Pictures I Had to Take

""For as long as I can remember, I have loved taking photographs,"" recalls the Tony and Academy award-winning actor Grey. A few years ago, friends encouraged him to take a second look at photographs that he had taken over 25 years of travel and unceremoniously assembled in shoeboxes. The resulting collection reveals an unabashed enthusiasm for the picturesque (wizened peasant faces, gaudy religious shrines, busy market places), the rustic (jumbled junk heaps, weather-beaten wood) the quirky (laughing drag queens, listless sidewalk musicians), the recognizable (Venice, Machu Picchu, the Statue of Liberty), and cats. In a short post-script, Grey rhapsodizes about the spontaneous pleasure of photography:""I never considered a tripod, zoom, or light meter."" Except for a delight in brilliant colors (a yellow and blue school bus in Mexico, flashy red dresses in Tahitian shop windows), Grey's indifference to technique and formalism is evident. His images are unconstrained by attention to composition, light and shadow, or even focus. Nor do they celebrate what Henri Cartier-Bresson--the ultimate sharp-shooter--calls""the decisive moment""; for snapshots, these photos are quite static. In his introduction to the book, photographer Duane Michals (Questions Without Answers) describes acting and picture-taking as shamanism. And indeed there is something mysterious about Grey's work; his""private act"" of photography reveals memories and emotions perhaps visible primarily to him. 72 full-color photographs.