Pablo Picasso with French model Bettina Graziani in his Cannes Villa, La Californie, 1955.
Rivals Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe making small talk before their match at Wimbledon in 1980. Well, more McEnroe talking and Borg just...not.
"I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said."
—William F. Buckley, Jr.
An imperious Nero and Gerhard Richter’s Frau Marlow (1964) share the floor space in Cy Twombly’s deconstructed Rome villa. Photographed by Horst P. Horst, 1966.
Return of the "Discovery" expedition from Antartica in 1931 (the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration).
*Those who did not get the memo about camel and navy were excluded from the group portrait, and consequently, the annuls of history.
A 20 year-old John McEnroe relaxes in his hotel room* in 1979. He would go on to win the U.S. Open that same year.
*That lamp probably called his ball out.
Jacques Cousteau and crew examine Italian pottery discovered in a 2,200 year old Greek ship (January, 1954).
Pablo Picasso with Indian headdress (a gift from Gary Cooper). Photographed at Picasso’s Villa La Californie in Cannes by David Douglas Duncan, 1960.
"We have your satellite. If you want it back, send 20 billion in Martian money. No funny business or you will never see it again."*
*Written on a wall in a hall at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, California, after losing contact with the Mars Polar Lander in December 1999.
William Eggleston at home. Among being lauded for his work as a photographer, his taste in wallpaper, though lesser known, is just as deft.
Spanish matador Antonio Ordóñez getting a pep talk from long time friend Ernest Hemingway before a bullfight in 1959.
If Hemingway gave Ordóñez the same advice he gave friend A.E. Hotchner the day Hotchner became a matador, it went something like this:
"You only have to do three things. Number one: Look tragic... Number two: when you get to the ring, people are watching you. Don't lean on anything; it's ugly for the suit. And number three: if the photographers come toward you, put your right foot forward; it's sexier."