New York during the Factory years; Los Angeles for the twilight of the studio gods, the photographer has had impeccable timing.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, whose new documentary, e Out List, which premieres June 27 on HBO, likes to say that he has good timing. e photographer and lmmaker arrived in New York a sophisticated and eager 18-year-old from Florida just as Warhol’s Superstars were at the height of their fame. at was in 1970.

In his second week studying lm at Columbia University, he called up a family friend, the underground singer and actress Tally Brown, and said, “I’m here and I have a car,” to which Brown, who lived on 181st Street, replied, “Pick me up at 9 o’clock, we’re going to some parties.” Greenfield-Sanders didn’t waste time. Brown, an occasional entertainer at the celebrated Continental Baths and a regular in Warhol’s movies, was the young student’s entrée to a whole universe. “In the rst two weeks of being in New York I met Candy, Holly, Joe, Andy,” he says—and if you have to ask, Candy who?, you are either too young or too square.

Brown died in 1989, but Greenfield-Sanders remembers her as “a very, very overweight blues singer who was ab- solutely brilliant and fabulous, and wore over-the-shoulder ka ans and eyelashes out to here, almost like a drag queen.” She looked, in fact, a lot like her friend Divine. You can imagine the impression the parties must have made on a young man new to New York and hungry for experience. “My only regret is that I didn’t take pictures,” says Greenfield-Sanders. “ they were all incredible extroverts who would have loved to have been photographed, but I didn’t have enough sense to shoot them.”

He would not make that mistake again. If Greenfield-Sanders got his social education in the nightclubs of New York, he earned his professional stripes as a student at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where he agreed to photograph visiting speakers for the school’s archives. It was a job no one else seemed to want, but it turned into an unexpected education. e glamour days of Hollywood were over by 1974, but many of its bright- est stars were still alive. Greenfield-Sanders got to photograph and learn from the best of them. Bette Davis reprimanded him for shooting her from below, then suggested he chau eur her around town for a week as she tutored him on the work of such legendary photographers as George Hurrell; Hitchcock took issue with the posi- tion of his lights only to invite him back to his studio for tips from his own lighting crew.

When he returned to New York with his new wife, Karin, in 1979, the city was emerging from its bankrupt, white flight, “Ford to City: Drop Dead” era, and the couple settled in a converted church rectory in the East Village—another timely decision—where Greenfield-Sanders set up his studio. It’s a wonderful space, standing aloof from the rest of the neighborhood and varnished by time, like something out of a child’s storybook. Lucky visitors—and I’ve been one—are sometimes invited to join him for a casual lunch of bagels and lox from Russ & Daughters, the Lower East Side institution that has been selling smoked sh and caviar since 1914. Many of the walls are hung with art by his daughter, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, or by artist friends, whose portraits he’s taken over the years. His father-in-law, Joop Sanders, was one of the founders of abstract expressionism, which is how he came to shoot William de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and, well, the list goes on. Greenfield-Sanders reckons he has shot over 5,000 people, which brings to mind Quentin Crisp’s hopelessly romantic desire to meet everyone in the world at least once. But ask Greenfield-Sanders which of his many portraits he would take with him to a desert island, and he replies, “a self-portrait.” Very diplomatic.

But back to Greenfield-Sanders’s impeccable timing: New York during the Factory years; Los Angeles for the twilight of the studio gods; then back to New York to shoot artists just as the city’s art scene exploded. In the ‘80s, like so many photographers, he was discovered by fashion—shooting artists such as de Kooning (again) for Comme des Garcons. It was a sensation, soon imitated by the Gap, but Greenfield-Sanders was too canny to be seduced by the slick, ckle glamour of high fashion, aware that while art photographers can cross over into com- mercial work, the reverse maneuver is harder.