In the 1990s New York, the information Superhighway was a deer path through the vast woods. A time when Paparazzi wasn’t a bad word, and Agents, Managers and PR people would invite the photographers to their events in hopes that we would photograph their celebrity client to run in the gossip section of New York City's nightlife publications. I was a photographer in search of celebrities and had to speculate, guess, and make judgment calls about where and when they would make an appearance. I networked with Doormen, Groupies, Party Crashers, Chauffeurs, Editors, Writers, Business Owners, and Bartenders, and that was to receive information which was spotty at best. I knew that certain letters (CLS) on the license plate meant a celebrity car service as opposed to a regular black car. I knew the back doors of the Plaza hotel, the escalator in the rear of the Ritz Carlton, where the SNL cast would go for drinks after wrap, or when the guests arrived for the Letterman show, and the side door they would go through. After I captured the image the celebrity portrait was published in my column in Black Book magazine. The negatives, the leftover prints, or the slides went into a shoebox and a cardboard container and was forgotten.
Life was good, then Princess Di happened, and we all had to stand behind a barrier and then the iPhone happened and now we are known as the paparazzi. Then the Twin Towers fell, and NYC went through a collective mourning.
American Royalty is comprised of the images in the shoebox, all shot on film and with Celebrities who welcomed my lens and the attention.
Author Biography:
Rossa Cole is the son of William Rossa Cole and Galen Williams two literary giants from New York City. William was an American editor, anthologist, columnist, author, and writer of light verse. He produced around 75 books, most of them anthologies. Many of his books were honored by the American Library Association. He worked as a publicity director at Alfred A. Knopf, publicity director and editor at Simon & Schuster, and, with Viking Press. Cole wrote the regular columns "Trade Winds" in Saturday Review; and contributed to Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. Cole was memorialized in a poem by Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Rossa's mother is Galen Williams is the former director of New York’s famed 92nd Street Y and founder of Poet’s & Writers magazine. Poets & Writers has grown into one of the largest nonprofit organizations in the country for writers of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She was a young mother with a passion for literature, who grew up watching her parents write in isolation, she started Poets & Writers over 30 years ago.
Rossa Cole: “My father and my mother were both big in the New York Literary scene, I like to say that I grew up ‘At the knees of the greats’, meaning I was only tall enough to see the knees of authors like James Baldwin, George Plimpton, Seamus Heaney, Betty Friedan, Joseph Heller and the likes at the cocktail parties my parents would drag me to. As a result, I had no “starstruck” in me, an actor was just a person in the arts, just like me."
Rossa Cole - has more than 30 years’ experience shooting people. Rossa's shooting style is unobtrusive yet omnipresent. Rossa was the staff photographer for the East Hampton Star, he also shot extensively on the streets and clubs of NYC in the 90's, before Paparazzi was a bad word. Rossa had a column in Black Book Magazine called, "1,000 Words" he was a frequent contributor to New York's Daily News and Hamptons Magazine. His portraits are personable and poetic, showing true character.
