My best shot / Martin Schreiber / Madonna

'She was very comfortable with her body, and with being shot by 15 students' ...
Madonna, photographed by Martin Schreiber

Photographer Martin Schreiber's best shot

'I needed a nude and a 20-year-old called Madonna showed up. She got $30'

Hannah Pool
Wed 24 jun 2009

I

n 1979, I was teaching nude photography at Parsons school in New York. I needed models for the course – and one day a 20-year-old called Madonna Ciccone showed up. She was just another citizen, a girl trying to make ends meet. She was quiet, taciturn. I'm not sure it was something she enjoyed. She did it for the money, in this case $30. She was relaxed, composed, did as asked. Some people are stiff, some are there to do a job, some give a little more. She was in the middle: she did what she was told but nothing extra.

I was into the body as a sculptural form in those days. I'd bend or twist models to see what I could create. It was experimental. She was very comfortable with her body, and with being shot by 15 students. When you're doing nudes, you have to have everything planned. The model has to be comfortable or you won't get a lot out of her. It was February and I had two heaters on to keep her warm.

In January 1985, I saw her on the cover of Interview magazine and thought: "Wow, I know her." Five months later, she was on the cover of Time magazine – as Madonna. I called the art director at Penthouse. One thing led to another and, eventually, Playboy published a series of photographs, in September 1985.

Shooting nudes is tricky. What are you trying to do? When is it a nude; when is it erotica? There is nothing erotic about these pictures. Erotica suggests sex; these pictures don't suggest sex. They are studies of the body – it's sculpture with a camera. Currently, I'm doing a series of nudes of women over 50. I want to show that their bodies are beautiful.

If I had my time again, I would have done more with her, changed the lighting, with maybe a bit more on her face, or tried a longer lens. I'd love to shoot her again in exactly the same positions – to see how she has evolved.

Curriculum vitae

Born: Prague, 1946.

Studied: "Fort Monmonth, New Jersey. I was drafted, then went to army photo lab school."

Inspiration: "Bill Brandt did great nudes. ­Peter Lindberg does great work, too."

High point: "Now – but also when my first book came out in 1981."

Low point: "When you don't work or don't sell. When you have a show and nothing ­happens."

Dream subject: "I'd love to travel and photograph indigenous peoples."

THE GUARDIAN

 

Claire Keegan

Claire Keegan wins €25,000 Davy Byrnes award

CLAIRE KEEGAN was last night announced the winner of the €25,000 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009, at a presentation in the…

Rosita Boland
Tuesday June 23, 2009

CLAIRE KEEGAN was last night announced the winner of the €25,000 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009, at a presentation in the Dublin pub made famous by Joyce.

Keegan's winning short story, Foster, was chosen from a shortlist of six writers by American fiction writer Richard Ford. Ford was not present, but Caroline Walsh, Literary Editor of The Irish Times, read from his winning citation, in which he praised the writer's "sparkling talent".

" Fosterputs on display an imposing array of formal beauties at the service of a deep and profound talent. It tells a conceivably simple story – a young child given up to grieving foster parents and then woefully wrested home again.

“Claire Keegan makes the reader sure that there are no simple stories, and that art is essential to life.”

Ford wrote of Keegan’s “thrilling” instinct for the right words and her “patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality”.

Walsh presented the award, organised by literary magazine The Stinging Flyand administered by Declan Meade, in association with The Irish Times, and sponsored by Davy Byrnes.

Accepting the prize, Keegan (41) told the thronged room that on the day of the February deadline to submit entries, it snowed in Wexford, where she lives, and she couldn’t get her car out to go to the post office. Thus she walked across the snowy fields until she found a postbox, and had dropped the envelope into it before belatedly tormenting herself by wondering how the postman was going to collect it that day. But clearly the Wexford postmen are undaunted by a few snowflakes, and her story duly made it to Dublin in time.

What will she do with her winnings? “I might buy a new desk,” she confessed modestly. “I have two sort of half-desks taped together at the moment, so I might go mad and buy a new one.”

Keegan, whose rural upbringing on a Wicklow farm has consistently informed her sensibility as a writer, has published two collections of short stories, Antarctica(1999) and Walk the Blue Fields(2007). She studied at Loyola University in New Orleans, the University of Wales, and Trinity College Dublin. Among her many previous awards are the Macaulay Fellowship, The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor himself.

Runners-up Mary Leland, Molly McCloskey, Eoin McNamee, Kathleen Murray, and Susan Stairs were each presented with €1,000. The competition attracted an entry of more than 800 stories, 30 of which were selected as a longlist for Ford to adjudicate.

This is the second time Davy Byrnes has sponsored the competition: the first was in 2004, and the winner on that occasion, Anne Enright, has since won the Man Booker Prize.

IRISH TIMES

Man Booker Prize 1990 / Possession by AS Byatt

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1990

Booker club: Possession by AS Byatt

Book club: A zest for pastiche

John Mullan on Possession by AS Byatt. Week one: satire

John Mullan
Saturday 20 June 2009

B

efore AS Byatt wrote Possession she had been teaching English literature at University College London, and it is often observed that her fiction has an academic quality. Possession is seamed with learning and allusion, like the writing of Randolph Henry Ash, the great Victorian poet whom it creates. Yet this story, whose hero and heroine, Roland and Maud, are academic researchers, is an acid satire on academia. Sometimes it offers secret pleasures of recognition to those readers who might have been through the same seminars and known the same professional absurdities as the author herself.

Famously, Byatt has composed passages of 19th-century verse for her two poets, and has invented extracts from Victorian journals and letters. Her zest for pastiche also runs to academic documents. Possession includes mock versions of academic citations and titles, footnotes to scholarly editions and even extracts from imaginary critical essays. Christabel LaMotte, whose unsuspected love affair with Randolph Ash is discovered in the course of the novel, has been made the possession of feminist literary criticism, which is the special target of Byatt's satire. Her poetry is analysed in articles with titles such as "A Docile Rage: Christabel LaMotte's Ambivalent Domesticity" or "Melusina, Builder of Cities: a Subversive Female Cosmogony". Maud herself has written the latter; she is destined to find the more human truth about her chosen author.

Like many satirists, Byatt has given us representative "characters" of a profession. There is the dour Professor James Blackadder, who at Cambridge learned the arts of discouraging aspiring students at the feet of FR Leavis. (The novel includes a vivid cameo of one of Leavis's classes at Downing College, where the "lean and agile don" gives a crowded room of undergraduates a demonstration of "analytic brilliance" by enticing them into errors.)

There is the irresistible Fergus Wolff, who has trumped Roland to the only tenured job in the English department of Prince Albert College by developing a specious expertise in literary theory. He has used post-structuralism to seduce Maud at a conference in Paris on "Gender and the Autonomous Text". His own paper on "the phallogocentric structuration of Balzac's hermaphrodite heroines" shows him au fait with the theories of French critic Luce Irigaray, and allows him to lure Maud to his hotel bedroom. ("We two are the most intelligent people here, you know".)

And there are the Americans. The villain of Possession is Professor Mortimer P Cropper of Robert Dale Owen University in New Mexico, who uses his wiles and the unlimited wealth of his institution to take possession of Ash. He invites the knowing reader to think of those rich American universities that have acquired status by buying up the manuscripts of famous British authors. Rather less odious is his compatriot, Leonora Stern, Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Tallahassee. Large, loud and irrepressible, Leonora has made a successful career of finding traces of repressed erotic feeling in Victorian women's writing. Naturally, Leonora's intellectual bravado cloaks ignorance in humbler matters: when she receives a crucial letter about Christabel LaMotte from a French woman she has to ask Maud to perform a close translation. "I got the general gist of it ... What it is to have an English education."

Some of the satire will be obscure to the majority of readers. Leonora's first husband, we learn, was "a happily meticulous New Critic" who "had totally failed to survive Leonora and the cut-throat ideological battles" of literary theory. Only academic readers will recognise that the school of criticism to which poor Nathaniel Stern belonged - dedicated to the fine nuances of highly wrought literary texts - was as doomed as his marriage. Leonora has decided that "the empowering force" behind Christabel LaMotte's writing was her "lesbian sexuality". This, of course, is in the absence of evidence of any actual lesbian attachment. Writing to Maud to persuade her to take part in an academic conference on "the study of the female erotic in nineteenth-century poetry", Leonora acknowledges that ... "I accept that her inhibitions made her characteristically devious and secret." Many a reader who has studied English at university since the 1980s will have enjoyed recognising the recent academic habit of finding evidence for a theory in the very lack of evidence.

The narrative of Possession is an admonition to the literary academic. Roland explains to Maud that he works on Ash's poems be cause they were "what stayed alive, when I'd been taught and examined everything else". "That's it," she replies. "What could survive our education." Roland and Maud uncover an unsuspected love affair between two long-dead writers. In doing so, they show - empirically, irrefutably - that the most sophisticated academic analyses of LaMotte's and Ash's work have been wrong. Literary academics, it seems, invite satire, for they bring most ingenuity to what they cannot know.

• John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. 

THE GUARDIAN

Digested classics / Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

DIGESTED CLASSICS

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

John Crace

Sat 6 Jun 2009

Bond's eyes narrowed in ironical satisfaction as he casually palmed a tip to the casino vestiaire and returned to the Hotel Splendide. The concierge passed him a note. Ten million francs was on its way from M; it would have to do. He checked his room for uninvited guests. The safe, empty room sneered at him; Bond sneered back before lighting his 170th cigarette of the day. He placed his .38 Colt under the pillow and his brutal, ironical face on top.

Two weeks before, a memorandum about Le Chiffre had reached M. The 18-stone flagellant's brothels were losing business and there was a 50m franc deficit in the union funds he controlled for Smersh. There was only one man for the job.

Bond gave Moneypenny a passing glance on his way into M's office; she would have been desirable but for her eyes, which were too quizzical. He would pass on her. "Here's the dope," M said. "Pose as a Jamaican plantocrat and clean out Le Chiffre at baccarat."

"You mean there's no gadgets, no exotic locations outside northern France and I won't even get to kill anyone?" Bond asked wryly.

"That's right. Just a lot of very heavy betting."

"Ding Dong."

"I said betting, Bond. Mathis will keep you covered."

Some of this back story conveniently passed through Bond's mind over a breakfast of seven scrambled eggs and a side of bacon. He looked up to see Mathis by his side.

"You'll be pleased with your number two," Mathis winked. "Especially her protuberances."

Bond groaned. What were they sending him a woman for? It wasn't a bloody picnic. Damn it, women were for recreation. At least Felix Leiter, the CIA chap, was around. He went outside and fired up his 4.5-litre supercharged Bentley before returning to the Negresco baroque of Casino Royale.

"This is Miss Vesper Lynd," said Mathis.

Her bodice was lasciviously tight across her pert breasts and her ironical eyes looked at Bond with ironical disinterest. "I'll bring you luck, Double-0 Jamms," she whispered.

He would sleep with her later, he thought; once the job was done. He rose from the table and walked outside. An explosion sent him tumbling to the ground; he picked himself up, removing charred flesh from his pristine dinner jacket.

"Your cover is blown, Jamms," Vesper said. "The two Bulgars blew themselves up instead of you."

"No matter," Bond answered. "Here's the plan." Vesper listened with attentive obedience, upset her feminine charm appeared to have no allure.

Bond's nostrils flared as he spotted Le Chiffre's henchmen on the way to the baccarat table. A tall guy and a cripple: he could deal with them. He leaned back in his chair, instantly disabling them both. Let the game begin. Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead. He was finished. Le Chiffre smirked. "Enough, Mr Bond." A waiter passed Bond an envelope from Felix stuffed with 32m francs. Marshall Aid from the US.

"I think not," Bond smiled. "Suivi." Two queens. Zero. It was desperate. Then a nine. "Banco", Le Chiffre was bankrupt. The job was over. Now for Vesper's cold and arrogant body. "Oh Jamms," she cried, "I want you but first I must see Mathis."

Ian Fleming

The silly bitch, he thought, as he raced outside. Mathis would never have sent such a note, and he gunned the Bentley in pursuit of the Citroën in which she had been abducted. He was up to 345mph and closing in when the tyres hit the tacks.

Bond awoke to find himself naked in a bare room under an alabasterine ceiling light. Le Chiffre cut out the cane seat of the chair and pushed Bond's buttocks through the opening. "Where's my money, dear boy?" he said, thrashing Bond's manhood with a paddle.

"Go to hell," Bond gasped. He could take a chance on losing some of his cock. After all, he had a good eleven inches to play with.

"Shtop." A tall Russian with a crag-like face entered the room. "You have lost Smersh's money, Le Chiffre. For that you must die." A third eye appeared in the middle of Le Chiffre's face. "I should kill you too, Mr Bond. But I only kill to orders. Good day."

Bond lay back in bed. The main action was over but there was still another 40 pages to go. He'd better find some way to fill them. Vesper had sent flowers, but he had sent them back; no one got away with implying he was queer. Yet he was curious about her. And his cock.

"Oh Jamms," she wept. "It is still so swollen."

"I am just pleased to see you."

Days passed. Bond was surprised to find he quite liked her gleaming buttocks and hard breasts; he toyed with resigning and getting married. Then he recalled the franchise. His heart and cock hardened as he stroked his memories and other parts. On reflection, there was something queer about her.

He found the note beside her dead body. "Oh Jamms, I am a double agent but I could not live without you. So I have killed myself."

Silly bitch, he thought. But there was always pussy galore to come.

THE GUARDIAN

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Possession by AS Byatt

Crash by JG Ballard

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Claudine in Paris by Colette

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Brideshead Revisited by EvelynWaugh 

Howards End by EM Forster

Mrs Dallaway by Virginia Woolf