The Concert Artists Guild celebrated it’s 60th anniversary last week with a concert at WQXR in NYC. Sarah Wolfson (below) sang a piece from Kurt Weill that was just amazing. I have been photographing their classical musicians for a few years. Everyone from Phylis Chen who plays classical music on toy pianos,  the violinist Michi Wiancko and  her indie rock alter ego Kono MIchi, classical pianist and snow boarder Alpin Hong (above), Jenny Koh with her  Stradivarius on Delancy St and Sebastian Baverstam who played cello for me on a street in the East Village. Rock on CAG.

We just survived an earthquake and Hurricane Irene in NYC – high winds and floods but we escaped what could have been a very serious disaster.

I shot this photo of a soldier below Canal Street a couple days after 9/11 – the city below 14th street was closed except for army, police, firemen and medical services. The air was polluted, stores shuttered, life as we knew it had stopped. Those of us that were in the area volunteered to do what we could, from making sandwiches for the responders on the West Side Highway, to collecting medical and clothing supplies from stores. But there was a feeling of unity in the city, people were actually helping each other. Since then we have seen corporate greed destroy a lot of what we had built

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 marks the start of another time that years later has had an aftermath but not an end.

Attorney Benjamin Brafman came to my New York studio for a shoot for YRB Magazine six years ago. He was a small man, impeccably groomed, wearing the most beautiful suit and cuff links. Powerful and charming in person, his clientele includes Sean “P-Diddy” Combs, Jay Z, mafia hitman Antony Senter, nighclub impresario Peter Gatien, Michael Jackson, and Dominique Strauss- Kahn.

Strauss-Kahn hired Brafman three months ago after his arrest on sexual assault charges and today the Manhattan DA has decided to ask a judge to dismiss the case.

Brafman, a self described “White, Jewish lawyer’ was immortalized by Jay-Z in “Welcome To New York City” : ‘Got Brafman defendin’ me / ‘Cause NY will miss me / If I’m locked in a penitentiary.’

Sometime in the 1990’s I went to Nashville on assignment for a British magazine to shoot ‘Fan Fair’. The hot and dusty Nashville County fairground was filled with cowboys and cowgirls, rhinestone outfits, beer and BBQ ribs. Billed as the festival where fans get autograph sessions and pictures with the stars, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, a young Clint Black and many more graciously signed autographs for lines of fans – and I met one of my idols Johnny Cash who sang ‘I walk the Line’ to me as I photographed him at the Johnny Cash Museum.