They figured the two of you weren’t perverts.
Barbara: Right, exactly. Because photographers had a really bad reputation, and these kids, they don’t know. They’d walk around the city and go see anybody that looked at them. So we sort of became specialists in that area. Ingenue, every month, we did a makeover. They would bring in some poor benighted kid with pimples or something, and by the time I did her makeup—I did theatrical makeup, so it was good for photography; she couldn’t go out in the street like that—but by the time we did the makeup and the hair, she was like a different person. And I gave her a nice outfit to wear. And she was strutting, she became something else. Which was really nice to see.
Justin: Teen magazine, we did thirty-six national covers in a row. There were so many photographers around town who wanted to break into Teen, and they just couldn’t. We had it absolutely locked up, because Barbara was so important to doing those spreads with them, working with the kids and so on.
Barbara: We did a lot of department store catalogs and stuff like that afterwards. I became a stylist, he was the photographer. Between us we worked very, very hard.
Justin: And it’s now thirty-eight years that we decided that we were going to try to make a living strictly from photographing antiquities, with essentially art galleries as our clients. That’s when we moved here, with the idea that we would cut down on overheard.
Barbara: My fantasy was to live in back of the store, so here we are. We got exactly what I wanted. When I was in school, we would say, “When we get out, we should open a shop and do our own designs.” We were all design students; I went to Pratt. I thought, “Ah, not me, I want to get a job. I want my weekends free. I want to know there’s a paycheck at the end of it. Not interested.” So, what was the first thing we did when I got out of school? We started a business. After that I never had a job again. Since 1950, I’ve never had a job.
See more of the Kerrs' photography in the NYPL's Digital Collections.