MB: Melvin Van Peebles recently left this realm. It was back in July 2016 when I spent an afternoon with him and his grandson Marley at this NYC apartment, which was like a museum on the tenth floor of a West 56th Street apartment building. Melvin was very standoffish and aggressive at first, especially with me being white, understandably because he had been taken advantage of by the white execs of Hollywood. So of course, I told him I was a Jewish kid from Paris and that my parents were from Cairo, Egypt. A decent icebreaker. I was told not to take my camera out unless he said to. I got the aggressive thing, but I saw great humor in it. I didn’t crack. I kept smiling. And then I got into my collection of black arts, black film posters, soundtrack albums, paintings, statues and finally, my collection of his books. Then when I showed him some of my collection on my phone, he straight up thought I was conning him: “how the F do you have this? how the F do you have that? You’re too young to have that!” 

And then he hit me with “Hey MF you’re a photographer, right? Then why aren’t you taking pictures? Am I not pretty enough?” And there it was. A dream come true. They are my favorite images I’ve ever shot. His son Mario Van Peebles who told me, “It’s him!” and that’s all you want as a photographer. I stayed so long he didn’t want me to leave. We made an instant bond. This picture is special to me because we sat at his kitchen table and shared a Cuban cigar and I had pulled out his Spanish edition of his impossibly rare 1966 book "Un Americano en el infierno” (“An American In Hell”) that had his Paris address in his own writing on the title page (thanks to the gift of natural light and heat from the cigar, you can see it bleeding through in the photo), which made us realize we had lived in the same area, It was a beautiful moment. There are so many incredible textures in the picture, only black and white could reproduce that and only the Monochrom cameras can pull out so many fine details. Even the stacks of old newspapers on the floor, in all their glorious blur! 

Sadly, I returned to the apartment to do a family shoot on September 10, 2021, with Mario, his brother Max and the rest of the siblings and kids but that very morning, Melvin was taken to the hospital where he would pass eleven days later. I was so sad to miss him.