Gay Talese. Phil Stern. Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

The most celebrated celebrity profile ever written contains almost nothing its subject actually said. In 1965 Gay Talese trailed Frank Sinatra for weeks while the singer, laid up with a cold, refused to sit for an interview. Out of that refusal came Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, the 1966 Esquire piece that helped define the New Journalism.

This TASCHEN volume sets that essay beside the photographs of Phil Stern, one of the few image-makers Sinatra actually let close. So the object holds two opposite kinds of access. The writer who never got the interview saw everything from the edges; the photographer who got the trust stayed discreet inside the circle.

The cold itself became the accidental engine of the piece. Denied the man's voice, Talese wrote about the vacuum a star leaves in a room, the way an entourage bends to a mood it cannot name. The failed interview turned into a richer subject than the interview would have been.

Stern earned that trust over decades. He was a Hollywood and jazz photographer who shot James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Louis Armstrong, and his Sinatra pictures favor the working performer over the myth. There is the cigarette, the recording booth, the fedora tipped against the studio light, the fatigue that publicity photos are built to hide.

A few frames carry the whole book. Sinatra at the microphone with his eyes closed is the public idol; the same man between takes, slack and unguarded, is the person Talese chased and never cornered. Stern got both without ever seeming to ask for either.

Stern's lesson, separate from Talese's, is about access as a discipline. He spent decades earning the right to be invisible in rooms most cameras never entered, and he repaid that trust by never grabbing for the cheap, exposing frame. Access, patiently kept, is its own kind of technique.

The pairing is genuinely smart. The essay is a masterful demonstration of observation, the exact discipline a portrait photographer lives by: watch, wait, register the small tell that gives a guarded person away. Stern's frames practice the same patience with a lens instead of a notebook.

Talese built his portrait from the outskirts. He listened to the entourage, the songwriters, the gray-haired woman who carried Sinatra's toupees in a case, the men who watched his moods for a living, and assembled a man out of the fear and deference he left in a room. It is reporting as surveillance, and it is why the piece still gets taught.

TASCHEN gives the collaboration a suitably grand frame. The book is oversized, the reproductions are rich, and the essay is set to be read in full rather than skimmed beside the plates. The production treats a magazine article as the historical document it has become.

The catch is the balance. For a photographer, the volume tilts toward the page. Stern's pictures are strong, but they share the room with the finest reported profile in American magazine history, and next to that prose even very good photographs can start to read as illustration.

So the honest thing to weigh is what you are buying. For some readers, a photography volume braided with landmark reportage is the whole appeal, two crafts of attention set side by side. For others, the braid dilutes both strands, and each would hit harder alone.

The quieter question is the one the object cannot resolve. When a subject refuses to perform, who ends up telling the truth about him: the writer who recorded what the man would not say, or the photographer he trusted enough to ignore?