North of Madison 

At age 60, iconic New York photographer Michael Halsband has spent the past 50 years developing his craft with a résumé equal parts rock-n-roll and fine art. “Every portrait is a self portrait and they can only get better if I get better,” says the thoughtful Hasselblad master. “If I can open up more I can get closer to the subject.” 

Renowned for his photos of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol in boxing gear, Michael’s work ranges from tour photog (Rolling Stones, AC/DC), fashion and editorial (Interview, J. Crew, Gap) award-winning album-cover design (Meat Puppets, Iggy Pop, INXS, Jim Carroll Band), commissioned projects by the School of American Ballet, and trips to Cuba with Hunter S. Thompson and Johnny Depp. Al Pacino called him personally to document the filming of his directorial debut, Looking for Richard. TSJ readers are familiar with his work via Joel Tudor and their collaborative Surf Movie and Surf Book projects documenting the luminary influences of our culture. Surf Movie, an unedited Super 8 meditation with a whimsical score of improvised guitar, reflects Halsband’s own intimate, spiritual connection to surfing. “I wanted to film the complete wave, from start to finish with the rider stepping off onto the sand,” he says. “You don’t always see that. It’s something Tudor does and Dora used to.” 

Halsband lives/works in the Gilsey House, a former grand hotel built in 1867 which hosted literary greats like Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde. It is now landmarked on the National Register of Historic Places and repurposed as a co-op. The cast-iron, Empire Baroque structure is located on Broadway where it cuts east across 5th Ave just north of Madison Park or “NoMad,” a neighborhood that intersects Chelsea, Murray Hill, and the Flatiron District. Historically known for its fancy hotels designed by noted architects, NoMad is also where some of the city’s early clip joints and bordellos appeared.

When I mention this to Halsband he laughs. “That’s funny, a client was telling me about all the S&M dungeons in my neighborhood. And when I asked how she knew, she just smiled.” The Museum of Sex is located on 26th and 5th, a short walk from Halsband’s crib. A few blocks south is where the advertising “Mad Men” of the 1960s drank their lunches, and where NYC classics like Lobster Newburg and the Manhattan cocktail originated in the 1870s. These days the neighborhood’s seafood and spirits tradition is maintained by spots like Luke’s Lobster and the John Dory Oyster Bar. The latter operates on the ground floor of the Ace Hotel directly across from his studio. You’re about seven crosstown blocks from the East and Hudson Rivers, both of which used to be abundant with oysters and shellfish. It’s only eighteen miles to Rockaway Beach, so it’s not uncommon to spot a seagull or even a Coney Island Whitefish on the street. 

If you’re Halsband, there’s always a pretty girl wanting to come over to play “backgammon” at 10 p.m. on a Monday night. “But I’m going to bed at 11 to wake up early for yoga” he jokes. Like most gracefully aging rockers, his current existence is more ascetic yogi than hard-partying womanizer. You won’t catch him dining on lobster Newbeug or drinking a Manhattan, either. The self-professed “beer lover” eats an Ayurveda-inspired vegetarian diet. “When people say they could never give up eating meat, it’s like, ‘Haven’t you done it enough? Life isn’t a land grab. Try something different, anything different.’ I do more cooking than going out to eat now. If I do go to a steakhouse, I’ll tell the waiter that I’m a vegetarian and ask the chef to make me whatever he wants. They usually go out of their way if you give them free reign like that and will do you right beyond what your imagination could dictate. That’s always worked really well for me.” 

His diet consists of an Ayurveda repertoire of meals that are calming and stress free “in terms of how you approach preparing the food, to eating, to what it does for you—that’s all within the objective. Maybe saying some mantras over the food and focusing your energy in a positive way.” This coming from the guy who turned me onto fried skate almost 20 years ago. “I eat lots of rice with turmeric, ghee (clarified butter), and some spices or quinoa and either steamed or roasted vegetables, softer and quieter in flavor, with salt and pepper, which is really good for the absorption of turmeric, a magical blood purifier high in antioxidants. I get it shipped in from a guy in Hawaii.” Of course the Brooklyn-born Halsband still eats pizza. “I don’t get it as much as I like to. I can’t justify eating pizza every Friday night. But I do like pizza a lot. Keste on Bleecker Street is sick.” 

Halsband purchased his 1,700 square foot studio in January of 1979 while still a student at the School of Visual Arts with money he earned from shooting catalogues for electric guitar parts. “I wanted to be a portrait photographer in the realm of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon and needed a studio. I needed the seamless paper. Every couple of days I’d walk past this building to get photo supplies near Herald Square and finally one day there was a huge sign that read, ‘Loft spaces for sale.’ I was 23 and felt that I couldn’t really buy something like this but summoned the courage and walked into the building. There was a guy on the second floor at a desk in a big, open, bombed-out space and he said the floor was sold out but he had one space left upstairs. The place was a wreck. It was sold raw with just walls, pipes, plumbing, electric, and vents but I looked out the windows and thought, ‘Yeah, this is good.’” 

When I arrived at his studio to get some intel for this article he was in his darkroom waiting for a few Basquiat prints to dry. When they were done he took them over to the 12-foot window overlooking Broadway and examined each while describing the micro-differences. “The agent said it was $45,000 but I didn’t need all of the money, only 30 percent down, and could mortgage the rest. And if I had any interest to let him know because they were going fast. So I went downstairs to the phone booth on the corner and called my mom and said, ‘Hey, I think I just bought a loft on 29th and Broadway.’” 

Michael paid an architect friend of the family to renovate the space that winter and moved in the summer of 1979. That fall he entered his senior year at SVA and was paying $650 a month on a property he owned as opposed to the standard $1,500, which was the going rate for a loft studio at the time. “I was living in this huge space. I had a studio, I had a dark room, and it was all good. Now I needed to run out and get people to shoot. The first portrait I ever did in here was an English teacher from school and then I did Lydia Lunch and 8 Eyed Spy. A few years later in 1987 I bought the apartment next door.” 

Whereas many of the studio finishes have an impeccable vintage feel, the adjacent space is a hyper modern one bedroom used as an investment property that fetches upwards of $7,500 a month in rent. In 2016, a sister unit in the Gilsey House sold for $2M. 

Around the same time he bought the studio, his parents began renting a summer home in the Hamptons, which helped him to reconnect with surfing. He’d first gotten hip to it when he was 12 on a trip to Venezuela, where he encountered a traveling crew from California with a quiver of G&S surfboards in tow. Later he picked up an O’Neill beavertail wetsuit and continued surfing during his 20s, mostly in L.A. when he’d be out there for work or visiting his grandparents who lived in Venice. Eventually his mom and dad would buy a beach house on the eastern end of Long Island. This sealed a permanent, ongoing relationship to the ocean and to a particular nearby cliquey beachbreak. 

“Those were some good years,” Halsband recalls. “If you got a good ride on that wave you never forgot it. There was a very interesting group of people surfing. The older guys really took me in and were really particular about who they took in. I have bad eyes and never used to wear contact lenses in the ocean and kind of got away with ironing out all the kinks of my surfing, figuring things out but also eating a lot of shit.” He couldn’t see the stink-eye local barrel-threading heavyweights like Chris Harmon and Charlie Weimar were giving him for surfing the main peak. “When Weimar would call me into a wave it would always be a bomb and you had to go. Although sometimes when Chris did it I wasn’t always sure he had my best interest in mind.” 

Halsband keeps a Jeep parked at a garage near his apartment and still jets out east to surf discreet beachbreaks with close friend artist/sculptor Mike Solomon. He focuses more on the spiritual component to surfing instead of the technical aspect. Halsband shares a few stories of people ceasing to have fun surfing, “coming out of the water angrier than they went in.” Rather than catching 50 waves a session, he tries to catch fewer waves but ride them completely, all the way to shore. “I’ve cycled into a different mindset of surfing since I started yoga. It has become a lot less of a priority and is cleaner for me now. I don’t put so much weight on it. You’re going out there to have fun and also to contribute to everyone else’s fun. You’re not there to get into the fray. I have no expectation. I don’t even care what the conditions are. I’ll just paddle out and take whatever the universe provides. I have enough great memories.” 

Halsband recalls a spine-tingling session he had with Dora in Australia where both of them were getting burned relentlessly. “Dora said he’d never been treated so badly in his life. He kept saying to me, ‘You know I surfed with Duke Kahanamoku.’ And it meant so much to him. It was like, ‘You know, I met God, I’ve surfed with God.’ And I’m thinking, ‘But you’re Miki Dora. It doesn’t even matter. That’s God enough for me.’ When I saw him surfing, the way he was standing on the board and the economy of motion and maneuvering was so subtle and so elegant. He stood like a king. Guys were dropping in on him and he’d just stall and drop down and pull up right under and push them off the wave and pretend as if he didn’t even see them. He did it in a way like nobody was there, nobody was dropping in, and he would do exactly what the wave needed in order to be in the perfect spot.”

When the buzzer rings downstairs, it’s Brendan Davison, the founder of Good Water Farms, a farm in Amagansett with a Native American-inspired take on growing food. He has an appointment to discuss an upcoming project and I have to go pick my daughter up from school. Michael walks me to the door and out into the hallway where Peter Tosh once stood with a massive spliff in his hand. I hit the streets feeling a bit buzzed. Was there turmeric in the water he gave me? Heading underground into the subway, NYC’s own unconscious dream world, Halsband’s words come to mind: “I’m fascinated with reality but none of us can handle it, it’s so harsh. We touch it once in awhile but it’s bleak and our dreams protect us from it. The construct of our lives gives us comfort—how much of a threshold we need or demand to divide ourselves from reality. There’s always this constant dreaming going on and we manifest a lot of what we accomplish through our dreams. As long as we keep dreaming, things keep happening. But they say everything’s already happened and we’re just living through it, going through it, tapping into the universe and where we’re headed.”