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BL!NK: Cher made for ‘sweet and mellow’ subject

By ANTHONY BARBOZA

Cher strikes a seductive pose as photographer

Anthony Barboza shoots images for a New York Times Magazine layout.

Date: November 1987

Location: Los Angeles

Published: The New York Times Magazine

“The New York Times Sunday Magazine called me and asked me to shoot Cher in Los Angeles. At the time, I was living between New York and L.A. because my wife, Laura Carrington, was working on the soap opera ‘General Hospital.’

“The Times sent my portfolio to Cher’s agents with mainly black people in it. Cher’s agents sent the book back, and said, ‘Do you have more with white people than what’s in your book?’ The Times said, ‘This is who we’re sending and that’s it. Take it or leave it.’ They backed me up. So they said, ‘OK.’

“We arrived at Cher’s house at 9 a.m. It was right near the famous Beverly Hills Hotel. I brought with me a black assistant from California. The house was shaped like a pyramid with the top of the pyramid cut off with glass on top so that the light comes through. I said to myself, ‘Wow, this is a big house.’ I eventually noticed that there was a house behind her house, which was a gym.

“We were greeted at the door and we stepped into a beautiful, giant living room with the light coming in from the top, with all of these couches and stuff. We put our equipment down while Cher was upstairs. At that time, we were downstairs with her makeup and hair people. Someone told me that they had told her that there’s a Rastafarian downstairs (laughs).

“The assistants came downstairs, looked at me and went back up, so they must have told her that. Eventually a guy comes down and says, ‘Cher wants to see your lighting, because if she doesn’t like your lighting she’s not going to do the shoot.’

“So I did a Polaroid, and there was beautiful lighting in there, and I combined it with my strobe lighting. They took the pictures to her and, soon after, a guy came down and said, ‘We love it, we’ll shoot.’

“Now, at this point, I’m nervous as hell, I don’t know what to think. So she comes down and the first thing she came down in was a pair of jeans, so I shot her on a couch and she loved the Polaroids I was taking. After she got to meet me, she just loved me. We shot from 9 in the morning and stayed until almost 9 at night. We were there all day. After the first shot she said, ‘You know, there’s plenty of food in the refrigerator, just help yourself. Whatever you want, Tony, whatever you want.’

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“For the second shot, she had me go upstairs with her, where she had an unbelievable amount of clothes in a closet as big as her bedroom. I picked out another outfit and we went down to shoot her in that. It was a sexy-looking outfit, like something she’d wear on stage.

“We had a great time together. She was really wonderful to work with. She was so sweet and mellow. I was shocked that we had stayed so long. It took a long time to do the makeup and stuff, but she was very gracious. So after the shooting was over, we were sitting and talking and I mentioned to her that, ‘Your people didn’t want me to shoot you because they wanted a portfolio with more white people in it.’ But she said that she didn’t know anything about it.

“These were the last shots Cher took before she won an Academy Award in February of 1988. After that, she stopped doing photo sessions for magazines, sending them to buy the pictures from me instead. One of the photos ran on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal, but they were sold around the world through a stock agency, Contact Press Images. I got $250 to do the shoot and wound up making more than $30,000 from the sales of the photos.—

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Bl!nk:A photographer’s experience between exposures Today we introduce a new, and very different, feature called BL!NK, which will appear monthly in features section of The Standard-Times. In his own words, as told to writer Sean McCarthy, New Bedford native Anthony Barboza will share memories, along with his photos, of some of the world-famous subjects he’s photographed in his long and illustrious career. When asked which subject would inaugurate this new feature, Barboza did not hesitate – Cher, whom he met a month before the release of “Moonstruck,” the film that would shortly thereafter earn her an Oscar for best actress. Look for this column every month at South Coast Today.

Next month’s subject: director David Lynch.

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