Life Sketches by Terry Berkson

‘Lady with Horse’

The first time I heard about Lady Ostapeck was about 20 years ago, at my friend Buddy Crist’s house on Angel Hill, outside the hamlet of Schuyler Lake. I was sitting in his living room when I noticed a picture hanging on the wall. It was of a man dressed in buckskins standing in the doorway of a weathered cabin. When I got up to take a closer look I realized it was Buddy appearing very authentic in clothes I never saw him wear before. He looked terrific.

“Who took the picture?” I asked.

“Her name is Lady Ostapeck,” Buddy answered. “A while back I was gassing up at Stewart’s in Richfield Springs. She was filling her tank on the other side of the pump and kept looking at me. I mean really looking—for a long time. Finally she comes around the pump and says, ‘Are you finish?”

“I’m still pumping,” I answered.

“No, are you Finnish—are you from Scandinavia?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“You sure?”

“Ma’am, to the best of my knowledge I’m Irish, Indian and German.”

“That may be, but I’d like to take your picture.”

It turned out that the woman, who was then in her 70s, was a famous photographer of Finnish descent. She wanted Buddy, who had the “right look,” to pose for pictures she planned to use to help celebrate Independence Day in Finland. They made an appointment and a week later my friend spent an entire day trying on clothes in a costume and prop-cluttered house while talking with Lady Ostapeck as she tried to bring to the surface a certain spirit she saw in him. When Buddy’s wife Cathy, who had been sitting in their car for hours, came around to see how the photo session was going, Lady ushered her away, saying that her presence would affect the aura.

Each shot took a long time. Lady would remove a makeshift velvet-lined bottle cap that she used to cover the lens of her antique Korona box camera. Then she’d start counting exposure time out loud. The speed of the count depended on the light that was coming through a nearby window. In an attempt to repair the camera’s broken shutter, she had taken it completely apart but was unsuccessful in making it work. When it was time to reassemble the damaged instrument, she lubricated the screws with oil from in back of her ear. She also used spit in some places. Though the shutter remained broken, the repair procedure lent to the mystic approach she brought to her photography. As in reincarnation, Lady believed the resultant portrait—accented by the use of costumes, lighting and conversation—would reflect something from a sitter’s soul or previous life.

Lady Ostapeck, whose birth name was Alma Kaukinen, was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother died a few days after she gave birth and her father, an immigrant from Finland, left the newborn child in the care of her mother’s sister. He fled to the northwest to work as a lumberjack and avoid the World War I army draft. Incredibly, two years later the aunt who had taken the child in was murdered along with the rest of her family by a deranged neighbor. For some unknown reason, the child was spared and passed through several Finnish families before she wound up in the mothering care of a widow by the name of Jansson, who lived in New Jersey.

As an adult, Lady worked at retouching negatives and photographs

for studios in New York City. The work was piecemeal and enabled her to answer a “calling” to frequently visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Commuting across the Hudson by ferry allowed her to maintain residence in New Jersey. She married Peter Ostapeck and had one child, a boy. The marriage lasted about five years before it came to an end. She later stated that she wasn’t cut out to be an ordinary housewife.

The “Lady” part of her life seems to have started when she put an ad in a newspaper stating, “Lady with horse wants house.” The appeal resulted in her finding an abode, along with a horse barn, in the tiny hamlet of Fly Creek, New York. It was then that she bought a horse and gave it a name that sounded risqué in English but meant “dear friend” in Finnish. She continued working for the studios in Manhattan but a lost portrait resulted in her termination. It was in 1970 that she visited a thrift shop and bought the Korona with the broken shutter. The purchase turned out to be her first step on the long road to international fame as a vintage photographer.

Fame did not necessarily come with fortune, but over the years Lady managed to make at least a dozen trips to Finland, where her work was well received. Finns first assumed that the accomplished artist was self-sustaining—and in her own way she was. Once, a government official arranged for her to make the expensive voyage as a courier. A shopping bag was all she needed to carry her belongings, which were often flawed. She had an aversion to throwing broken things away. In lieu of having to pay for lodgings she sometimes slept on a train. If the weather grew cold, a slit in an old blanket made a poncho.

In Lady’s words: “I am lost in the boondocks…no money for equipment…40 years doing negative retouching does not teach one to be a photographer…so I became a photographer anyway.”

I finally got to meet Lady Ostapeck some years ago at a gala held at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown. While we were talking, I got the feeling that she was checking me out in very much the same way she did Buddy years before at the gas station. At one point she asked if I had ever been on the stage, to which I responded, no. The last thing she said to me was, “Come up and see me some time,” which I took to mean that she wanted to do a portrait. Regretfully, I never took advantage of the invitation. How she saw me or made me feel may have given some kind of insight or even shed light on a past life.

Lady’s funeral was held on the eighth of February, 2017, only three weeks before her 99th birthday. Reverend James Atwell presided over the impressive ceremony. Friends spoke of a triumphant life in spite of tragic beginnings, and of Lady’s possessing a curiosity that outweighed fear. She even expressed a quiet interest in knowing just what dying felt like. I have never attended a funeral where mourners broke into applause in response to descriptions of her style and attitude toward life. In response, she’d probably say, “Keep a straight face when you think of me. Smiles don’t hold up for an extended exposure time.”

Terry Berkson’s articles have appeared in “New York” magazine, “Automobile” magazine and many others. His memoir, “Corvette Odyssey,” has received many good reviews: “highly recommended with broad appeal,” says “Library Journal.”