Intimate Pictures From a Legendary Photographer (Published 2015)

• Dec. 2, 2015

“Hardly anyone keeps albums anymore,’’ says the photographer Peter Schlesinger as we flip through stacks of embossed picture diaries in his New York loft. ‘‘But I guess no one really did then either.’’ The perfectly preserved, chronologically organized volumes begin soon after 1966, the year the California-born Schlesinger, then 18, met the British painter David Hockney, who was teaching a summer course at U.C.L.A. This was the beginning of a love affair that would take Schlesinger to London, straight into the eye of a twister of bohemian glamour and creativity. While studying painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, he began to capture the most magnetic personalities in the couple’s social circle with his Pentax camera. There was the fashion designer Ossie Clark and his partner Celia Birtwell, the model Amanda Lear, Manolo Blahnik, Paloma Picasso, Cecil Beaton and the man who would eventually become Schlesinger’s lifelong partner, the Swedish-born photographer Eric Boman. With a natural, snapshot-like aesthetic, Schlesinger managed to conjure happy, blink-and-they’re-gone moments in time. There were weekend trips to Beaton’s country house, wine-drenched lunches by the pool at Tony Richardson’s in the South of France and late-night dancing at everyone’s favorite underground club in London, Yours or Mine. These effervescent images became the basis of his first book: ‘‘Checkered Past,’’ published in 2003. Schlesinger recently released a second volume, ‘‘Peter Schlesinger: A Photographic Memory 1968-1989’’ ($50, Damiani), which includes some of his greatest (and formerly unseen) hits from the London years plus images from his life after he and Boman moved to Manhattan 37 years ago. Schlesinger, now a ceramic artist, has lived and worked with Boman in the same former girdle factory in the Flatiron district for these past decades. Four months a year they decamp to their house in Bellport, N.Y., where Boman bakes and Schlesinger tends the garden. ‘‘These days I take more pictures of my plants than anything else,’’ he says. ‘‘But they’re my friends, too.’’