Way down deep, I was afraid that he'd be there with a gun.
Monday night I decided to stay home rather than go to the Strand Bookstore to hear Gregory Gibson discuss "Hubert's Freaks," which details the life of Robert Langmuir and his discovery of a trove of Diane Arbus photos. I was a little worried that the man he bought them from, Bayo Ogunsanya, might be there, too. In an unfriendly mood.
And he was. (The camera doesn't turn from the author, but the speaker was identified by Galleycat.) If you can sit through the long video of the reading, you can hear the voice of Ogunsanya in the Q&A portion of the evening. He's peeved. Although, thankfully, unarmed. Perhaps he knew his revenge was coming the next day, when Phillips canceled the Arbus auction.
Read the controversy surrounding this story in this earlier post: Man who sold Arbus photos to another dealer says he was cheated of their true value.
It will take a little bit for the video to load. The player, from the Strand Bookstore site, has no fast forward, so there's no way to skip to the good parts. I tried and had to sit here and listen to the reading all over again.
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