JOnathan Becker recalls an occasion when he was working with the late Vogue creative director André Leon Talley. They were supposed to take a photo of “a jewelry lady and her daughter on a pony.” In case you hadn’t noticed, Becker wasn’t very excited. But Talley was – and he was annoyed with Becker for not being more excited. “He was twice my size,” Becker says, “and he gave me a smack on the head: ‘Get the girl. Now take the photo.'”

It wasn’t his kind of shoot, though. “André loved fashion and brands,” he says, “and that just didn’t appeal to me in the slightest.” Although Becker is a photographer who has been taking pictures of, well, everyone for five decades, he himself is not a household name. But many of the people he has photographed for publications like Vanity Fair and Vogue are – and more. Becker’s latest book, Lost Time, is full of them.

Harvey Weinstein appears behind actress Léa Seydoux at the chic London club Annabel’s in 2015. Madonna appears beaming with laughter in 1990. Author Fran Lebowitz grins as she is knocked over by a giant cream-colored chair at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in 2000. David Bowie looks slightly annoyed at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.

Then there are the greats of the art world: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman and Roy Lichtenstein; and those of the literary world, including William Burroughs, Arthur Miller and Tom Wolfe. Becker could assemble a dangerously eclectic cabinet with the politicians and their partners he has won over, from Jackie Kennedy to Nancy Reagan, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy to several of the Trumps, as well as international names such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Aung San Suu Kyi. And royals too, lots of royals.

“These are figures from a vanished world,” writes Mark Holborn, the book’s editor, in the introduction. And as he speaks to Becker via video from his cabin on an island in Maine, the book does indeed seem like a surreal catalogue of the grandees of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

But back to Talley. It may not sound like it, but the two were good friends. “I loved André,” Becker says. “I cry when I think of him.” They met in 1979 at a photo shoot for former Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland in the living room of her Park Avenue home in New York. When Becker confessed to Vreeland how he knew her – he had taken her home in the taxi he had been driving since 1978 to supplement his freelance income – Talley apparently shrieked. “He was truly the most dramatic person I have ever met.”

Becker’s speech is peppered with phrases that are very reminiscent of old New York, which is helped by his regular breaks to relight his cigar. “I wouldn’t have had the slightest chance in a public urinal,” he says at one point, referring to how his academic father, William Becker, assessed his chances if he didn’t go to Harvard. When the great Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï responded to something Becker wrote about his work by saying, “You have well understood and expressed the spirit in which I took my photographs,” Becker thought, “Well, I’m out of the urinal.” That gave him freedom, he says.

His backstory includes moves to Paris – Brassaï became one of his early mentors – and to California to avoid a $500 spaghetti bill at the famous Elaine’s restaurant in New York, in whose kitchen he had made portraits of Paul Simon and Andy Warhol. During his time on the West Coast, he did “dirty work for magazines with unpronounceable titles” and was an extra in Grease II – his mother Patricia Birch was the director.

The images in Lost Time perfectly evoke an era. Take, for example, his 1988 photograph of Robert Mapplethorpe, taken a year before he died of AIDS. It was the opening of his retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. It is an unassuming image. Mapplethorpe sits in profile, leaning on a cane. He does not take up much space in the frame, but his thin fingers are the focal point, dramatically underlining the thinness of his face directly above.

“The AIDS plague had cast its shadow – the elephant in the room. I tried to express it visually,” Becker writes in the book. “This plague in New York was terrifying – and it was killing people,” he says today. “There was no cure and it had never been properly photographed before.” Becker’s image was widely reproduced.

Although his subjects always surprised him in one way or another, he was perhaps most surprised by Dr. Kevorkian, the outspoken supporter of assisted suicide. Becker photographed him at his home in Detroit in 1994. He was a controversial figure and had already been tried for assisted suicide – but no one had ever seen his art. “Here, underneath it all, he revealed his necrophilic tendencies,” says Becker. “It was one of those pictures that really made an impact – the equivalent of that would be that it brought the Internet down.”

Becker was sent to locations, to Aspen, the Adirondacks, South America and Palm Springs, and then he could take care of the story himself. Budgets, or “the budget thing,” as he jokes, “never existed. If someone had said, ‘There is no budget,’ I would have said, ‘Of course there is no budget’ – and I would have meant that there is no limit to the money you can spend.”

Becker recorded many of his best compositions spontaneously and without staging. In one exciting snapshot, Nicole Kidman puffs on a cigarette at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in 2000. Tom Cruise, who was still her husband for a year at the time, watches from the shadows. It seems to be a moment of disapproval. “I think he was annoyed with Nicole that night,” says Becker. Cruise, he says, is conservative, “well-mannered and very conscious of his fame as a movie star.” Which explains the annoyance, according to Becker: “She had a few drinks in her and wasn’t playing the part.”

He is refreshingly open and often says whether he likes a topic or not. Myanmar’s head of government Aung San Suu Kyi? He didn’t like her. “I had a strange feeling about her,” he says. He also seems unimpressed by the Gonzo legend Hunter S. Thompson. “He was a freak. He liked to fire guns and keep going and was definitely outrageous.” Becker admits, however, that Thompson was “a lot of fun.”

He likes Melania Trump, whom he photographed shortly after their wedding. She was “quiet and had a certain sense of humor,” while Donald Trump “has his charm.” Becker has photographed the ex-president several times, but the shot that made it into the book shows him spinning on a brass-gold throne in a brass-gold room in Trump Tower. What exactly is Trump’s charm? “I’m not sure,” says Becker. “It’s a narcissistic charm. He somehow shares his great power – he thinks he’s very powerful. But he’s also very gullible.” Becker doesn’t seem squeamish about who he photographs, claiming not to be really interested in politics but rather to pay attention to “the character.” But he doesn’t “take on assignments to whitewash people. My job is not necessarily to make people beautiful or to make them more likable. What I like to do is to bring out the character and let them do their own theater.”

Becker is endlessly curious and has a bloodhound’s nose for humor, but he seems to be attracted to peace and quiet – at one point he shows me the quiet island where he spends part of the summer, which seems even quieter because it’s Saturday morning, six in the morning. He visits his studio in New York two or three times a week. “It’s on the east side, so I don’t have to go too far into the city when I drive there.”

Although he has made a career out of photographing fabulous New Yorkers at fancy events, he has always found the city cacophonous. “I’m a New Yorker first and an American second,” he says, but he also speaks of a sense of loss. “When I was a kid, there was no doubt that it was the greatest city in the world. Frank Sinatra sang about it. It really was the capital.” He no longer has that feeling, he says.

The more Becker looks at the book, “the more I realize that this is a lost time.” He points to a photograph of Jackie Kennedy Onassis in which she appears to be “charmed” by the writer Bernard Malamud. “This was a time when intellectuals had more status than movie stars or celebrities,” he says. “It wasn’t just about the Kardashians. They would have been laughed at.”