-LIFELINE

He’s a man known by all and by no one. A silhouette both devilishly flamboyant and impoverished vagabond, recognizable among thousands. Pinstriped suit, silk tie and a dandy’s panama hat, a hip-hop assembly of medallions and khakis or hobo techno street-wear, Paul Steinitz has been an obscure legend of the Paris and New York underground these past two decades.
On need only leaf through copies of the Amaan magazine he’s published since the mid-90s. Writers, filmmakers, designers, top-models, everyone he has photographed has been transfigured by his vision, before having distinguished themselves in their respective fields and earn international recognition.

A constant: his “infinite love” of all women. The first star of his Factory, his first “ negative goddess” was a Japanese girl sitting on a washing- machine at the corner of avenue B and 7th street. Her name is Lena Shirai, exuberant feline, neighbor of Madonna, head designer of jewelry for Matsuda and Comme des Garcons, ambassador in Japan for the most avant—garde New York fashion designers – including Willi Smith dead of Aids before the age of twenty-five- and who introduces him to Paradise Garage.

It would be too exhausting to list them all because from Tel Aviv to New York where he opened art galleries- the Prisunic Gallery in the Meat Market opened in 1986 with his brother and showed Stephen Sprouse- to Moscow whose underground life he recently documented in “Ebyan Magazine, Moscow Rules”, Paul Steinitz has rendered thousands of them sublime.

Sometimes for very long periods of time when it was a matter of his long time collaborator Christine Mingo met on the corner or 14th street or the love of his life and mother of his children, Ebyan Steinitz, Saint-Laurent and Givenchy model, Somalian born who introduced him to the magical world of Haute Couture. He describes himself as “degenerate” and “schizophrenic”, “ a lost and irresponsible being” wearing out everyone around him because he doesn’t know how to stop questioning normality, to verify each second that he doesn’t belong to the world of reasonable people his worst fear, because forgetting reality is his “greatest passion”. Will he end up like the Toulouse Lautrec of the Bret Easton Ellis years or their Fassbinder? The Bukowski of the Britney Spears decade or its Sid Vicious?

He claims to have taken the same portrait since the age of 25, but an examination of his work- orientalist chromes printed in platinum to ripoline gangsta shots - reveal and great stylistic richness, and a permanent redefinition of his esthetic starting with fundamentals like Hollywood glamour or expressionist cinema. To conjugate the sublime and the street to denounce the lies of money, power, sexuality, to go off in search of lost time and continuously questioning what is left of images, such is the life of Paul Steinitz. A sparkling voyage, a Golgotha of excess, through generosity. Too full of life, too hungry for love and a recognition that neither prizes or articles in neither magazines, nor decorations could fill.

The first shot he takes is that of a Christian gravestone at the top of an Israeli cliff, balancing between the earth and the Mediterranean Sea. An authentic epiphany originating in the requirement of infinite repetition in its search for permanent instability. A fertile search that produced other images and explosive texts summoning the most eclectic references in a logic of intertextuality-Modigliani and David Bowie, CNN and Rita Hayworth, Eric von Stroheim and Paul Morrissey- the only way of taking into account the communicational world, of accepting the disappearance of a petrified world of values and culture, doing everything so that it doesn’t die out completely. So Paul Steinitz has only a few friends, Abel Ferrara, his New York double in artistic fever, fashion designers, princes and some of those excluded from the system, splendid unknowns to share modern absinthes with, and more women who bid farewell clad in lingerie, naked in the snow. Of his 25 years spent producing and taking thousands of photos, he has no regrets; “I haven’t learned anything and every image will remain my greatest orgasm”.

This is perhaps the reason why some travel across the globe to be photographed by this artisan and poet of the image who haunts bars, in and why he is exhibited such prestigious galleries as White Cube in London, next to the work of Anselm Keifer, Damien Hirst and Cindy Sherman.