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Chelsea: arts&lifestyles
Photographing the Chelsea Hotel, inside and out By Ed Hamilton In the Hotel Chelsea, you can’t escape the art. In the lobby alone there’s a Larry Rivers painting by the door, a Philip Taaffe painting by the fireplace, and not one but two Donald Baechler paintings, one by the window and another by the desk. But it’s the artists themselves, and their creative brethren —the writers, musicians and other untamed souls of the Chelsea — who inspired photographer Linda Troeller’s “Hotel Chelsea: Inside Out” project. A petite, red-haired woman with a friendly manner and an intelligent gaze, Troeller moved into the Hotel Chelsea in 1994, where she has lived in the same small room for the past 12 years, the last four of them with her husband Lothar Troeller, also a photographer. She is well known for two books, “Healing Waters” (Aperture, 1998), in which she photographed hot springs in Europe and America as the background for her artistic compositions, and “The Erotic Lives of Women”(Scalo, 1998), which, Troeller jokes, expands upon her, interest in the topic of “hot” older women.
Troeller’s Hotel Chelsea project was also inspired by the changing character of New York, and especially of the Chelsea neighborhood, which has become the target of money-hungry developers in the past few years. “Real estate moguls are encroaching on landmark architecture and mythic symbols,” Troeller says. “When a hotel chain made the Chelsea’s owners a large offer last spring, it became clear to me that we could be moved by the flick of the corporate wand.” Propelled by a renewed sense of urgency, Troeller began to sort through and edit the images she had already collected, all the while shooting more photographs of this iconic hotel. She also began to conduct written interviews with current and former residents, including luminaries like Cristo and Jean Claude, beat writer Herbert Huncke, party hostess Serena Bass and painter Sir David Remfry, whose work also hangs in the lobby. “The Chelsea Hotel has been embodying and defending an alternative tradition since the Beats,” Troeller says. “It’s a safe haven because it’s a place of artistic acceptance.” In her color photos, Troeller uses the juxtaposition of forms and the subtle interplay of light and shadow to capture the essence of what attracts and holds the building’s diverse residents. In one striking image, the fashion designer Zaldy stands in a stark bathroom, the windows of which have been inexplicably painted over, his face shrouded in shadow to reflect the same sense of opacity and enigma that belongs to the building itself. In another, the writer Victor Bockris sits, wise and owlish, beneath a collection of snapshots and notes scrawled on bits of paper and tacked to the plaster wall, referencing the crannies and compartments of a well-stuffed mind. It was while photographing Bockris, in fact, that Troeller herself became the subject of a documentary, “Linda Troeller, A Photographer’s Portrait,” due out in 2008. The Canadian filmmaker, Jeff McKay, who received a Manitoba Arts Council grant to finance the project, checked into the room next to Troeller’s at the Chelsea and filmed her creating portraits of Bockris, painter Robert Lambert, and Vogue fashion director Sally Singer. In a way, the diverse mix of residents of the Hotel Chelsea mirrors Troeller’s own manifold interests, which include everything from fashion photography to her two-decade-long involvement in AIDS education and activism. Lately, there has been renewed interest in her “TB-AIDS Diary,” a project she completed in 1988 in words and images. “TB-AIDS Diary” (www.tbaidsdiary.com) tells the parallel stories of two patients, one with TB — Linda Troeller’s own mother, who spent time in a sanitarium in the 1930s — and one with AIDS, focusing on how the stigma attached to the respective diseases affects the patients’ treatment, with an eye to using the lessons learned from the earlier epidemic to inform our perceptions of the later. “Over the last few years,” Troeller says, “we have witnessed not only the rapid increase of AIDS in many countries worldwide, but also the activation of TB in the homeless and drug users, and now the vast increase of TB in AIDS patients.”
At one point in our conversation, Troeller’s husband called to explain that he would be home late that evening, as he was attending an art auction. When Troeller hung up, she said, “He was very apologetic. Apparently he’s forgotten that it was my idea in the first place.” Troeller had suggested the art auction as a way to have Lothar out of the house while we conducted our interview. “Well, let him think he owes me one,” she said jokingly. Troeller has been awarded numerous grants and awards for her photographs, and travels abroad frequently to teach and to exhibit her work. It was on one of these trips that she met Lothar. In 2000, she was teaching at the Summer Art Academy in Salzburg, and Lothar was her student. When she asked for volunteers for her study on “The Erotic Lives of Men,” Lothar was the only one bold enough to raise his hand. His courage paid off: the couple was married at New York’s National Arts Club in 2004. Over the past summer, Troeller attended the Arles Rencontres, a photography festival in Provence, France, where she showed a portfolio of her Hotel Chelsea photographs to a panel of curators, editors and publishers. She was awarded the Jurors’ Prize. Singer” left, and “Helen Hunt, Woody Allen Film Set at the Chelsea Hotel, ‘Curse of the Jade Scorpion.’” With such an interesting project on the table, people are often amazed to discover that Troeller hasn’t yet found a publisher for her Hotel Chelsea book. When asked to explain, she says, “I find that publishers tend to want a book about the celebrities who have lived at the hotel. They want shots of Bob Dylan standing in front of his door, or Patti Smith on the staircase. But what you find is that in most cases those photos just don’t exist. The Chelsea is not a place like CBGB’s where the cameras are clicking away constantly. It’s a place where people come to live and create, to find inspiration and to recharge their batteries. ‘Hotel Chelsea: Inside Out’ is an artistic interpretation of the atmosphere of the Chelsea, of what it’s like to live in an environment that supports the creative lifestyle.” Troeller paused to reflect, before going on to add, “I suppose in a way the book is about the famous people, but it’s about their struggle, which is a struggle that all artists go through, and their artistic dream, which is a dream we all can share.”
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Photo by Linda Troeller
