“This is fine,” said Vernon Stratton. “It’s always easier with women’s clothes.”
At 6:00 p.m. Ramella began to grimace. Bites six inches in diameter had popped up on her skin. At six ten, Weber rubbed his eyes and, eleven hours after he began, put down his camera.
The whole side of his face had been rubbed raw.
On the surface, Bruce Weber was as goofy, friendly, and unglamorous as the pack of golden retrievers who were always around him and appeared annually on his holiday cards. Large and round and friendly as a big old dog himself, always lightly bearded with a classic bandanna knotted over his head, Weber emerged as the quintessential photographer of his time, the medium, if not the message maker, for the two best-known fashion designers of the day, the battling Bronx-born boy wonders, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. Weber was a shaman who made misty moments and sexual fantasies into memorable selling propositions.
Weber’s most influential work was for brands, not magazines, a result of a stark decline in the creativity of the fashion publications that had long been the Medicis of the fashion picture, nurturing photographers and bringing them to prominence. Lauren and Klein were leading a revolution in which designers, flush with cash from the sale of commodities such as jeans and polo shirts, took the lead in taking photography to parts unknown.
Most photographers excelled at either stillness (Penn) or motion (Avedon); Weber was comfortable with both. His genius was his ability to portray images as opposite as Dionysus and Apollo, punk rock and country music. For Lauren, Weber’s work crossbred the nostalgic and the modern, idealizing Americana and evoking its white Anglo-Saxon Protestant past, but replacing its distancing Puritan legacy with a tangible yearning for a sexualized ideal that was both accessible and out of reach. “All Bruce had to do was pinch it and it jumped,” says model agent Frances Grill. For Klein, Weber shot pictures that alternately evoked classical ideals of physical beauty and the quintessentially of-the-moment chaos of the era’s no-holds-barred libertinism. For both, he did something previously unimaginable in fashion photographs, portraying women as paragons of strength and men as sexual objects. For Klein, he’d even placed a young man on a pedestal.
Weber’s specialty, and what brought him to prominence, was photographing “suggestive men,” said Milton Glaser, the art director, with “an erotic undertow,” according to Condé Nast’s Alex Liberman. Weber’s vision didn’t treat male models like the props they’d been in the past, when “real men” didn’t buy fashion magazines, men’s fashion photography was an industry stepchild, and as the late designer Perry Ellis put it, “male models had an effeminate flair.”
Weber convinced “extraordinary American men with exquisite bodies” to pose for him, Ellis continued. “True men in every sense of the word.” He did it by being utterly unthreatening, in his infectious way. He confides easily and draws out those he’s with. His friendliness seems natural, heartfelt. But, he’ll admit, “You have to be manipulative, to be a photographer, to get results.” Equally crucial to Weber’s success was that he caught the zeitgeist on the fly. Weber’s pictures “were saying, ‘Change!’ ” says Grill. “Of course there were social messages.”
By any standard Weber was already a great success. His advertising day rate was then $10,000; he was soon to have museum shows in Italy, Switzerland, and France and was about to publish his second book; and private sales of pictures had earned him over $150,000 in the prior year. He was thought to earn between $1 million and $2 million a year.
He spent some of it on collections of photographs, vintage cars, and grand real estate: a sprawling loft overlooking the Hudson River in New York’s Tribeca district; a compound in Bellport, Long Island, a summer community popular with fashion types; and Longwood, an eleven-acre, eighteen-building camp reachable only by boat on Spitfire Lake in the Adirondack Forest Preserve. Longwood, a property with great patrician provenance, was built at the turn of the twentieth century for Standard oilman George S. Brewster. Weber shared these residences with his agent, Nan Bush. Though it was as liberal as any existing subculture, the fashion world, fully cognizant of Weber’s obsession with male sexuality, wondered what that was about.
Weber’s professional secret seemed simple. By making men protagonists in the foreground of his photos, by giving them character and sexuality, by placing them in poses traditionally associated with women, and by sometimes photographing them with short-haired girls wearing popular man-tailored styles, Weber confronted traditional mass-market stereotypes of sexual roles and encouraged their evolution. Ironically he did that by objectifying men. But Weber’s ambitions went beyond that. His work also reflected the ego and id of the baby boom, then the primary buyers of fashion products, capturing both its yippie-era sexual pioneering and its yuppie longing for perfectly edited lives.
Over the years, Weber worked for a stunning array of top designers from the avant-garde Azzedine Alaïa to the nouveaux riches favorite Gianni Versace (another brand that leaned on homoerotic imagery) to staid establishment brands such as Chanel, Neiman Marcus, and Valentino. “He’s given each one a distant mythic image that’s either beautiful or scary,” said Barbara Lippert, an advertising critic. Either way, he’d snared the fleeting attention of a media-soaked generation, inventing better visual mousetraps with stunning rapidity and fecundity. But Weber was “not content,” said another designer client, Jeffrey Banks. Weber fought endless battles for creative control; as he’d unhappily point out at every turn, clients had been killing his work, or choosing (in his view) to use the wrong pictures, since the day he picked up a camera. Even his best clients—Lauren and Klein—could drive him crazy. “ ‘This is too Calvin. This is too Ralph.’ They’ll throw away what a team has done!” he’d shout, saying their criticism made him “crazy in the head.”
In the early years of the eighties, life had changed entirely—and not for the better—for many peers of Weber’s age. Drugs had stolen lives and livelihoods, and not just in the fashion trade. And an epidemic first recognized in 1981, when it was referred to as gay cancer, and given the name AIDS (or acquired immune deficiency syndrome) in September 1982, had already affected thousands, hitting particularly hard in the fashion community, where homosexuality had long been accepted, even celebrated. By 1985, AIDS had reached every region of the world, the actor Rock Hudson had given it a celebrity face, and more than fifteen thousand cases had been reported, causing more than twelve thousand deaths.
Weber not only believed that the fashion industry’s acceptance of different lifestyles needed to spread widely and quickly, he had embraced the role of educator through his pictures. Though he never discussed his own sexuality, Weber was determined to confront people’s prejudices and fears and nudge them past embarrassment into acceptance of the whole spectrum of sexual preference.
The walls of his homes were lined with his photography collection. Every surface was covered with photo books. He openly admitted a debt to photographers who’d come before him, speaking of his love for August Sander and Jacques Lartigue; heroic shooters such as Alexander Rodchenko and Leni Riefenstahl; glamour photographers such as George Hurrell, Andre de Dienes, and Roger Corbeau; and fashion lensmen such as Horst and Hoyningen-Huené. “A lot of people have taken great men’s pictures,” Weber says. “Huené’s pictures of Horst are amazing. August Sander’s photographs of young actors and actresses in the Berlin Ensemble are amazingly avant-garde. The Man Ray photograph of Cocteau. I hardly think I was revolutionary.”
Yet he was neither a copyist nor a mere update. “I was just photographing them the way I felt about them,” Weber says. But Alex Liberman saw that Weber’s vision was something new and different. “The fashion photograph is evolving,” said the editorial director of Condé Nast, and Weber “may be one of the first to have sensed it.” As clothing grew simpler and less important, the human factor, the narrative, the social message, “became dominant,” Liberman continued, “and there, Bruce is quite unique in daring to portray a reality t
hat is seldom seen in fashion magazines.”
That British Mohair shoot was a typical day for Weber, who was renowned among his clients for shooting ten thousand frames to fill a few magazine pages or to create an ad campaign. “You’d get a shopping bag of three thousand chromes when all you wanted was one picture,” says art director Nick la Micela.
Weber was as notorious a control freak as any of the greats who’d come before him. The difference was, he had Nan Bush running interference. “I have to see if they really want his involvement,” she says of her client-screening procedure. “If they just want him to knock off a picture they’ve seen somewhere, I know it’s the wrong job for us.” He’ll turn down work if he doesn’t like the client, if they’ve already picked a location or models he doesn’t like, if he is unsure of the idea motivating a shoot, or if it changes too much beforehand. He’s even threatened to walk off sets when his control was questioned. “Most people don’t like to have two very strong, opinionated people like Nan and myself involved in their work,” Weber admits.
While he discusses approaches and models with his clients, he says, “We never get specific.” He lets his shoots take their own shape, trying to capture fantasies on film, “and sometimes they’re not mine.” The Mohair session “was no more planned than that we would drape people in fabric,” Grace Coddington explained. “What happened after that was anyone’s guess.”
Like Arthur Elgort, Weber is intrigued by unposed, unplanned moments. To maximize possibility, he treats his models and stylists like family, traveling with them, eating together, soliciting their ideas, waiting for telling moments he can pin to a page like a butterfly. “There’s a bit of voyeuristic qualities in any photographer,” Weber says. There is empathy, too. “He gets into my head,” said Jeffrey Banks. “His style was very similar to what I believed in,” said Ralph Lauren. “I never liked real fashion. My thing is much more earthy and natural and rugged looking, and that was Bruce’s feeling.” “We understand each other,” agreed Calvin Klein. “It starts with that and ends up with a photograph. There’s always trust and a sense of freedom. There’s a tremendous amount of planning that goes into it, but then hopefully it goes far beyond what we planned.”
How did Bruce Weber manage to channel the inner souls of so many finicky fashion clients? Fashion is “completely schizophrenic,” Weber says. “I was used to that kind of emotion.” The source of Weber’s chameleonlike empathy lies in Greensburg, a small farming and coal-mining town outside Pittsburgh. His father, a furniture businessman, came from a large, poor Jewish family and Bruce’s mother from a wealthy one. His parents lived a life filled with heavy drinking, extramarital affairs, and constant travel. Bruce would be left alone with a maid or with his grandparents, who lived nearby, for months at a time, while his parents went off to resorts such as Capri. “People always say, ‘This parent is really out of it, this parent’s really drinking a lot, this parent’s sleeping around a lot. It’s really bad for the kids.’ But in another way,” Weber says, “it gives you a toughness that makes you survive. It made [me and my sister] immediately sophisticated.”
But their lives were anything but stable. “It was a really wacko existence,” he says. Which he feels was good preparation for a fashion photographer’s life. His parents “went through a crazy period where once every three or four months, they wanted to get a divorce. My mother would pull me out of school and rush off to Palm Beach. So the only normal life I knew was with my grandparents, and they were very strict.”
He endlessly studied family snapshots, including many of his mother’s wealthy family. A great-great-uncle had come to America from Germany with Carl Laemmle, a founder of Universal Pictures, and Bruce’s maternal grandmother shopped for clothes in Paris and wore Chanel and Schiaparelli. He had pictures of them all as well as of his parents, “this whole record of their romance together in pictures.” He fantasized an ideal adolescence he never had—romantic images he later plundered for his Ralph Lauren ads. He was obsessed with style from an early age. “My mother dressed very well and my dad had a real beautiful sense of style. I never really think of clothes as fashion. I think of them as something that’s just a part of being.”
His real life wasn’t glamorous. “I was like this weird kid. I was really skinny. I wasn’t very attractive. I was incredibly shy, wasn’t a jock. I was left alone and my whole life became picture books and art books and magazines. I was a little boy looking at Vogue. I studied painting, took piano lessons. You weren’t considered a real man unless you played football, and obviously, I wasn’t playing football.”
He sometimes took pictures of his family with an Argus instamatic camera, but “I never wanted to be a photographer. I wanted to be a cowboy movie actor. I was into Clint Eastwood.” Years later, he named a dog Rowdy after Eastwood’s character in the TV series Rawhide, which debuted when Weber was thirteen.
At sixteen, Weber was sent to the Hun School in Princeton, New Jersey. “My parents were really flipping out and my granddad really wanted to send me. If you were a total fuckup and you got thrown out of a great boarding school, you went to the Hun School. I was totally frightened to death. But I knew that in a crazy way, I would find a different family.”
After two uneventful years at Denison University, and a stint in summer stock at the Bucks County Playhouse, Weber transferred to New York University to study theater and art in 1966 and went a bit off the rails. “I really wasn’t happy. I had no social life. I wanted to get out and get attention. My parents immediately sent me to see a psychiatrist, and I’d go to this drug rehabilitation place down in the East Village,” not because he was doing drugs, he says, but rather, because he liked the company. “It gave me a way to open up, to continue growing up and getting away from my family.”
He was in a “James Dean period,” he says, hanging around with theater people, and “interesting people who didn’t amount to anything, but were just like lushes, or whatever,” some of them on New York’s then-still-deeply-closeted gay scene. Among them was the composer Stephen Sondheim, “a really good friend of mine,” who “got me through five very difficult years of my life.”
Weber’s father cut him off for reasons he doesn’t specify. “I had to pay my rent. I had to feed my dog.” Yet that summer, Weber spent his last money on two weeks in the US Virgin Islands. When he came back, “all tan and really thin,” but broke, he decided to try to earn money modeling. He thinks it was Sondheim who introduced him to Roddy McDowall, the actor and photographer, who took his test photos. “All that craziness adds up to at least a look,” Weber says, laughing.
Chuck Gnys, a theater director and, later, talent manager, once told him, “Bruce, when you first came to New York and walked into a room, there wasn’t a person who didn’t gasp at the way you looked.” Obsessed with appearance, Weber was thrilled to hear it. “I leaned over and kissed him,” he says. “That was the kind of attention that I never got.” A saying he often repeats is “When you’re young, you’re gold.” To Donald Sterzin, an art director friend, it was the key to Weber’s success as a photographer. At age twenty, a man’s look “all comes together, flawless and shining,” Sterzin said. “Bruce has a knack for capturing that magic year of their lives.”
Weber says he was a terrible model, incapable of being prompt or attentive to his craft. “I didn’t have the looks, I didn’t have a dedication. I wasn’t pulled together enough.” But his year of modeling turned out to be magic for him. He was photographed by Francesco Scavullo, Saul Leiter—“this strange, sensitive man” who took photos that “were so beautiful”—and Art Kane, who shot Weber in Coney Island for an Arrow shirts ad that never ran, “with food dripping all over the shirts.” Weber was most impressed by Sante Forlano, who’d shot for Glamour and Vogue. “He wore these wild kimonos and tons of jewelry and he’d just be totally insane. He really made me look like a movie star, and I thought, ‘God, that’s really incredible. Can I do that for somebody else?’ ” Though Weber was still taking fi
lm to drugstores for processing, “I started to feel like I wanted to be a photographer.”
By 1969 Weber was in Paris, trying to get “as far away from my family as possible, and away from all my psychiatrists and doctors,” and “do it. You really had to pay your dues by going to Paris in those years.” Other photographers told him to “find a beautiful young model, make sure she’s a top model, have an affair with her, and you’ll work all the time, and I just knew that I might be like that for five years, but I’d never be able to continue.” Weber was a different breed, thinking, “Why can’t men have pictures like women do, that they can look back on when they’re older and say, ‘Hey, I wasn’t so bad, was I?’ I wanted women to have the chance to see a guy like that, too, to fantasize a little bit. I mean, how many years did I dream about that picture of Elizabeth Taylor from Suddenly, Last Summer in that see-through bathing suit?”
Weber had two friends in Paris, a model and a film student, and whoever had money would pay rent for all three. He’d go to see Peter Knapp at Elle, “but none of the magazines would ever give me a job.” Photographers from New York would visit and buy him dinner, “but they never really wanted to help me. I was photographing a lot of men. That was really frightening to them.” Ultimately, to eat, he was reduced to sitting in the lobbies of the Ritz and Crillon hotels, chatting up tourists so they would invite him to dinner and perhaps take pity on him and give him money. “Nothing weird ever happened,” he says, but “I sort of knew what it was like to be somewhat of a hustler.”
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