After a year, his sister, who worked in the music business, visited with a band called War, and he shot them in concert and then came back to New York, where he started shooting “overweight record-company executives” at press parties and rock musicians “who could hardly stand up and I had two seconds to do it in,” taking head shots for actors, and testing models. Lisa Taylor was one of those. “He wasn’t Bruce Weber yet,” she says. “He was just loving photographing. I loved him, adored him. He was so good with people. He’d talk to you and get to know you and it would be about you.”
He first shot fashion for a trade magazine, Menswear, in 1973, on Mike Edwards, a model who would later romance Elvis Presley’s widow, Priscilla. Weber felt instantly attracted to him and saw in his own yearning a way to differentiate himself from other photographers by shooting through the lens of his sexual and emotional attraction. He wanted anyone seeing his pictures “to get the romance of a guy,” he says. “It was a means to an end,” to get attention, he admits. “But it seems like a really stupid way of going about it. A very certain kind of picture was all that was accepted. It isn’t like now, where you can open up a magazine and see a lot of expressions.”
Harry Coulianos, the flamboyant art director of the then-gaycentric GQ, loved the Mike Edwards photos—“the first positive reaction I got to any of my men’s pictures,” says Weber—and assigned him to shoot some tennis players on an indoor court. Weber hated the results, and when Coulianos insisted on running them, Weber insisted in turn that they appear without a credit. Coulianos found Weber’s attitude “incredibly abrasive” and refused to work with him again. “So I was thrown back into the rock-and-roll scene,” even briefly touring with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
Meantime, though, he’d attracted the attention of some powerful players in the photographic world. Miki Denhof gave him a small job at Glamour, and Irving Penn’s agent helped Weber put together a portfolio of samples and showed it to potential clients, including Bea Feitler, who’d become the founding art director of Ms. magazine. “She didn’t care about how you worked or what kind of tear sheets you had,” says Weber. She was interested in “what you want to do tomorrow, not what you did yesterday.” She tutored him, showing him photos by Diane Arbus, Bill Brandt, and Jacques Henri Lartigue, and assigned him to photograph the film editor Dede Allen, whom he shot barefoot in a tailored black dress and pearls at a Moviola “with tons and tons of film all over the place,” Weber remembers. Feitler “really woke me up and gave me a lot of strength to continue being a fighter, because she was.”
Around the same time, Weber met Nan Bush, who’d run Francesco Scavullo’s photo studio in the late 1960s. They “slowly became friends,” and she would lend him money to buy film. By 1973, she’d become his agent, and he’d moved into her tiny East Fifties walk-up apartment. But despite the odd jobs she found for him—ads for $2,500, photos for a catalog house that paid $750 a day, and magazine work for $200–$250 a page plus expenses—he’d begun to despair of ever having a career.
In desperation, he called Richard Avedon, who’d also shot him in his modeling days. He showed Avedon his portraits of jazz musicians and was advised to seek out Lisette Model, a Brodovitch-trained photographer, who was teaching at the New School for Social Research. That reminded Weber of an encounter two years earlier with the fashion-photographer-turned-artist Diane Arbus. After she ascertained that he wasn’t a groupie and, despite his tan, wasn’t a rich kid, either, Arbus spent several mornings talking to him on the phone, and he shyly showed her photos he’d taken of a gypsy couple he’d met in Central Park. He shot them “almost making love,” he recalls, “in this loft with twenty-five birds.” Arbus had also told him to study with Model.
Model was delighted by Weber’s first photographs, taken for her seminar, of an impoverished imperial Russian princess who “lived in this funny old apartment,” Weber recalls, “with thirtysome cats.” He photographed her in bed with them. But Model hated his next assignment, “all very good-looking girls and guys,” he remembers. “You didn’t take any chances!” she scolded him. So for his third try, he photographed a once-beautiful bouncer-bartender-hustler with a “Charles Atlas man kind of body,” who’d had four face-lifts, seeking to look like Marilyn Monroe.
“I really wanted to win Lisette’s respect back,” Weber says, “so I went to his apartment. He was always trying to commit suicide, and there were bloodstains all over the place. I did pictures of him posing with all the photographs that had ever been taken of him, lying in dirty underwear and his bathrobe. His bed hadn’t been made in weeks and the sheets had a grayness to them.”
“Is this guy still alive?” Model asked. “He looks like he’s about to kill himself. Bruce, you took the chance. You really did it.”
Years later, he could still quote her verbatim: “She’d say, ‘You’ve got to photograph a tree when it’s living, when it’s first planted, when it’s dying or it’s in a storm. A tree is a special thing. Don’t make it like a Hallmark greeting card.’ ” Before long he had his first gallery show, in May 1974, of photographs of the losers in Miss Body Beautiful and Mr. Teenage America contests. “More than anything,” he says, Model “gave anybody who studied with her the courage to really confront.”
Weber began to gain momentum. In 1976, Andrea Quinn Robinson gave him a job at Seventeen—one of his first times shooting women’s beauty—and found him “agreeable but strong about how he felt. I drove him crazy. I’d say, ‘Bruce, I’m going to get fired for this picture.’ He was always game for doing the unusual.” On a subsequent trip to Puerto Rico, they tore up bedsheets and tied rags in the models’ hair. At the time, that was bold.
Bush sent Weber’s portfolio to Kezia Keeble, a Nashville debutante who’d started her career in fashion at Glamour, then worked as Diana Vreeland’s assistant and a fashion editor at Vogue, and was dabbling in fashion publicity while serving as the freelance fashion editor of Esquire. Keeble offered Weber an assignment shooting back-to-school clothes on nonmodels, a requirement at Esquire then, and one Weber eagerly embraced; the “effeminate flair” that prevailed in a world where macho Marlboro Men were, quietly, gay had no visual appeal to him. Weber also embraced several of Keeble’s choices of amateurs, all of whom had recently graduated from college. One was Paul Cavaco, a waiter at a nearby branch of Brew Burger, and Keeble’s boyfriend.
The shortish, bespectacled Cavaco was “what every kid’s best friend looked like in school,” Weber says. Cavaco was also a natural fashion stylist, and after that first shoot, Weber told Keeble her boyfriend was “really good at this,” Cavaco remembers. “I’d watched Kezia do it, so I kind of knew what to do.” Styling was just then emerging as a new freelance fashion profession and attracting magazine editors who wanted both more freedom and more money at a time when advertisers were increasingly calling the tune at glossies.
Magazines and fashion were becoming ever more boring and conservative during the economically troubled years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency—and creative fashion folk felt stifled. “People were doing very creative things in other areas like advertising and avant-garde magazines,” says Barbara Dente, who’d worked at Nancy White’s Bazaar and Marc Balet’s Vogue Patterns before turning independent. “All they wanted you to do was be creative. They’d send a suitcase [of new clothes] and say, ‘Do what you want.’ ” Sometimes they weren’t even paid. “We did it for the creative experience,” Dente says. “The photographers had their costs paid, but I never got a dime.”
Keeble and Cavaco were living together when they met Weber. They would soon marry, and the trio grew close enough that when Keeble got pregnant, Weber was the first friend they told. The three were always looking for ways to work together. Weber would shoot press kits for Keeble and little ads for her clients. “Every time she got a job, she’d say, ‘Let’s use Bruce,’ ” recalls Cavaco. Weber would do the same for them. Keeble was “very much of the school of the photographer,” Cavaco says. “She want
ed him to take his pictures,” and Weber adored that.
“At the same time, maybe out of desperation,” says Weber, “GQ said, ‘Let’s give Bruce a few things to do.’ ” Dente was sometimes hired to style women’s clothes for the men’s magazine. “No one was on my case that ‘You have to show this dress,’ ” she says. Weber was a perfect partner for the new stylist elite—and for Donald Sterzin, who worked at GQ. Sterzin and Weber turned their backs on modeling-agency men and started cruising college towns for those flawless and shining twenty-year-olds of their dreams. “It’s interesting,” said the late model Ingo Thouret, “that the gay models” of the era “appeared totally straight,” so their pictures would appeal to straight men, while Sterzin and Weber “mainly hired straight models, but the photographs have a gay appeal.”
Over the next four years, they would transform GQ, dragging it out of its closeted us-against-them Boys-in-the-Band beginnings into a nirvana where “gay men and the gay sensibility didn’t need to be ghettoized” and “hetero college boys,” as GQ itself would later put it, “stumbled into stardom as gay icons.” One of the old-school gay male models who were thus usurped would later describe a silent confrontation while posing for Weber. The photographer wanted him to look away from the lens, but he stared straight into it instead, he said, to deliver the message “I know who you are.” Weber, he felt sure, was a new kind of fashion voyeur, one who used his camera to possess unattainable men.
In 1978, not long after shooting a photograph of Ralph Lauren’s family, Weber was hired to shoot a promotional brochure for the designer. That same year, working with Keeble and Cavaco, Weber made his debut in the SoHo Weekly News, a local paper for what was then an emerging artist’s neighborhood, featuring a twelve-year-old Brooke Shields wearing menswear. “It really looked different from what was happening,” says Annie Flanders, the paper’s style editor. It would be five more years before the world caught up with androgyny and cross-dressing.
For his second SoHo spread, Weber recruited New Jersey surfers as models—and struck a nerve that’s still vibrating. Over the next four years, his photos filled GQ, as Weber and Sterzin, who replaced Coulianos as art director in 1980, scoured America, combing its schoolyards, picking through college yearbooks and team photos, hanging around gyms and sports fields, even crouching in dunes with binoculars, trying to spot new faces on the beaches of California, Hawaii, and Florida. Everyone around Weber joined the act. “Our phone bills,” Nan Bush said at the time, “are not to be believed.”
Their most famous discovery was a water-polo player from Pepperdine University named Jeff Aquilon, who’d appeared at an open casting call for a Weber shoot with a black eye and a bandaged broken nose. The first photos Weber took of him, in 1978, shot by the pool at director George Cukor’s house in the Hollywood Hills, didn’t appear for years, Weber says, because they were “pretty much aggressive.” GQ’s editors “were really frightened of seeing men’s skin. Pushing the sleeves up was an amazing adventure. Opening two buttons? ‘Aren’t we getting a little wild?’ ” At SoHo Weekly News, Flanders wasn’t as inhibited. She encouraged Weber, Keeble, and Cavaco to go “overboard to excite,” she says, and flew Aquilon to New York, where Weber shot him lying on an unmade bed with his hands stuck deep in a pair of Calvin Klein tighty-whities, a come-hither look on this face—and created a sensation. Editors at GQ warned Weber they were so tasteless, he’d never work again. “At the time, GQ was doing pictures of men in string bikinis, but the reaction was just so horrendous,” says Weber. “I’m sure I didn’t work for Glamour for a long time because of that.” Kezia Keeble more presciently proclaimed those pictures “the start of everything!”
Before the Jeff Aquilon photos were even released, Weber was onto bigger things. “It all sort of happened at exactly the same time,” he says. He’d met with Calvin Klein, shown him the photos of Aquilon, and won jobs shooting press photos in Palm Beach, images for Klein’s men’s jeans, one of which became another billboard in Times Square, and finally, a sprawling fashion portfolio that resulted from a 1979 shoot in Santa Fe that included items from all of Klein’s many product lines. Klein decided to combine them into a twenty-seven-page “statement of what Calvin Klein was all about,” he said. Faster than you can say Bronx rivals, Ralph Lauren hired Weber to do something similar.
European fabric manufacturers such as Peppone Della Schiava were the first to use ad portfolios, called groupage, highlighting fashions by the different designers who used their wares. With Weber, Lauren and Klein refined groupage into a new kind of advertising, buying consecutive magazine pages to keep their images consistent no matter what was being advertised. They sought to reclaim creative control from magazine editors and retail advertisers, who’d previously used the designers’ garments to tell the stories they chose, sometimes mixing and matching wares from several labels. Thanks to Weber, Lauren and Klein’s images were individually tuned and pitched. Thanks to Klein and Lauren, Weber’s photographs were given display that was unprecedented, particularly for a photographer so young. Imitations quickly began creeping into advertising for other clothing lines, and the concept of lifestyle advertising traveled far beyond fashion.
None of it would have mattered had Weber not pushed the envelope. Provocation got attention, which created authority, said the graphic designer Milton Glaser: “The worst thing is to be overlooked.” Love him or hate him, you couldn’t overlook Weber. “There is a liberation of attitude, a liberation of behavior in society,” said Alex Liberman. “He reflects that and maybe helped initiate it.” Calvin Klein’s ads were particularly controversial. “I don’t set out to upset people,” Klein said at the time. “That’s not my aim. My aim is to stimulate and excite. What I’ve come to realize is that everyone doesn’t see the same thing. People were upset by what I do.”
Weber’s commitment to risk put him at odds with many fashion magazines. For a time, British Vogue, which had published some of his most evocative photos, tributes to artist Georgia O’Keeffe, photographer Edward Weston, and author Willa Cather, could no longer entice Weber to work. Weber’s photos were “killed constantly,” fashion editor Grace Coddington said. But they sometimes seemed designed to provoke that reaction. Many of the best pictures in a series of marines on shore leave in Waikiki, shot for L’Uomo Vogue, were rejected and appeared instead in 1982 in Details, a then-new avant-garde magazine founded by Annie Flanders, and in Weber’s first, eponymous photo book a year later.
After Condé Nast bought GQ in 1979 and it was repositioned as a more conservative magazine, Weber stopped working there, too. Four years later, GQ got a new editor, Art Cooper, a journeyman who’d worked at Newsweek, Penthouse, and Family Weekly. He openly admitted that the magazine had been perceived by advertisers as oriented toward homosexuals, and he reoriented it as a more macho general-interest magazine with a fashion component, but Alexander Liberman dismissed the theory that it had turned antigay. Rather, he said, it was just promoting the fashion business. “Is Michelangelo’s David a homosexual sculpture?” he asked. “Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein sell images. Magazines fundamentally sell garments. This is where we have trouble with Bruce. The store or the manufacturer wants its garments to be bought. He gets the aura, but where is the merchandise in a Bruce Weber photo? Bruce wants to make a woman look like a truck driver’s moll. It doesn’t work. I think he despises fashion. Every time we’ve tried a sitting, there’s been a distortion. He is fortunate he has income from advertising sources who accept the outer limits of his urges.”
Chapter 37
* * *
“A DESIRE TO LIVE WILDLY”
Times had changed in so many ways, though it wasn’t always apparent. Avedon, Penn, Newton, and Bourdin were still taking pictures, Gilles Bensimon was about to take over Elle, and Patrick Demarchelier was emerging as a star at the international Vogues. The production of fashion imagery had been transformed into a growth industry as the garment trade spread in a thousand directions, designers embraced
mass-market products, and their coffers swelled with profits that let them expand out of their native markets, broadcasting their messages around the world. There was more than enough work, and so much money being thrown around, photographers didn’t need to seek new creative frontiers because fashion’s boundaries were growing so fast, just keeping up was a challenge.
Guy Bourdin continued to do work of distinction. “It was always all night long and very creative,” says Bonnie Pfeifer. “I never knew what the heck was going on, but the pictures were always great.” But what the writer Anthony Haden-Guest described as Bourdin’s “impenetrable strangeness” and “morbidity” began to overwhelm him in the eighties. He was “a little bit twisted,” says J. P. Masclet, who assisted him after Bourdin’s return from a six-month career pause Masclet describes as “a bit of a burnout.”
Bourdin could be generous and charming, Masclet continues, but would also consult an astrologer daily and would send models and stylists home if he’d been warned off their signs that day. “I was told to be aware that he was a bit of a sadist. He was a very, very difficult man to work for.”
In 1981, Bourdin’s second wife, Sybille Danner, the model he’d taken up with more than a decade earlier, committed suicide. Bourdin’s son, who discovered her body, was shipped off to boarding school. A year later, Haden-Guest reported, Bourdin was thrown in jail after tearing off his clothes in a French tax office and calling the officials there Nazis. Why was he losing his grip? Fashion, Haden-Guest suggested, “had fallen out of love with photographs that hinted at decadence, ambiguous sex and female frailty.”
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