William Coupon, Who Wished to ‘Photograph Everyone in the World,’ Dies at 73

William Coupon, an influential portrait photographer who deployed a painterly model and huge curiosity in his oft-stated quest to “photograph everyone in the world” — taking pictures punk rockers, artists, politicians and Indigenous folks, amongst others — died at his dwelling in Santa Fe, N.M., on May 29. He was 73.

The trigger was issues of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his brother Robert Grossman stated.

Mr. Coupon’s first images had been “audiographs,” footage that emitted sound utilizing looped cassettes hid behind the frames, and “kinetographs,” photographs hooked up to transferring motors. (His appeared within the home windows at Bloomingdale’s within the late Seventies, as a part of a swimwear show.)

Self-taught, he ventured onto the New York cultural scene in 1978, speaking his well past the velvet ropes at Studio 54, the place he documented the membership’s decadent glamour. The “Disco Tribes” sequence he shot there included images of a distracted Andy Warhol; the drag queen Divine, decked out in a strapless, sequined robe; and Truman Capote, who agreed to put in writing the textual content for a ebook of those pictures.

The undertaking ended abruptly after three weeks, when Mr. Coupon was thrown out of the membership and his cameras smashed by bodyguards working for Steve Rubell, who owned the membership with Ian Schrager. No one ever defined why.

The subsequent yr, he discovered recent inspiration within the punk and New Wave scene on the Mudd Club in downtown Manhattan. Instead of dismissing Mr. Coupon’s work, Steve Mass, an proprietor of the membership, exhibited a few of his portraits there. “I had always felt like an outsider, but it did kick-start my life as a portrait photographer,” Mr. Coupon wrote in a 2014 essay for Lenscratch, a web based pictures journal.

Amid this anarchic aesthetic, Mr. Coupon started to develop what he known as his “obsessive pursuit of the face.” His model concerned a traditional medium shot, the topic set in opposition to a backdrop of hand-painted, mottled Belgian linen and illuminated by a light-weight field that created dramatic contrasts of sunshine and darkish. Among his inspirations, he cited the chiaroscuro grasp Rembrandt.

Mr. Coupon’s “Punks of New York” sequence, shot largely within the late Seventies and early Eighties, included an enigmatic David Byrne; a barely terrorized-looking Debbie Harry; a contemplative Jean-Michel Basquiat; and an otherworldly picture of Klaus Nomi, the German vocalist.

John Leland wrote in The New York Times in 2015 that Mr. Coupon introduced a “different visual vocabulary” to the carnival adventurism of punk, slowing the tempo and “taking the circus out of the tent,” whereas making portraits of “fun-house denizens looking in a mirror that removed distortion rather than adding it.”

Mr. Coupon’s stark, minimalist model was evident within the play of sunshine on the jazz musician Miles Davis’s brow and fingers within the picture on the duvet of “William Coupon: Portraits” (2018) and in one other picture of Mr. Davis holding Mr. Coupon’s infant daughter.

Anthony Bannon, a tradition critic and historian who wrote an essay for the ebook, stated in an interview that Mr. Coupon was assured that “the truth will out” in folks’s faces.

Mr. Bannon likened Mr. Coupon’s boundless curiosity to that of a hen. “Look at him, like a crow flying around,” he stated. “All of a sudden, the crow sees a red ribbon standing out in contrast to the green foliage. Bang, the crow makes a dive for the ribbon.”

Mr. Coupon, he added, “was out there looking, and ready to dive.”

William Edward Grossman was born on Dec. 3, 1952, in Queens. His mom, Kathryn (Karger) Grossman, was a specialist in poverty statistics for the Census Bureau. His father, Carl Grossman, was an accountant who gave him his first digital camera.

At Syracuse University, he studied communications, leaving faculty three credit wanting graduating in 1974.

Before turning to pictures, he labored in promoting in New York, making a profitable marketing campaign that featured a coupon. Co-workers started calling him Mr. Coupon, his brother stated, and ultimately he legally modified his surname.

Mr. Coupon’s early images and his work on the Mudd Club led to jobs with New York journal and a fee to shoot the duvet of Bette Midler’s 1979 disco-inflected album, “Thighs and Whispers.” (Perhaps coincidentally, Mr. Coupon’s trademark coiffure of golden ringlets got here to resemble Ms. Midler’s tresses on the album cowl.)

He additionally started to freelance for The New York Times Magazine. In 1983, he was despatched to the Manhattan condominium of Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, to shoot a cover story. While he was there, Mr. Coupon obtained a name from Rolling Stone journal, asking if he was out there to {photograph} Mick Jagger that night time.

“Who’s Mick Jagger?” Mr. Wiesel requested, in accordance with Mark Bussell, the picture editor for The Times Magazine who had accompanied Mr. Coupon on the shoot.

Mr. Coupon, who accepted the project, stated that Mr. Jagger later requested, “Who’s Elie Wiesel?”

Mr. Coupon additionally photographed George Harrison, Jerry Garcia and Neil Young for Rolling Stone covers, and shot 15 covers for Time journal, together with portraits of two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, for Person of the Year points.

They weren’t the one presidents he photographed. He additionally shot Richard Nixon, who was chatty about baseball. Ronald Reagan supplied a pensive smile, which Mr. Coupon most popular to a full smile. “A lot of a person’s personality can get lost in the smile,” he told the Professional Photographers of America in 2020. “An ethereal gaze is more transcendent.”

Mr. Coupon photographed Donald Trump in 1985, lengthy earlier than he turned president, for the cover of Manhattan, inc. journal. Mr. Trump posed with a white dove to indicate his need for world peace, and the hen relieved itself on his hand, stated Nancy Butkus, the journal’s artwork director on the time. Undaunted, she added, Mr. Trump wiped his hand and continued with the shoot.

Ross Perot, the Dallas businessman and impartial presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996, was apparently much less understanding when Mr. Coupon arrived for a Fortune journal picture shoot in 1989 sporting an unconventional outfit that included black tights and ballet-like footwear. Mr. Perot refused to be photographed, Mr. Coupon stated, till he modified garments, borrowing some from a safety guard.

Mr. Coupon’s marriage to Karen Seeley led to divorce. In addition to his brother Mr. Grossman, he’s survived by one other brother, Martin; a sister, Karen Cohen; and a daughter, Hayley.

Mr. Coupon, a loyal reader of National Geographic journal as a boy, had lengthy been fascinated by the lives of Indigenous folks. Throughout his profession, he took his linen backdrop on a number of journeys to {photograph} Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, the Sami in Scandinavia, the Berbers in Morocco and the Pygmies in central Africa. These initiatives, which he referred to collectively as “Social Studies,” additionally included pictures of demise row inmates and immigrants in Times Square sporting costumes of American cartoon characters.

“Even if he had only a two-minute session with somebody, William could always create that space where people’s essential underlying humanity came through,” Adam Stoltman, a former picture editor at The Times and Sports Illustrated, stated. “It didn’t matter what station in life they were.”