Diane Keaton on photography

Image from book Clown Paintings, edited by Diane Keaton




Most of us know of Diane Keaton as a Hollywood actress, with many award nominations to her credit, winning her Academy Award for Best Actress in 1977 for her role in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall – which also won her a Golden Globe Award and a BAFTA in the same year.

However, if I were to tell you that Diane Keaton has been awarded the 2008 ICP Trustees Award by the International Center of Photography in New York, you might wonder what’s going on. The fact is, apart from her career in acting, Diane Keaton is an avid photographer and curator of photographic collections.

Her contribution to American photography can be stated as (and I quote from ICP’s website):

“…outside of Keaton’s many acting, directing, film production, and philanthropic pursuits, she has long pursued her interest in the photographic medium. Several collections of her own photographs have been published, and she has edited or co-edited multiple collections of vintage work, commonly focusing on photographers who are forgotten or ignored. The latter include Still Life (1983), Mr. Salesman (1993), Local News (1999), and her forthcoming collection of images from Fort Worth, Texas, Bill Wood’s Business, to be published in conjunction with the ICP exhibition of the same name in May 2008.”

The news of Diane Keaton’s 2008 ICP Trustees Award win is not really a big surprise to me. I had been fortunate enough to learn of Ms Keaton’s devotion to photography earlier; and was reminded of it upon reading an article in the New York Review of Books a few months ago. The article, by Larry McMurtry, titled Diane Keaton on Photography, had some wonderful things to say about Ms Keaton as a person and her contribution to American photography.

Here’s an extract:

Over the years, sometimes with the help of the New York writer-curator Marvin Heiferman, Diane has sniffed out collections or archives of photographs that she feels are unjustly overlooked, neglected, or lost — like, very often, the tarnished human beings who appear in them. Once convinced, she mothers these archives and attempts to arrange for their exhibition and safekeeping and, so far, publication in five books to which she’s written prefaces…

Her eye, however, is broadly welcoming and embracing, as are her sympathies. Ron Galella, the Dean, as he was known among paparazzi and their subjects from the Sixties on, once shot Diane in rollers and yet she easily forgives him:

“Lovers, who, with the turn of the head once had the power to crush, or lift me into the realms of impossible elation are gone, gone, gone. Yet they have returned with the flash of Ron’s camera. I see our lives, and am cognizant of the absurdity of some of my choices, even though they were such very sweet encounters for awhile. But what I am ultimately confronted with is the hard fact that there is no permanence for any of us... ever. Permanence can only be found in the immortality promised by the results of the click of a camera. Like it or not, life moves on as quickly as the photograph doesn’t.

In the end I’m glad to be among the Dean’s cavalcade of celebrities, not just for the recognition value, which I can’t deny I once pursued with a relish I am ashamed of, but also because of the education he gave me.”

[Citation: (a) Diane Keaton ICP Trustees Award, ICP’s Infinity Awards 2008; (b) Diane Keaton on Photography by Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 17, 8 November 2007; (c) Clown Paintings image courtesy Amazon.com.]