On the way to get a coffee around the corner from his studio in Lower Manhattan, Michael Stipe catches sight of a piece of paper among the contents of a split-open garbage bag: a child’s school assignment, the large and loping letters suggest. He picks it up. On the way back, the musician and artist pauses again — this time to investigate an unusual fruiting plant growing out of the sidewalk. “My boyfriend tells me I have no hierarchy of image,” Stipe says, back in the studio, referring to his partner, the photographer Thomas Dozol. “I’ll see something and think of it as insanely beautiful, and it might be not at all something that would attract a regular thinking person. And I’ll put it next to something from Versailles — to me, they make sense together.”
