‘No-one else ever took such a photo’

THEO PANAYIDES meets a local photographer and looks back on a life once lived at the forefront of the swinging 60s in London

You could drive up and down the street a hundred times – a quiet Nicosia street in a part of town so sleepy it still has the occasional empty lot – and never suspect who lives there. Even if you went up to the second-floor flat belonging to Tony Moussoulides, and noticed all the photos on the walls – models glancing at the camera with an ethereal expression, old Sunday Times Magazine covers, a photo of Andy Warhol finished in such vividly unreal lines and colours it looks more like a painting – you wouldn’t necessarily surmise that this 82-year-old man actually took all these photos, in the 60s and 70s and 80s, that he lit and posed the models, making as much as $3,000 a day in 70s money, and even flew to New York by special invitation (on Concorde, no less) to take that remarkable picture of Andy Warhol.

Not that he’d be shy about telling you. Look at this one, barks Tony, pointing to a photo on the wall beside the giant TV, I won the Bill Gibb Award for this one. It’s a photo of a girl in a white dress, presumably an ad or magazine cover. The girl is twirling, in motion, daylight and shadow undulating in the folds of her dress – but not heavy shadows, he points out, the urgency in his voice making me stop and look closer. The light behind her is hot, the front of the dress soft as milk. How was such lighting accomplished, outdoors, with 25 ISO film and a model in motion? “I’ll give £1.000 to anyone who can say how it was done,” offers Tony smugly. It’s not just technique, he explains a little later, in front of another photo – it’s a glimpse into the mind of Tony Moussoulides. “No-one else ever took such a photo.”

He’s not, it must be said, an easy interview – not because he’s unfriendly, quite the opposite, but because his life doesn’t flow smoothly in the telling; his memories tend to erupt in jagged chunks, like random pieces chipped from a statue. He rambles a bit, as one might expect from a man of his age. I have a couple of hang-ups, he declares before we start, using the Cypriot word “aipi” (we speak in Greek, which surprises me since he spent 40 years in the UK): I have only one eye – the right one is half-shut for most of our interview – and I tend to forget things, “I go into a room and wonder ‘Why did I come here?’”. But there’s something else too, something one often sees in very successful men whose success is a few years behind them: a kind of relentless self-assertion, a rather strained swagger, a vigorous delight in drinking from the fountain of the past that may also be a way of trying to compensate for Time moving on – as if he himself had trouble picturing the enormity of his own success, from the vantage point of this cluttered flat on a Nicosia side-street.

Again and again he circles back to the one thing he hates about Cyprus, deception in general but especially the “lying words” artists often use to pump themselves up, “‘I did this, I did that’ – a tissue of lies, to upgrade themselves”. I can see how it might be annoying to endure this or that local photographer bragging of their achievements when Tony did so much, back in his day – when he photographed Kate Moss and hung out with Peter Sellers and Peter O’Toole, when he won the Art Directors Award (“the Oscar of photographers”) for his groundbreaking photo ‘Water Nymph’, when he represented Britain at the MIFED festival in Milan with Spliffs, Joints and Pot, a 1965 documentary on London junkies which the British Film Institute is now in the process of digitising. “They’ve written to me, saying it’s a classic,” he explains proudly, leafing through a sheaf of papers to find the relevant email.

He’s been in the Sunday Mail before, nine years ago, when an exhibition of his work titled ‘Moussoulides: a 40-Year Journey With Light’ opened at the Kasteliotissa Hall in Nicosia and the estimable Zoe Christodoulides did an admiring write-up. “Zoe couldn’t believe who I was, because I wasn’t on the internet!” marvels Tony – but of course he pre-dates the internet, and besides the kind of work he did doesn’t leave much of an online imprint (though a Google search throws up several examples of his work). Tony was a fashion photographer and fashion, by its nature, is transient; the photos remain, but their context – the campaigns and magazine covers – are long forgotten. For a time, however (especially in the 60s), he was the highest-paid photographer in London. “Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Sunday Times – um – give me the names of some newspapers…”

The Telegraph?

“The Telegraph! The best newspaper, if you ask me. The Guardian. I worked for them all. You understand? They wanted me.”

It hangs in the air as we talk, this mosaic of a different time, shot through with memories. Peter O’Toole adored Irish whiskey; Tony knows this (granted, it’s not exactly a state secret) because his house in Mayfair, next to a venerable 16th-century pub called The Guinea, was a favourite haunt for O’Toole and his fellow actors. Almost every night, after the pub closed they came next door to his place, for drinks and parties. “I had a big hall upstairs, with a very well-stocked bar. That actor – the one who played Dracula?”

Christopher Lee?

“Christopher Lee. He was obsessed with my daughter – he loved playing with her, and telling her jokes”. Tony’s daughter, it should be noted, was about two years old at the time. She now lives in Ireland (his ex-wife was also Irish), working for a local charity.

One piece leads to another. The place in Mayfair was a massive three-storey affair that also included his studio – not just a house but a vital link in his successful career, making him known. He found it through Dame Moura Lympany, one of the top British pianists of the time, whom Tony had photographed; “You brought out my youth,” said delighted Dame Moura (who was in her mid-40s) and asked if she could do something for him. “I said look, I’d like to get out of Fulham Road, with all the drug addicts, and go to Mayfair for my work,” he replied, so she found him the three-storey pile (previously occupied by Eric Clapton and Cream) and even put down some cash for the deposit. Then again, those Fulham Road addicts also contributed to his life, having previously agreed to go on camera and talk about their lives for what became Spliffs, Joints and Pot.

A few more fragments: Warhol in ‘The Factory’ (his famous New York studio), telling our hero that he wanted to check all the photos himself, pick the one he wanted and burn the rest. He selected the one you see on my wall, relates Tony – the head has a halo, like a Byzantine emperor, with the Stars and Stripes in the background – despite the artist’s objections. “You look stupid in that one,” said Tony; “I want to look more stupid, and more savage, than Salvador Dali,” replied Warhol cryptically. Another fragment: commiserating with Peter Sellers, a celebrity friend who’d even asked Tony (for some reason) to write one-liners for his comedies. Sellers jealous because his girlfriend, a German princess, had been invited to Buckingham Palace and he hadn’t; “Re Peter, you’re a half-Jewish son-of-a-bitch, I said to him. They don’t want you, mate!”. Sellers coming by for his one-liners, and Tony joking that he can’t write except when he’s on the toilet (he has quite an earthy sense of humour). Sellers coming by the next day, with his Rolls Royce and chauffeur, toting a bottle of cod liver oil which he poured down Tony’s throat, as a laxative. “Oh, he was terrific! A good guy.”

Many people say he was neurotic, I point out.

“Well, he was a nutter. But I don’t have a problem with nutters. When you respect someone, when you don’t see their hang-ups and try to see the good side, they’ll respect you too.”

Was that the secret of his success – that he didn’t judge people? Maybe. A lot of his friends were gay, for instance (Tony wasn’t: “I liked models”), and of course that was never a problem. But the secret of his success was probably, quite simply, that he wanted so much to be successful – that he was “hungry”, as he puts it. Again and again, he recalls how aggressive and competitive he used to be as a young man, obsessed with becoming the best in his field: “I’ll beat him, and I’ll beat him too,” he recounts with a laugh, his fists pounding furiously as he acts out his inner thoughts from 50 years ago. “Someone said to me, ‘Who do you think you are, Avedon?’, I said to him ‘What name did you say?’. ‘[Richard] Avedon, the best photographer in the world’. Write it down” – he mimes writing the name down – “I’m gonna beat him!’.

He credits his dad for that hunger – a well-to-do Nicosia merchant who was perfectly happy for his son to become a photographer, but warned him not to expect a penny in financial support. “To succeed,” explained Dad, “you have to go hungry” (literally so: during Tony’s first few weeks in England, every meal was a cheese toastie with a single anchovy on top). Then again, maybe his competitive side came naturally, being the youngest of six – his oldest sister is about to turn 100 – and having to fight for attention as the runt of the litter. Photography was always a hobby, though he credits Anis Fuleihan (a famous Armenian-Cypriot musician who lived most of his life outside Cyprus) with having mentored and inspired him as a teenager. Before that, his interest had been sincere but not entirely serious: one of his first photographic endeavours was taking secret snaps of the girls at the Pancyprian Gymnasium doing PE, which he subsequently sold to the boys.

Then again, photographing women has always been what he did best. “Women were always running after me,” he sighs. “They thought I was Jesus Christ – that I just had to bless them, like that, and they’d turn into famous models”. (Easy to see why he never remarried.) ‘Water Nymph’ was something else, however – his most acclaimed picture, a two-page spread for Honey magazine in the early 70s that broke all the rules by cropping the model’s face, going in so close that you got half the head instead of a head and shoulders (“You will mutilate the lips! You will mutilate the ears!” protested the art director). Tony leafs through his notes – he’s prepared for the interview – and gives me a quote from poet Odysseas Elytis, the “three T’s” which hold the key to success: boldness, talent and luck, all three words beginning with ‘T’ in Greek.

‘Water Nymph’ was boldness, daring to try something new. Dame Moura Lympany was luck, perhaps (though you also make your own luck), an encounter that opened doors unexpectedly. And of course there was talent: you can’t do without it. The man knew – and presumably still knows – how to light an image. “I had a great talent for lighting,” he affirms, a little wistfully. “Lighting speaks, it has personality… I was the No. 1 bastard, when it came to that.”

Looking back, it’s been quite a life. “When you hear my story, you will shake your head,” he boasts early on (it’s that old man’s self-assertion again) and he has a point, the only regret being perhaps that he all but stopped making films after Spliffs, Joints and Pot. And now? In his later years, he’s rediscovered his compatriots, called back to Cyprus by his old friend Pefkios Georgiades (then Minister of Education) in the mid-00s. The plan was to launch a film and photography school, with Tony among the professors – but Pefkios died and the project was shelved, then came his smash-hit exhibition at Kasteliotissa, then came the move back from Mayfair and the flat on the quiet Nicosia street. A Filipina housemaid brings us a drink of water, presumably unable to claim her £1,000 by guessing how her boss contrived the lighting for the girl in the white dress.

“I have no secrets. I’m an open book,” says Tony Moussoulides. At 82, he owes nothing to no-one – except perhaps himself, the hungry young man who pushed his way to the forefront of Swinging London and must now be recalled from a distance, the power he wielded over advertising agencies and beautiful women now dissolved, inevitably, into glorious memories and advice for the young. “To be an artist, you have to do things – write it down, if you like – that other people haven’t done… In all my work, I was always a pioneer”. I walk past the glamorous photos on the walls and down to the street, to the empty lot where I parked my car.