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bread-and-puppet-george-lange-photograph

Bread and Puppet

A couple of weeks after leaving my job as first assistant for Annie Leibovitz, I hooked up with a puppet theater I had seen previously in Vermont. They were doing five blocks of performances for a big anti-nuke parade in NYC. Bread and Puppet Theater was the vision of Peter Schumann. The theater was political and strange and brilliant. One thing they were NOT was photo friendly. They hated photographers and journalists of any kind. At the parade I followed them all the way up Fifth Avenue and, near the end around 60th St., I saw Elisabeth Biondi in the crowd – then a photo editor of a publication called GEO… I ran over to her and said, “You should do a story on this group!” She said, “Call me next week and come by to tell me about them.” At the time I had a little stutter… and had a really hard time asking for Elisabeth on the phone. After a couple of tries I got through and set up an appointment that launched my career. I got the assignment to go up to VERY northern Vermont where Bread & Puppet were based and start my very first assignment for one of the top photo driven magazines in the world. I took my one camera and one lens – and the knowledge that I had never shot color before except for assisting Annie.

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