November 2024

This renowned portrait photographer now lives in New Orleans, adding images of local creatives to his extraordinary body of work.

– by Bogdan Mynka

– photos by Curtis Knapp unless otherwise attributed. All photos are copyrighted.

When it comes to handling celebrities and their public appearances, New Orleanians keep their cool in the presence of famous people. So for French Quarter residents, learning that your neighbor is secretly a Parisian designer, or bestselling author, or a portrait photographer with a stellar international career who has captured some of the most celebrated faces of our culture – is no coffee-spitting event. 

Curtis Knapp is the latter of those, a Quarter denizen most wouldn’t recognize as he bikes down the street or places his order at Envie, yet he’s photographed some of the world’s most recognizable people. Knapp remains virtually unknown to the general public, despite his monumental resume.

“My work is famous; I'm not,” he said. “My Smithsonian students in DC used to joke that I was one of America’s best unknown photographers.”  

Exploring Knapp’s online portfolio, one finds hundreds of riveting portraits of celebrities like Madonna, Andy Warhol, Robert Downey, Jr., Hank Aaron, Toshiro Mifune (the Seven Samurai star). Timothy Leary is there too - and he wrote the introduction to one of Knapp’s published photography books.

Knapp’s artistic journey began in New York City when he was 20 and began attending the Parsons School of Design. During this period, he lived in the East Village of NYC, rubbing shoulders with the artists and writers at the heart of the bustling bohemian scene in the ‘70s and ‘80s, linking with the likes of Jim Carroll, Leary and William Burroughs.

Though some of these artistic titans and writers ended up in front of his camera lens in Knapp's Union Square studio – or later, in his dining room in Los Angeles or Tokyo – he shrugs off their celebratory status. 

“They found me rather quickly for their projects, and I look well-read,” he said, laughing. “Actually, I prefer reading bios and tech stuff, like Isaac Newton's book Optics – it's a page-turner.”

After Parsons, Knapp’s talent for the visual arts turned to illustration, working commercially with clients like Sesame Street Magazine, Metropolitan Museum of Art Cloisters and more. Then in 1978, he took a vacation to visit a girlfriend in Athens, Georgia. “I went down for two weeks and stayed almost two years,” he said. 

In Athens, one of his housemates owned a health food restaurant downtown. One night, she took Knapp through the kitchen to several enormous antique wooden lockers. 

“She knocked on one, opened the door and there sat a band practicing with a small drum kit, ‘toy’ pianos and a guitar – with five strings,”  Delighted with their music, the artist became friends with the band, who called themselves the B-52s.

Impressed with the impact the band had at a local party (“The whole house went up and down with the dancing!”). He decided to get them a gig in NYC. 

Knapp had painted a mural on the walls of Max’s Kansas City nightclub the year before, so he had connections.  He and a few band members crammed into a VW bug, drove to New York and met with the club’s booking agent. After listening to the B52 demo tapes, he was unimpressed. 

But Knapp refused to give up. Back in Athens, he used the bus station pay phone and called the booking agent every four days. Finally, he begged the agent to offer the band just one gig. “Trust me! They got it! In a song and a half the whole room will be dancing!” 

The persistence paid off. The band rocked Max’s and landed another gig a few days later at CBGB’s. They began their climb to international fame. 

Several months later, Knapp returned to New York himself.  He was still working in illustration, but he’d grown weary of the isolation required. Longing for face-to-face collaboration, he turned to studio portraiture photography. 

The switch from brush to camera only took a few months. Knapp knew from the beginning the lighting and formatting that he wanted to achieve from studying photographs by Irving Penn (whose studio was around the corner on 5th Avenue) and Chicago great Victor Skrebneski, who had come up with the idea of shooting subjects in black turtlenecks (from Bowie to Betty Davis to Orson Wells). 

Soon the artist began inviting his musician friends from Max’s and coming up from Athens - like REM and the B52s – into his Union Square studio for impromptu photo sessions. The energy was fun, the portfolio grew with a signature style and within a few months, Knapp was working for GQ and Esquire, and photographing album covers for record companies.  

Knapp’s talents attracted an international audience and in 1983, he moved to Japan and discovered the international world of advertising. He remained there until 2002, all the while pursuing his more artistic endeavors and exhibiting in shows in Tokyo and Kyoto. 

Whatever city he was working or living in – NYC, Tokyo, or Los Angeles – Knapp continued to take portraits.

“I’d ring up 15 people I liked and say something like, ‘Hey, I’m here in whatever city! Come over and I’ll make a portrait for the next book I’m planning. It’ll be killer and Slash is doing my introduction!

“And seven or eight would say ‘Great, when?’ I’d get people like Sir John Hurt, Dennis Hopper, Tim Burton and the most beautiful Michelle Phillips (Mamas & Papas) coming over.” While Knapp adds that most book projects make no money, he comes from a publishing family and loves the well-printed book.

The photographer returned to the States in 2002, taught at the Smithsonian in D.C., then returned to New York City to explore the art scene there. 

“You have a choice [when returning from a long absence],” he said. “You can stay in the place you were and try to catch up. Or you can pick Door #2 and go someplace you’ve always wanted to go. For me, that was New Orleans. 

The photographer arrived in New Orleans in 2007, drawn by its dazzling architecture and eclectic arts scene. His life in the French Quarter is as charming as you might imagine. When he's not busy photographing the next Tina Turner, he's riding his bicycle around the city taking in the architecture, which “I don't need to photograph. I just appreciate it.”  

And while New Orleans offers a perfect paradise for photographing spontaneous portraits at events and parades, Knapp’s creative interest is clearly focused on the classical portrait. His favorite camera remains safely at home, pointed intently at his 40-year-old canvas backdrop. 

“For me the Hassel is IT,” Knapp says.  “What's truly frustrating is the instantaneousness of modern cameras, eliminating the time one should take before capturing a moment.” 

Yet, he believes digital photography is “totally OK.”  

“Change happens,” he says. “To fight change is a waste of time so use that energy in a different creative way instead.” He adds, “It’s not the machine you shoot with. It’s your eye, your composition!” 

Knapp’s role as a creative collaborator and mentor is also fed in New Orleans, driven by the sheer number of artistic projects constantly being birthed. “If someone's really going to do something, I'll help them out. I like projects. I don't have to take over, just guide and add to their idea content or PR and make it nicer for them. Know your target, know what does not work, and so on.”

Fond of his double-balconied apartment, Knapp says you'll have to kill him to get him out of his French Quarter cave from which he watches the sunrise every morning over the Jazz Museum. 

His favorite neighborhood restaurants are Irene's and Mona Lisa, the latter of which houses one of his Madonna photographs. Such has been the popularity of the photo, that the admiring touches of diners have forced management to reframe it. 

But Knapp’s not one to rest on his laurels. For several years he’s been working with the New Orleans Jazz Museum and often shoots portraits of notable musicians, writers and artists with a portable studio he sets up there. The collection ranges in the hundreds, with the online sampling including Ellis Marsalis, Irma Thomas, Walter Isaacson, George Dureau and Samantha Fish. On occasion, notable individuals - both local and visiting New Orleans - contact Knapp for private portrait commissions.

Although some of the portraits are in color and others in black and white, they all have a curious commonality: there’s an ephemeral sense of connection the viewer has with the subject.  Actor Steve Buscemi wrote about that connection in his forward for the digital book The Portrait Photography of Curtis Knapp (2012).

"What struck me… was that the photos make all of them, even the people I've never met, seem like old friends. I can't really explain it, but Curtis captured something personal, simple, and familiar with every shot he took... it's clearly evident in the eyes of his many portraits, mine included, that we trusted, respected, and in some cases were very entertained by our photographer..." 

Building that trust, and catching the essence of an artistic subject makes Knapp happy.  It drives him to keep creating, to continue spinning invisible, mystical threads between an image and a viewer.  

The work will never get old to him. “People – all types – are so damn interesting. So many stories." 

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