After several years of complications with three publishers, Robert Delpire published my first book in 2006.  I had met Bob in 1998, when I first arrived in Paris, through Annie Boulat. Annie was the one and only contact I had when my feet touched French soil, given to me by a friendly Italian photographer at a party in New York just days before my departure.  Bob was a hard read at first.  I wasn’t sure whether he liked my work or not, but when he pointed at a picture of a stuffed Felix the cat in a toy store in Korea and said, “I’d like to put this in a book I’m doing about cats…is that OK for you?”

I saw Bob once every couple of years after that, bringing a box of small prints of new pictures to show him, trembling inside that he would tell me that they weren’t very good.  He generally didn’t said much.  “Continuez…  Il faut continuer à faire des photos.” was what he always told me as I left his office.  He used ‘vous‘ with me back then.