Autumn Years Winter 2023/24

She and her friend ac cepted the invitation, and Barbara thought she would introduce Manos and her friend and things would progress from there naturally. Manos, however, had other plans. What Barbara did not learn until years lat er was that Manos sold his plane ticket home to Greece after he met her. Manos only had eyes for Barbara. “Don’t make plans, the uni verse will always mess it

Barbara and Manos on their wedding day, 1969.

and a live-in maid. Tell one of them to do it.” So, he fired her. Within a week’s time, Manos also found himself out of work. He was working as a staff photographer in a company whose owner had promised to promote Manos’ portfolio among his many advertising and magazine contacts. When that never transpired, Manos quit. His egotistical boss told him, “No one quits on me, you’re fired!” Manos told Barbara he wanted to start his own advertising photography studio and suggested they work together, with Barbara representing him to the advertising industry. She protested that she did not know anything about advertising or the industry; Manos confidently told her, “Don’t worry, I’ll teach you.” And he did. They started their business, Trident Communications, in one room on 23rd Street in Manhattan in 1973. Together, they grew a successful still photography and multimedia business that, eventu ally, became a marketing company. Most of their accounts were travel clients, with On a recent Jewish heritage press trip, a much younger journalist told Barbara, “When I get to be your age, I want to do what you’re doing!” Barbara considers this “a wonderful compliment.”

Barbara holding a king crab in Norway, 2012.

the New York Institute of Photography. In New York, he also started working as a freelance photo assistant in some of the top advertising photography studios of the period, both for the needed income and to gain experience working with famous photographers and seeing, first hand, how they created their images. Manos says, “If you want to become a famous photographer, New York City is where the best advertising photographers are. That’s where I actually honed my skills, freelancing and learning from the best!” Barbara and Manos met at a party about a year later in early October 1968. “Barbara started talking to me because she thought I was cute and that I would be great to introduce to her best friend who wasn’t at the party,” laughs Manos. Manos walked Barbara home after the party and, like a true gentleman, shook her hand, and invited Barbara and her friend to a Halloween party several weeks later.

up,” she laughs. Manos and Barbara had a good time at the Halloween party, and after that, every day he would wait for her to come home from work. He would knock on the door of her studio apartment, once a brownstone’s foyer at 92nd and Lexing ton Avenue across from the 92nd Street Y; the apartment shook when the subway passed below. “Hi, I’m here!” he would announce, recalls Barbara. They married in 1969. “My family’s rabbi in New Jersey wouldn’t marry us unless Manos con verted, and his priest in Athens wouldn’t marry us unless I converted, so we were married by a New Jersey judge who was a friend of my older brother,” explains Barbara. One rainy morning in 1973, Barba ra’s boss threw his drenched raincoat onto her paper-filled desk and directed her to sew a button back on to protect his clothes from the rain. She told him what he could do with his button, re sponding, “You have a wife, a mistress

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