A photographer's marketing trick, a legend's self-importance, and a funny pair of glasses.
![contactsheet.jpg]()
Photographer Tom Zimberoff's original contact sheet from his Jobs photoshoot (Tom Zimberoff).
Just when you thought every single Steve Jobs story had been exhumed from the ghastly Cemetery of Brushes with Power, here's one more. An enterprising journalist poking around Buck's, an iconic Silicon Valley diner, spotted a photograph of Jobs that he was sure he'd never seen before. In it, Jobs sits in front of a replica of the Rosetta Stone wearing
Groucho Effing Marx glasses.
That journalist, John Brownlee, then proceeded to track down everyone associated with the photograph, except (obviously) Jobs himself, and published the results of his
investigation on Cult of Mac. It's more revealing than you might think, perhaps precisely because this was not a big event in the Life of Steve. Small and funny, there was no need to pretend that Jobs was other than he was in the making of the photograph: cantankerous, interested in good PR, incredulous at the stupidity of other people, etc.
Turns out, the photographer, Tom Zimberoff, asked celebrities he photographed for magazines to wear the glasses for just a few shots, just as a lark -- and a marketing tool for Zimberoff. Jobs didn't want to do it, but Zimberoff got him to after some "very difficult" negotiations. In fact, this was how the whole shoot began:
Zimberoff immediately took the Rosetta Stone replica off the wall and moved it to the front lobby, which he converted into a make-shift studio by lining the ceiling to floor in black drapery.
Several hours later, Steve himself walked in, in hellfire mode.
"I'd been working in the lobby to turn it into makeshift studio for hours when Steve walked in with his entourage," Zimberoff recalled. "Jobs didn't even acknowledge me, but just walked in and asked the room, 'Whose stupid f***ing idea is this?' So I told him it was my stupid f***ing idea, and if he didn't like it, he could go screw."
But the best observation in the Cult of Mac piece relates to another photograph, the famous one of Steve Jobs' sitting in his house on the floor. The image conveys asceticism, dedication, a sense that Jobs needed nothing but his mind and his bicycle for the mind, the computer.
![jobsalone.jpg]()
The famous photo of Jobs by Diana Walker.
But Jamis MacNiven, his one-time builder, owner of Buck's, and separate a part of the glasses-photo story, noted that Jobs had little furniture not because he didn't care about material things, but because he cared too much.
"Steve was the kind of guy who would choose to sit on the floor because there was no couch good enough," MacNiven says.
Which, to be obvious, is not asceticism, but aestheticism taken to the extreme.
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
