HE IS ONLY THIRTY-EIGHT HERE, IN MY PORTRAITS, ON A BOOK TOUR PROMOTING HIS SHORT STORY COLLECTION EINSTEIN’S MONSTERS. Twenty years younger than I am today. (I’m sorry, but I do this math in my head whenever someone significant dies, and especially if I’ve photographed them.) I was a big fan, and I’m pretty sure he was one of the first non-rock and roll people I ever photographed.
Martin Amis was very firmly a baby boomer but his books – especially titles like Dead Babies, Success and Money – were a very big deal for Generation X, and he was an honorary member of our cohort. I was happy to get this assignment, and anxious about pulling it off. The conditions weren’t ideal – candid portraits, shot in the huge dining room of a big downtown hotel across from city hall. But I was too close to the start of my career to be picky, and I did the best I could.
He has died at 73, the same age as his famous father, in whose shadow he only briefly worked. He outlived his friend Christopher Hitchens by nearly a dozen years; I briefly imagined the old friends reunited, but then I remembered how risible they’d both have considered any such vision. And he looks so young here; we’d put him on the cover of Nerve! magazine, sharing the page with the Butthole Surfers – the sort of writer our largely post-punk readers would have appreciated.
I had barely owned my first medium format camera – a Mamiya C330 – for a month or two when I took these photos, still struggling with the new format but thankfully just past making my first big mistakes with the unwieldy machine. The light from the big windows in the atrium restaurant at the Sheraton Centre wasn’t that bad, and there was enough of it for me to get sharp frames while Amis divided his attention between the interviewer and me. I certainly didn’t imagine the day I’d be revisiting these photos like this.
Rick McGinnis Photographs 