An Afternoon with Alice at The Carlyle

All photos by Alice Olive (click to enlarge)

Friday afternoon just before 6PM. A second floor ballroom in the Carlyle Hotel with an iced G&T and Alice Olive. We look around. Costume jewelery designer, Lisa Salzer of Lulu Frost is footing the bill and the room as she grips and grins the crowd under a beautiful short shock of white hair that takes me back to Sydney in 1987.

I tell Alice the pictures I want. Only a certain cool blonde and a Islay single malt redhead. I recall a favorite bumper sticker in London, "Warning! I Brake for Blondes but Back Up for Redheads." I stand alone by an unused kitchen entrance and watch Alice shoot the room with a memory card clenched between her teeth and an extra lens in the crook of an arm.

No one sees like Alice Olive. In a world of self professed photographers, whose only pictures are ripped off cliches of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman & James Dean pasted on Tumblers with hackneyed Gore Vidal quotes (What is with these guys?) -- Miss Olive is the real deal.

After the show, we step off an elevator and into the lobby. A woman in a hat, in front of an 18th Century painting, stops me cold. I ask if Alice can take her picture. She agrees. I tell Alice what I want. Alice shoots it the way she wants which... if you see like Alice -- is the way it should be. But I crop it anyway...