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"View Slideshow\n\nOf all the luxuries that a Manhattanite can enjoy, could any be more splendid than the private garage? It's always been something of a paradox that this most utilitarian of spaces, so common in residences all over the rest of the country, is so rare in the city that is famous for having everything. Still, the great majority of New Yorkers will tell you that they have no need for a garage, as they don't own\u2014and don't even want to own\u2014a car; they're perfectly happy, they'll say, to rely on taxis and subways to convey them from point A to point B.\n\nDon't be fooled by their nonchalance. Given the opportunity, any one of them would love to have a garage, and inside it a sleek set of wheels, ready and waiting for the loving kiss of the ignition key. A car sitting in one's own attached garage represents total freedom\u2014to move about the city, of course, but also to get out of it occasionally on nothing more than a whim. For the person accustomed to living well and freely, the absence of same is indeed a sacrifice.\n\nFor the connoisseur of automobiles, it's downright unfathomable. Timothy White, one such connoisseur, was determined to find a way to incorporate his car collection into his life as a New Yorker. White, who parlayed an early job with Rolling Stone into a career as one of the world's most successful and in-demand celebrity photographers, grew up in 1960s New Jersey, immersed in the formidable car culture that came out of that time and place. \"I've been intrigued by cars my whole life,\" he says. \"In New Jersey, you get your license at 17. But I was driving my first car at 15.\"\n\nWell before that, like many a young boy, he had collected Matchbox cars.\n\n\"So when I got older and could afford them, I just got the big versions,\" he says matter-of-factly. He currently owns nearly two dozen vintage automobiles, including a 1939 Lincoln Zephyr, a 1969 Aston Martin, a 1962 Corvette, a 1949 Oldsmobile sedanette and a 1951 Cadillac convertible. All of them spend most of their time in the 10,000-square-foot garage of White's house on eastern Long Island, to which he repairs on weekends. But when the time comes to return to the city, White hops into one of his treasures and drives himself back, pulling right into the garage that takes up most of the first floor of his studio, a former carriage house on Manhattan's West Side.\n\nThough he does much of his work in Los Angeles, White prefers to live in New York, where he has had a number of studios since 1979. When searching for his latest one, he naturally considered factors of location, space and light. But there was one other spec on which he refused to compromise.\n\n\"It was very, very important to me to be able to drive into the studio,\" he says. \"So the property had to have a curb cut, as we call it here. In New York you can't just buy a place and put in a garage. The cuts in the curb have to be there already.\" The former carriage house White found had everything he needed, curb cuts included. He spent 12 months renovating the space, \"gutting the whole first floor and putting down all the steel and concrete, so I could fill it with cars if I wanted to.\"\n\nWhile he's happy to tinker\u2014\"I'm building a '59 El Camino right now,\" he volunteers\u2014White insists that he's not particularly turned on by gearboxes and engine blocks. \"I'm not as much of a motor head as I may appear to be,\" he says. \"It's really an emotional thing for me. For instance, I have a '46 Chevy, and it's a completely pedestrian vehicle\u2014it was back when it was made, and it certainly is now. It's a jalopy, but I absolutely love it, love the fact that it's an original car with fewer than 50,000 miles on it.\"\n\nThe photographer, whose subjects (and friends) include Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and countless other screen icons, admits that he loves nothing more than \"driving around in Manhattan in one of my cars from the '30s or '40s\u2014it makes me feel like Robert Mitchum in a black-and-white movie.\" Not long ago he started taking his cars out on the back roads of Long Island, allowing himself to get lost until he came upon some beautiful setting. Then he would get out, with his ever-present camera in hand, and do what he does best.\n\nThe resulting photographs have already yielded Timothy White a pair of exhibits in New York and Los Angeles; a book is due out next year. \"My hobby has become a part of my work,\" he says. \"That really gives me a lot of pleasure.\" And how does this celebrity portraitist describe these pictures that so elegantly capture his lifelong passion? \"Well, there are no people in them,\" he acknowledges. \"But they're portraits.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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