When Charles Finch asked the renowned photographer Jonathan Becker for his pointers on how to be snap happy in front of a photographer, he replied with ingenuity

Very dear Charles,

Your request for ten pointers on being photographed comes at the most exquisitely timed of moments as I have just coincidentally improvised a simple device: the Becker Handker-graph. It should solve the problem and eliminate all human anxiety about being photographed for all time – forevermore. I expect it may make me my first billion or so. Can’t wait for your scheme on the marketing. What you and I and the world-at-large think of when saying “hanky” will soon be long forgotten and replaced with my stroke of genius.

I’m bursting to tell you – naturally, you’ll be amongst the first to know – but I just can’t go into the detail quite yet. Patent lawyers will soon get to work and insist on discretion. So, while we’re still in the late Before Becker Handker-graph period, I’ll give you some soon to be obsolete pointers:

1. Just say “NO”. Use these wonderfully wise words of Nancy Reagan right off the bat as the key, all-important opening gambit even if one does have every intention of being photographed. In fact, there is a certain parallel in the context of Mrs. Reagan’s usage and mine: to a certain breed of human creature, the very act of being photographed is addictive.

2. Watch the angles. As Bing Crosby said to the late great Slim Aarons, who was kneeling on a Hollywood golf course at the time, “NO, NO, NO…NEVER up the nose, Sonny”.

3. Don’t belabor it. After the requisite “NO”, followed by a long, debilitating night/morning of Jack Daniels and memorable palaver I can’t remember, Frank Sinatra finally acquiesced with the simple, syncopated, “One pitcher”. He kept is word the next afternoon. I got my picture for Town & Country. Never have I been so careful with the shutter-trigger.

4. Be patient. In the midst of recounting a certain lady’s reaction to her picture, Brassai chuckled and said, badly paraphrased, “If I had my druthers, I’d always wait ten years to show subjects the photograph. They always think it’s great ten years later on.”

5. It’s theatre. I have two failsafe muse-subjects, neither of them women: Kenny Jay Lane and Nicky Haslam. Year in and out, they make tremendous subjects because each has an innate, distinctly theatrical sense of humor. It’s your stage, but you know that.

6. Your good side. Point a camera at Graydon Carter and watch closely while his studied smile – deadly disarming and eminently photogenic – charmingly overtakes his features. Simultaneously, with almost imperceptible stealth, his nose leads his face to drift gently, if ever so swiftly, two inches to the right. It works.

7. Practice the lesson of #6 above, incorporating those of #1 through #5. Use a mirror and then rehearse sudden situations – Sydney might stalk and surprise you around the house, snap-shooting at startling moments until you’ve got the look down pat. This may take quite some time, but surely Jesse James drilled with his brothers when no-one was looking. A surefire quick-draw smile saves reputations if not lives in this day of careless camera-slingers.

8., 9. & 10. The Becker Handker-graph & The Becker Necker-graph (for Sydney, though she really doesn’t need it). I can share this with you now. Things move fast here in New York. Deeply disappointing advise of private counsel indicates that I will never make the billion off my devise. Verbatim: “You haven’t got the mothball’s chance in a public urinal, kid.” [Apparently, it's no more patentable than The Becker Horn-o-Meter of a few years back - concocted to help Mayor Giuliani control horn-honking in the city. I imagined all automobiles to be affixed with it.] Very simple: you have your picture taken by me – a most flattering, dashing and seductive head shot. Then, with a process that surely involves Guangdong, China, I transfer the image to both sides of a silken pocket-square or neck-scarf: very handy items to draw and hold in front of one’s face when picture-takers approach… How’s that for a hanky? It must be worth something..

Yours truly,

Jonathan

PS One day soon, I’m going to tell you the tale of my aged Anglo-Argentine tailor.

– Jonathan Becker is a well-dressed photographer of international repute working with Vanity Fair & US Vogue

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