s I moved to a big loft on the corner of Fourth Street and Second Avenue, just off the Bowery. It was a fourth floor walk-up above a refrigerator store that was equidistant from the Electric Circus, CBGB’s of punk rock fame, the Hell’s Angels headquarters and Bill Graham’s legendary Fillmore East. One day I picked up my cameras, walked around the corner to the Fillmore and got permission to shoot Ike and Tina Turner. Those photographs became the cover and inside pages of their 1970-71 tour booklet and was my introduction into the wonderful, wild and weird world of rock and roll. 

As a young woman in my 20s, I felt as if I was living in the center of the universe and for years had no need to go above Fourteenth Street. The loft, which had an enormous

northfacing skylight, was my first photography studio. I often worked with professional models doing editorial fashion, beauty and nudes when I wasn’t on the road photographing the rock and roll greats of the 70s and 80s.