You can find the celebrated portraits of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and at the Whitney Museum.

He has spent nearly twenty years documenting the contemporary art scene, resulting in the landmark book and exhibition of seven hundred photographs entitled Art World. His first film — Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart — won a Grammy, and after opening at the Sundance Film Festival has been shown at more than fifty film festivals worldwide over the past year.

Unusually, Greenfield-Sanders eschews the industry-standard 35mm camera, choosing to work instead with oversized view cameras which can produce negatives as large as 11 x 14 inches. More recently he has worked regularly with one of only five large Polaroid cameras in the world, which produce a Polaroid print of up to 24 x 36 inches. He works from a church he bought in the 1970's and converted into a beautiful studio and home, which he shares with his family.

What was it like growing up in Miami Beach?

I was lucky in that I grew up in a very artsy environment. My family's been in Florida for more than 100 years and has always been very involved in the arts. And my mother was an accomplishedl pianist and ran an arts organization that was the center of the cultural scene in Miami in the 1970's and 80's.

What got you interested in film?

I bought my first Velvet Underground recording when I was sixteen and got very interested in Lou Reed and that whole scene. And as a result I also started to read about Andy Warhol. I really loved the Warhol films, the un-Hollywoodness of it, the idea that you can make a film yourself with very little money. So I started making Super-8 films, with my own little group of crazies and counterculture types, very much in the mode of Warhol. We had a great time and I learned how to make films. I wanted to go immediately onto film school but decided finally to go to Columbia University first and study art history. I'm very glad now I did because those studies still have a great impact on my portraiture to this day.