He has captured Cruise and Kidman partying, the ‘charm’ of Trump, a disgruntled Bowie, and a deathly Mapplethorpe. As the ex-New York cabbie releases a book of his extraordinary pictures, he recalls a bygone age when ‘the Kardashians would be laughed off the planet’

Jonathan Becker is remembering an occasion when he was working with the late creative director of Vogue, André Leon Talley. They were supposed to be taking a picture of “some jewellery lady and her daughter on a pony”. If you can’t already tell, Becker wasn’t very excited. But Talley was – and he was annoyed at Becker for not being more so. “He was twice my size,” says Becker, “and he was slapping me upside the head, ‘Get the girl. Take the picture now.’”

It was not, however, his sort of shoot. “André loved fashion and brands,” he says, “and that just didn’t intrigue me in the least.” Despite being a photographer who has spent five decades taking pictures of, well, everyone, Becker is not himself a household name. But many of the people he has photographed, for the likes of Vanity Fair and Vogue, are – and more. Becker’s latest book, Lost Time, is bursting with them.