Chelsea Boy

Straight out of college, Nathan Englander plunged into the gritty, fabulous world of nineties New York fashion photography.

- Nathan Englander

BY 21, I’D GIVEN UP ON BECOMING A NOVELIST. It was too impossible, too grand, too unattainably elbow-patched-Waspy for a cash-strapped, state school–educated, suburban Jewish boy. I’d moved on to my backup plan. I’d become a fashion photographer in New York.

I understand now that it’s like giving up professional poker to fall back on shooting craps. Still, it made sense to me. Photography is a real job. There’s lots of equipment to operate. You press a button and get results. If you work in a studio, you can play loud music and be around other people— most of them models. And everyone takes you seriously. Set up a light in Central Park, have an assistant hold a reflector, and the tourists will circle around, taking pictures of you taking pictures, assuming you’re a star.

Connections to commercial photographers in New York were, as you can guess, pretty hard to come by for me. But my older sister was working in Chelsea back then, and she had a photographer friend named Dan Wilby, with a studio over on Twenty-first Street, right near her office. She introduced me to him. And, nearing the end of college—the future laid out, wide open and terrifying—I threw myself on his mercy.

Wilby let me intern for a week, during which he encouraged me, inspired me, and—a nonbinding promise he actually made good on—told me that maybe, if I kept up, he’d help me find paying work. The work he eventually found me was with him.