Early morning.

A downy body sleeping in the dawny haze.

There is a beaded whisper of condensation on every natural surface—could be the remnants of rainstorm or a perfidious drop-in by the dew point. We aren’t particularly far from high noon, but these brief hours personify a weightless idle that is casual and contemplative. If time were an architectural construct, these hours are the comfortable confines of a living room that is modest in its minimal modernity. “A cigarette, a cup of tea, a bun...” in the words of Dirk Bogarde, but also the ghosts of liaisons whose corporeal presences have left the room. And yet: here they forever sit, collectively in sensual memoriam in a chair across the table. Are you tantalized or tortured? Do you pine or prefer your solitary confinement?

The clock ticks softly as you gaze out at the grass. You think about the beach, and how far you are from it. The road that leads you there is long and stretches far behind you. There will come a time when strangers scattered across the globe come into view and beckon you to travel back that way, but for now you take a sip and think of days sequestered in a commercial studio in Paris at the dawn of the 1980s, cutting tracks of facsimile electric blues boogie on your guitar like a surrogate Chuck Berry, minus the tempestuous ego and inflated fees.

Memories materialize of the evening at a dinner party when you harnessed a bit of liquid hubris and convinced the president of CBS France that you could craft a better pop record than the polished noise he was polluting your ears with at the time. “Find a singer and I’ll give you the money,” he said. All you wanted to hear at the time was the blues in any way, shape, or form, but you played his game by your own rules; you’d even been filming television adverts lately, so you were basically (in the words of Robert Fripp) a “small mobile intelligent unit” ready to storm the gates of French pop in vibrant Kodachrome celluloid.

It seemed at the time like everyone fancied themselves a chanteuse, releasing throwaway singles and shooting music videos, so you figured, “I could make one of them records!”. You’d seen a video on French TV by Chagrin D’Amour (though their name escaped you at the time), probably ‘Monte Carlo’, and thought that the gal singing would be perfect for this project. By a strange twist of coincidence, while telling the story in a London barber shop weeks later, a stranger getting his hair cut turns around mid-snip and tells you that he knows the singer in question, who calls herself Valli, and that he can connect you with her.

He gives you Valli’s phone number and the two of you hit it off and cut a pair of tracks for Epic Records: a synthy balearic cover of Chris Montez’s classic ‘The More I See You’ and ‘Baby Baby’, an original which you’d demoed yourself way back in 1975 at New York’s Blue Rock Studio, turned into a smooth bossa nova B-side that playfully winked at the yé-yé girls of the swinging mod ‘60s. That was the era when you’d made photography into a career accidentally and almost by default—what started with a few snaps for Nova Magazine in 1968 soon led you through the offices of Queen, Eye, and Vogue UK; by 1972, you began what would become 20-year collaborations with Vogue Paris and Marie Claire.

By the 1980s you’d entered what you felt was your “best period” as a photographer. Your style—by this point (unbeknownst to you) a firmly established aesthetic signature—was very much in demand, and as such the work was consistent and plentiful. “Strange, beautiful girls in strange, beautiful places in strange, beautiful light.” This was your modus, your melody in purest of pitch, inspired by a lyric from one of the first songs you’d written, and you’ve spent the entirety of your career capturing this universal enigmatic concept in visual and sonic formations with nearly every piece in your vast portfolio.

‘The More I See You’ proved to be a European hit, and even had a music video which you directed using a crew borrowed from the hit American program Miami Vice. The single’s sleeve also featured your photography and was designed in collaboration with your art director friend Simon Kentish—he was the fellow that got you the gigs playing guitar for TV adverts, and the two of you had also been recording music together in private during this period.

Your mind drifts back to those Saturday afternoons in Simon’s atelier in the south of Paris, which became a quiet haven of sorts. Kentish, a great cook, would prepare a meal; you’d have a glass of wine, and soon after the two of you would work on a track before his wife returned home. Come five o’clock, you and your guitar would gather up and head back home on the Metro, north of the river. These gentle études you were recording were perfect for train travel, the mechanical repetitive chug of Simon’s rhythms anchoring the weightless gauze of your six-stringed touch. By this point, you weren’t trying to make an album, though the two of you would occasionally be commissioned to produce tracks for commercial purposes. You just wanted to make tracks that you thought were “interesting” using your guitar and his machines.

These visits to the atelier were not meant to be a continuation of your past trips to the beach, documented in your first solo photography exhibition and soundtracked by an album you’d made in 1983 for Japanese audiences, though your guitar—always a constant and inseparable companion on your globetrotting adventures taking photos of many of the world’s most beautiful women modeling the latest in couture—still sang with the same clean, clear, crisp tone. Little-to-no effects, softly ululating in a state of undress save for a flirtatious bit of compression or delay and reverb draped across the body like a linen sheet. You’d give Simon the chord progressions for a tune you’d conjured that week, and he’d dial up a rhythm and some ambient pads or keyboard textures with his arsenal of technology.

These pieces became a diary of sorts, documenting a lovely and fruitful collaborative friendship that would remain hidden from public view until decades later, when two young gentleman in Australia and the UK would simultaneously express interest in re-releasing Down On The Road By The Beach outside of Japan for the first time since its initial 1983 release. You’d heard that your lone album had finally begun to be discovered by a new generation thanks to the marvels of modern technology, and that its magic had touched many of them deeply. You see an opportunity to finally release some of those Paris Tapes made with Simon Kentish out into a more appreciative world, and decide to theme them around a series of photos of “girls in the grass”, which you’d begun during that same period. On many of your shoots, regardless of theme or context, you’d request to take a shot of the models laying about in the shoot’s verdant settings, and this ritual continued into the ‘90s.

Some months later, those Australian and English gentlemen enlist a colleague in New York City (where you’d lived for a spell in the 1990s), who was known to be an obsessive fan of your album, to pen notes for its re-release. You don’t know it, but your album has been for many years an oasis or balm of sorts for him and many others. The strange beautiful light and shadow found in your music speaks to them in a language that feels profound and yet entirely comforting and familiar.

You read these notes, penned by that obsessive outspoken New Yorker, and recognize that things have come full circle, traveling across the world from London to Tokyo to New York to Paris to Melbourne and Manchester and a million points in between. Your name is Steve Hiett, and the time has finally come for the world to praise your talents in capturing snapshots of the world’s beautiful minutia as vividly with sound as you mastered for decades with lens. There’s more rain in the woods, but you can see sunlight and the most vivid of blues opening up across the sky. Are these your memories? You grab your camera—small and light, just like your first 35mm Samoca, but digital now—and hum a little blues to yourself.

It’s funny how things always come back around.

Michael IQ Jones, June 2019