The following is an excerpt from a longer and more detailed article on Priscilla Rattazzi's life and career originally published in EAST magazine's July issue, on newsstands and online.
At the beginning of her career in the mid-1970s, Priscilla Rattazzi received valuable advice from her employer at her first job. She was working as an assistant to the famed fashion and portrait photographer Yasuhiro Wakabayashi, better known as Hiro.
"He would tell me over and over again, 'Remember, Priscilla, work will always be there for you,' " she recalled at a talk for the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, Fla., recently. "Work," Hiro told her, "will never let you down, work will never betray you, especially in times of personal crisis."
Ms. Rattazzi eventually broke away on her own as a successful fashion and portrait photographer, before turning her lens to people and places she cherishes, Georgica Pond in East Hampton among them, for a series of books. But she never forgot Hiro's advice. It would be prophetic.
For the past three years, Ms. Rattazzi has endured a cascading personal crisis. So, she turned to work.
The result is a book, "Three Lindens." Its two brief essays and 13 photographs -- evoking a remarkable combination of tender, turbulent, heartbreaking, and heroic -- are her farewell to an East Hampton life and property she loved, and to three huge, majestic, and, as she would discover, ancient "champion" linden trees that stood watch over it all. (More background about the house and the circumstances that led to her departure are detailed in EAST.)
For three decades, Ms. Rattazzi and her family owned and lived in one of the most breathtaking properties on the South Fork, Briar Patch on Georgica Pond. The 11-acre storybook setting commands something close to a quarter-mile of Georgica Pond's eastern shoreline. The view from the wide Southern-style porch on the south side of the 10,000-square-foot Georgian Revival house stretches across a vast lawn, over the pond, to the ocean in the distance.
In the middle of this picture are the three 200-year-old lindens. Visually, but also in a way that can be felt only by being in their presence, they dominate the vast property. It belongs to them.
So it was to them Ms. Rattazzi turned when financial chaos struck, driving her from Briar Patch. Because of the very public business failures of her then husband, Chris Whittle (they have since divorced), creditors seized the property in 2021 through a foreclosure auction; additional auctions were held this summer.
The 13 photographs in "Three Lindens" reveal a fuller Briar Patch story: the shimmering blooms of joy and beauty, the soft-focus leaves of loneliness, the fierce black and white limbs of turmoil, even perhaps rage. The trees -- dressed in snow, stoically enduring hurricanes (Bob and Irene), in glorious flower, in love.
Ms. Rattazzi had been drawn at first by the lindens' beauty, their strength, the calm that descended on her when she was with them, watching the leaves turn in the breeze or the bees descend on the fragrant blossoms, the reassurance she felt by their guiding presence as she paddled home over the pond.
As they grew to know each other, she learned more about their less-obvious virtues, and her devotion to them grew. Cultures around the world consider lindens sacred, beneficent protectors; they are trees of maternal love, of healing, of justice, of harmony. From them come oils, elixirs, and medicines to heal the skin, the organs, even the mind. And they can outlive us over and over again, some nearly to a thousand years.
The three at Briar Patch began their lives around 1800, when their ground along Georgica Pond was a mixture of woodlands and farmland. The largest of the three trees, all of them Tilia americana, the American species of linden native to eastern North America, is 70 feet tall. Its trunk is the size of a small car, 24 feet in circumference. After being inspected and measured by Tucker Marder, an artist and arborist from Springs, it was declared a state "champion," the largest linden in New York State in 2022.
With undisguised admiration, Ms. Rattazzi writes in the book how, during her final months at Briar Patch, she pointed her lens upward into the trees' long, bowed limbs, and "noticed, perhaps for the first time, how their branches were intertwined, embracing each other like a family. . . ."
More than anything, she says, "Three Lindens" and everything that went into it is a way to recover her Briar Patch years.
The book was released this summer. An exhibition of photographs of the trees is on view at the Peter Marino Art Foundation in Southampton, where she will speak on July 29 about the book (which was published by the foundation), the exhibition, and the series.
"I photographed the trees in every kind of storm, including my own, so the book is a journey from real storms to metaphoric ones," Ms. Rattazzi said. "I also just wanted to focus on how lucky I was to live there for 30 years."
In late April, after securing permission, she returned to Briar Patch with her daughter. It was dusk, a crimson sunset over the western horizon. She embraced the trees and burned some sage. The smoke swept up into the wind.
"I pray that I will be as resilient as you are. . . . I pray that you will be loved," she said to the lindens, before turning and driving away in the falling light.
--
"Three Lindens" can be found at the Peter Marino Art Foundation, the Monogram Shop in East Hampton, and Marders garden shop in Bridgehampton.
