Model Behavior

The irrational exuberance of Bill Hayward

S0ren Kierkegaard, according to Susan Sontag in her incomparable compilation of essays On Photography, feared that the advent of the camera would create one single portrait of us all, obliterating the treasure of our differences. "Everything is being done to make us look all exactly the same," he lamented. Now, Kierkegaard was no slouch, but a 50-ish and impish New York photographer named Bill Hayward would seem to take issue with the eminent Dane. This month, Bad Behavior, his new book of assisted self-portraits, will be released by Rizzoli. It is an amazing and enticing amalgamation of portraits in which the sitters declare the ambience by painting and costuming themselves and by decorating the white backdrop that Hayward provides. Hayward, being a worldly flaneur (and voyeur?), has assembled a dance card of (self-) portrait subjects running from the late Quentin Crisp to Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, formerly of Talking Heads, now of Tom Tom Club. (No David Byrne, boohoo.) In an oblique sort of manner, Hayward's book brings to mind the old JumpBook of Philippe Halsman, although with Hayward's haywires jumping is the very least of it, my dear. The photographer himself, though not a household name as yet, did not just fall off the banana truck. A full two decades back, his first book, Cat People (sly, sly), featuring endless culturati and their favorite felines, sold more than 30,000 copies, and the first editions became the sort of cultish thing ex-husbands and ex-wives fight over (along with the old Bobby Short albums, to be sure) when the time arrives to agree to disagree. Carter Ratcliff, who knows the forks, contributed the perceptive introduction, Hayward stood alongside the tripod, and the portraits were, well, themselves. Bad Behavior indeed!

RICHARD MERKIN