Forbes

Forbes was a stand-alone magazine, as opposed to Fortune, which was part of the Time Life family of magazines. Forbes was housed in a modest eight-story building at 12th Street and Fifth Avenue, while Fortune was high up in the Time Life skyscraper at 50th Street and Sixth Avenue. Neither Forbes nor Fortune minded that I worked for both of them, though they were rival publications. Like Fortune, Forbes gave me a lot of varied subjects to photograph: Babe Ruth's glove; a nuclear power plant; independent oil producers; ninjas of the leveraged buyout. There were three photo editors, and once, they each gave me an assignment for the same issue, which they dubbed the "Geoffrey Biddle Memorial Issue." Fortunately it did not signify the end my work for Forbes.

In 1992, a picture editor called and said she'd like me to photograph a businessman, and I needed to do it on the roof of the Forbes building. It was an odd request because usually I went to the subject's place of work. I still can only surmise why that venue was required—either the business was going defunct or there were things about it that weren't open to public scrutiny. The subject turned out to be Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street. They told me to make him look sneaky. When Martin Scorcese was working on his 2013 film "The Wolf of Wall Street" that starred Leonardo DeCaprio in the title role, Scorcese's research department called to see if I'd photographed Belfort in his own operation. Sadly, since I so admire Scorcese's movies, I had to say no—but I loved the movie and got a lot of calls for those photos after it was released.