Town & Country March 2013
$50
"Hoarding School: The Collector Of Everything Preppy"
Thomas Cary's Upper East Side apartment is a preppy paradise, meaning it's timeless, if not eternal. John Perona's El Morocco Family Album lies just steps from a Chipp madras blazer out of the 1960s. Cary started stockpiling coins and stamps as a youngster living outside Buffalo in the '70s, and over the past few decades he has amassed a vast array of what he calls "product," including 21 Club jockey lamps and a leatherbound set of James Bond novels signed by Sean Connery. (He has 15,000 rare books stored off-site.) "I have this innate knowledge of what I've acquired," he says. "I can tell you when I bought each particular item and why." Cary used to be a buyer for Brooks Brothers but now focuses on the Cary Collection, which he oversees out of his time machine of a one-bedroom apartment. (Companies like Kate Spade and Bergdorf Goodman are steady clients.) Despite Cary's love of collecting, there isn't anything with which he won't part — for the right price.
[164] pp.
Featuring 'Yours Truly'
Photograph by Tina Barney
Tina Barney (born October 27, 1945) is an American photographer best known for her large-scale, color portraits of her family and close friends in New York and New England. She is a member of the Lehman family.
Barney is most well known for creating large format, colorful photographs of her wealthy, East Coast family. The images straddle the line between candid and tableau photography. Although, the wealthy became a sort of aesthetic in Barney's work, her "fascination is with the repetition of traditions and rituals. The idea that families no matter where they come from, kind of do the same thing." Barney's work is in the collections of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection in New York City; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. More recently her work has been shown at the New York State Theater in New York, in 2011; The Barbican Art Centre, London; Museum Folkwang in Essen, Museum der Art Moderne, Salzburg, and others.