A Rabbit’s Foot celebrated the life and work of Jonathan Becker with an intimate dinner at The Twenty Two in Mayfair.
LONDON—On 5th November 2024, as Bonfire Night fireworks sparkled across London, and the world anticipated the results of the American Election, inside Mayfair hotel and restaurant The Twenty Two, a cosier transatlantic affair was taking place. A Rabbit’s Foot Editor-in-Chief Charles Finch hosted an intimate dinner for the master photographer Jonathan Becker to commemorate the release of Lost Time, a new book published by Phaidon.
“There’s no one I’d rather host a dinner for,” said Charles Finch, introducing the evening. Finch first met the photographer through their mutual friend Graydon Carter, whose Vanity Fair was regularly illustrated by Becker’s vibrant images of celebrity and society. Fittingly then, as well as close friends and family members, those who came out to celebrate Becker came from across the worlds of art, fashion, film and media. Guests included Condé Nast’s Jonathan Newhouse, Sir Christopher Hampton, Rachel Johnson and Ivo Dawnay, The Independent’s Geordie Greig, Saffron Aldridge, Ellie Bramley, Marina Hanbury, Jeremy Thomas, Nicholas Foulkes, Nicky Haslam, Selina Blow, Natasha Fraser, Vassi Chamberlain, and Gemma O’Brien.
Lost Time, curated and introduced by the esteemed photography editor Mark Holborn, takes a long view of Becker’s work, who has been working professionally as a photographer for 50 years. The dinner followed a Q&A talk at the V&A the night before with Becker in conversation with the curator and writer Susanna Brown. “You haven’t got a moth ball’s chance in a urinal,” Becker jokingly recalled of his father’s reaction to his son’s photographic vocation.
Becker’s mentor Brassï is the book’s philosophical—and literal entrance (an image of the Hungarian photographer’s hallway is among the first images). ‘Lost time,’ is of course, a reference to Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, which Brassaï read in full, twice. “Everything relates to things that interested me as a child,” says Becker, of his subject matter, such as the boats in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens. Intimate images of family and travels to South America, and early ‘studio work’ in iconic New York restaurant Elaine’s are balanced by editorial and events work (Becker pioneered the medium as a form of portraiture, capturing the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Diana Vreeland, Nicole Kidman and…. Donald Trump).
Lost Time’s cover is of the iconic blue diving board at the Eden Roc hotel on the Cap D’Antibes. “That diving board was probably there when Fitzgerald was alive. I love the gaiety and doom of Fitzgerald. The magic of a sudden moment.” The image sets the tone for what is inside. “A slide from personal history to larger social history to historical time, geological time, astronomical time, back to photographic time,” says Holborn. All we have to do is jump in.
Jonathan Becker: Lost Time edited by Mark Holborn, is published by Phaidon, £79.95 (Phaidon.com)
