Weber didn’t lack for work. In 1996, he shot an entire issue of L’Uomo Vogue in Vietnam. “Kate Moss in a rice paddy in a ball gown is as mad as any of Diana Vreeland’s exotic fantasies,” wrote photography critic Vince Aletti. Then, in 1997, Weber staged a retrospective show of his fashion work and celebrity portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Simultaneously, a London gallery showed a group of hand-tinted Weber photographs focusing on the body of a sixteen-year-old professional wrestler from an eccentric book and movie project Weber called Chop Suey.
Weber seemed more comfortable with himself by then. Once, he’d left it to observers to speculate on his intentions, imagining his photos were inspired by everything from base voyeurism to a more mundane longing to be part of “some high-school in-crowd,” Weber finally felt free enough to admit, or at least verbalize, his obsessions, telling American Photo he was increasingly focused on “catching a kid at that really vulnerable time when he’s becoming a man . . . how you come to terms with who you are.”
By then he’d published eleven books and released six films. A seventh, a docu-portrait of Robert Mitchum, was in the works. And he’d become mainstream, or so it seemed from the reviews of the London show. The Financial Times said his work contained “nothing remotely shocking,” was sometimes self-indulgent, and that he’d been “eclipsed” by younger, edgier fashion talents. Apparently that critic hadn’t noticed Weber’s forty pages of photos of Kate Moss, Lucie de la Falaise, and Marianne Faithfull in the latest issue of W.
As if in response, Weber doubled down on his preoccupations with sex and youth. He started working for Abercrombie & Fitch, an old-line outfitter of WASP adventurers then being retrofitted, under the aegis of an outspokenly gay executive, Mike Jeffries, as a hip retailer for college kids. Weber’s partner in crime at A&F was Sam Shahid, whom Weber had first worked with at Calvin Klein. Shahid came up with the idea of a quarterly magazine—later dubbed a magalog—for the brand, filled with photos by Weber and cheeky articles aimed at hormonal college students; it debuted in spring 1997. Over the next half dozen years, the magazine—aimed at the young and featuring hard, young, seminude bodies splayed in sexually suggestive poses and situations—would be acclaimed, engender criticism, and become increasingly suggestive, likely to ensure A&F was not eclipsed by other brands.
As he’d done for years, Weber took a traveling-circus approach to Abercrombie shoots, envisioning them as movie sets. “We had acting classes, great acting teachers, a dance class for everybody, so they weren’t just sitting around thinking about their careers,” he says. “There was a bonding like people have on a football team or in a boot camp.”
Like Weber’s photos, the quarterly’s written content was nothing new, but seemed calculated to outrage some who worried about its corruptible target market. In 1988, Mothers Against Drunk Driving protested a spread of mixed-drink recipes. In 1999, an A&F “sexpert” offered advice on giving oral sex in movie theaters. In summer 2001, a group of concerned Christians called the magazine’s photos exploitive, and the National Organization for Women protested its promotion of unrealistic body types. That fall’s issue featured photos of nude women supposedly inspired by Katharine Hepburn, whom it described as a collegiate skinny-dipper. The next issue was canceled in the wake of the September 11 attack on New York’s World Trade Center, but even then, Shahid and Weber didn’t back down, and at the end of 2003, A&F released its most outrageous quarterly yet, one with a group-sex theme.
At the shoot for that issue, Weber predicted, “This will never happen again.” When it was released, more protests erupted; Abercrombie withdrew it and canceled the next issue, though it was already on press. Shahid and Weber continued working on ads and magazines for the label, but it was in decline; Abercrombie’s moment of influence was passing, and their work no longer provoked.
For Weber, it was all replay, anyway. “Jeffries says, ‘Hey, do whatever you want, I don’t care about the clothes; as far as I’m concerned, they don’t need to wear anything,’ ” Weber recalls. “These are all sort of red lights to me, because I think they do care about the clothes, but they don’t want to seem too square and they think that’s what I want to hear. Then all of a sudden, they start asking questions. ‘We want to be on the nose about stuff.’ Pictures don’t grow from that. If your heart is in the right place, you just do it. Sam Shahid fought for us. But they were very middle of America.” Which made Weber feel rebellious and left him as tongue-tied as one of the teenagers he was shooting. “So I’m doing something maybe I shouldn’t be doing, because they don’t understand me anymore,” he sputters. “And the people who are hiring you, they’re saying, ‘Why are we doing that?’ When it’s successful, they’re happy. But when it’s not, who do they blame? They blame the photographer.” In fact, they blamed the boss, too. By the end of 2014, Mike Jeffries was gone. Weber and Shahid’s contracts were allowed to expire.
By then, Weber had found a new client willing to push people’s buttons. In 2011, Dennis Freedman, the longtime art director of W, which had morphed over its thirty-nine years of existence from a folded social gossip broadsheet to an oversize magazine bursting with the latest in fashion photography, joined Barneys New York, the avant-garde department store, as its creative director.
Three years later, in January 2014, it released a suite of Weber’s photographs in its seasonal catalog and ads. Titled “Brothers, Sisters, Sons & Daughters,” it featured an international cast of seventeen transgender individuals—people who’d consciously chosen to change their gender identity—ranging in age from their teens to thirtysomethings, wearing the latest clothes from Barneys. Freedman believed that despite American society’s strides forward in its views toward gays and lesbians, the transgender community was still lagging behind.
Freedman and Weber had been working together since doing an award-winning shoot for W in 1997, inspired by their mutual admiration for the writer Eudora Welty. When Freedman conceived of the transgender campaign, he says, “There was no question there was only one photographer who could find the humanity in it, and that was Bruce. I called and there wasn’t a second’s pause.”
Barneys had been casting the shoot for months. Weber dedicated a week to talking to the models, “developing relationships,” Freedman says. “It was classic Bruce.” He also made five films to accompany his photographs. “There was not a big budget and films are very expensive,” Freedman says, “especially the way Bruce does them. He put the films ahead of financial gain. He knew we could make a difference.”
Though fashion folk had sporadically played the transgender card, never before had a business like Barneys taken such a stand. Just when it seemed no social boundaries were left to cross, Weber had found another and done it with both beauty and empathy. “It’s the best thing he’s ever done,” raved stylist Tina Bossidy. “It’s such a big deal. It’s the only territory that hasn’t been raked over yet.”
Bruce Weber says his experiments in film refreshed him, taught him, and “really opened me up a lot. I just feel lucky that I’m still healthy enough that I can get up and work and photograph.” Asked what jobs in the last two decades inspired him the most, he sounds just like the younger man who insisted on pursuing his own vision, even if it meant walking away from paychecks. He also sounded like someone who’d adapted smoothly to a world in which big money backs big brands and works hand in hand with the machinery of fashion to sell a vast array of products.
Weber was working on both a book and a film in 2008, he says, when Vogue Italia’s editor, Franca Sozzani, called and suggested he shoot for Moncler, a five-decade-old manufacturer of down jackets. Remo Ruffini, the company’s chairman and creative director, then cohosted a dinner in Miami with Sozzani to celebrate a special issue of L’Uomo Vogue featuring about a hundred pages shot by Weber, celebrating life in that city. Weber had owned a home in nearby Golden Beach for many years.
In an interview before the party, Sozzani said she no longer thought of her public
ation as a fashion magazine. “I don’t think you sell clothes through a [fashion] credit,” she said. “I think that you go through an image, that you sell a dream, and [then] the clothes.” She claimed she cared more about ideas and concepts than celebrities and selling magazines, even though she’d put the actor Javier Bardem on her cover to illustrate “the heart of Miami.” In saying that, she was bucking the fashion industry’s tide, just as Weber would soon do with his Moncler ads. Both editor and photographer are exceptions to fashion’s ruling protocols in the twenty-first century.
Sozzani promised Weber that he could do whatever he wanted if he accepted the Moncler assignment. Normally, he says, such a promise makes him want “to go and hide” because it’s so rarely true. When Sozzani added, “You can photograph your dog,” Weber, whose golden retrievers are something akin to his and Nan Bush’s children, was tempted. It turned out there was a condition: the notoriously camera-shy Weber had to include a self-portrait, but when Moncler agreed to a condition in return—to make a $140,000 donation to Green Chimneys, a charity chosen by Weber that provides animal therapy to young people—“I thought, ‘Wow, these are people who stand by their word,’” Weber says. “So I ended up photographing my dogs.”
Weber didn’t only photograph his dogs, he shot them swimming with down coats in their mouths and wearing them in the rain. He also shot a group of bare-chested men rolling a giant ball of down coats up a mountain of gravel, and he made himself almost invisible in his self-portrait, which showed him in bed, covered with cameras, a down coat hanging on the headboard. “You’ve got to look pretty hard to find me in the picture,” he says. Working with Moncler “was an incredible collaboration with people who really trusted me.” He continued to shoot Moncler ads for years.
Though he’s been shooting pictures for forty years, five times longer than Alexey Brodovitch’s use-by date for fashion photographers, Bruce Weber’s career seems far from over. As long as he still feels the need to lash out when someone kills his photos and is thrilled to be trusted, he is likely to continue. Taking pictures, practicing his art, is his life—and he’s managed to blend the personal and commercial so well, the division has become meaningless. So it seems somehow appropriate, in the tortured logic of fashion magazines, that after an increasingly ill and disengaged Alexander Liberman was effectively retired from Condé Nast early in 1994 (relinquishing his title of editorial director for the essentially honorary one of deputy chairman), he reached out to Weber.
A few months earlier, Liberman had bought a penthouse in Miami, and at the end of his life he spent considerable time there. One of the ways he occupied his time was to call Weber, “and we’d have these amazing conversations,” Weber says. Despite their past differences over his refusal to bend to the art director’s will, Weber decided Liberman was attracted to him much as Weber’s parents were drawn to his older sister, who “was always wild,” he says, “and my parents would complain, but I could see how much love they had for her. I learned a bit from that, and I just felt like I was going to be myself. I never spent my career thinking, ‘I’ve got to work for a fashion magazine.’ ”
Liberman had had a second heart attack in February 1991, further weakening a body already ravaged by cancer and diabetes. It couldn’t have helped that his beloved wife, Tatiana, was also in and out of the hospital with kidney failure and would die that spring. Like a failing parent moving close to a child, he would soon relocate to an apartment on the East River in the same cooperative apartment complex where Si Newhouse lived. Confined to a wheelchair and attended by his third wife, who’d entered his life as Tatiana’s nurse, Liberman would die in Miami in fall 1999. Liberman’s replacement, a thirty-five-year-old Briton named James Truman, was an editor, not an art director, and both of his subsequent replacements were editors, too. The age of the omnipotent art director ended with Liberman, who’d already signed the death warrant for the “noble” fashion magazines he’d championed. “It’s hard to compete with Bruce Weber’s photographic layouts for Calvin,” he’d said a few years earlier. “Magazines are a rearguard action.”
But before his death, Liberman would sometimes ask Weber how he was doing, and as is his wont, Weber would complain about the latest unsympathetic art director, the latest story or campaign some wretch had ruined. “He was very simpatico,” says Weber. “He agreed with me that it was better to stay who you are than give in to giving it all up and selling yourself down the river.” That’s what Liberman had done at Condé Nast, and in retirement, or at least when talking to Weber, he appeared to have regrets. “Look at his book,” Weber says, referring to The Artist in His Studio, Liberman’s 1960 volume of photographs and intimate conversations with painters and sculptors. “It’s really a book about love and desire”—for the artist’s life that eluded Liberman. “And that’s why that book is so good.”
And what about Weber and love and desire? Does he, as so many think, find love through the lens of his camera? “That’s a good question that you could ask a lot of photographers,” he says. “I don’t really know and I don’t really think I care to know. I kind of like it that I’m discovering what the feeling is each time I do it. It’s so fulfilling, because it’s different all the time. But I think that’s so private. I just think that there are certain things that can’t be answered in life. And that’s one of them.”
Part 6
* * *
DISRUPTION
If you throw a pig an apple, he’ll run with it.
—RICHARD AVEDON
Chapter 40
* * *
“EVERY MOTHER’S NIGHTMARE”
As the nineties dawned, fashion raised its hem, revealing its transformation from an elite preoccupation to a mass-market production. The change was first obvious at the biannual fashion shows, where teams from major magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue grew from three or four to eight, ten, and more, and instead of one or two television cameras appearing, if any, there were as many as twenty. Not only did the shows seem to be on steroids, so did the entire business. Outrageous display became the new normal as the egos of designers, models, editors, stylists, and fashion publicists and journalists inflated like Thanksgiving Day parade balloons.
This was especially curious because fashion itself was in the doldrums. Designer Karl Lagerfeld had recently spun the syndrome as “the fashion of no fashion.” The void had been filled by supermodels, a cadre of Glamazons with compelling personalities who were promoted by modeling agencies and taken up by image-conscious designers such as Lagerfeld in Paris, Gianni Versace in Milan, and Isaac Mizrahi in New York. But no one played a larger role in their celebrity than a photographer who would soon loom larger and soar higher than his peers and remain aloft for more than two decades, Steven Meisel.
Shortly after launching Bruce Weber, the signature photographer of the eighties, Annie Flanders and Kezia Keeble were the midwives at the birth of Meisel. Like Weber, Meisel was a gay man with a strong, well-connected mother figure beside him—only unlike Weber, Meisel would quickly drop her and cut his own swath through the fashion demimonde. Still, just as big-bucks advertisers such as Ralph and Calvin had elbowed fashion editors aside, pioneering stylists such as Keeble and Cavaco and agents such as Nan Bush and Frances Grill sensed that times had changed and started competing with art directors as visual tastemakers and nurturers of photographers.
Grill was a rarity who began as a photographer’s agent, became an agent for models, but played as profound a role in shaping fin de siècle fashion photography as any magazine employee or advertiser. The daughter of a longshoreman, she moved from Brooklyn, where she was born, to Manhattan’s SoHo after college. One day, sheltered under an awning in a rainstorm, she chatted up the man next to her, Alberto Rizzo. He said he was a photographer. Without pause, Grill said, “I’m a photographers’ agent.” Grill and a friend promptly opened an agency and picked up Jeanloup Sieff as their second client. Over the years Grill would rep photographers on both sides of the Atl
antic, including Frank Horvat, Lillian Bassman, Otto Stupakoff, and Oliviero Toscani.
In 1979, Annie Flanders introduced Grill to Meisel. A dark-skinned man-child with straight, long, thick black hair and piercing eyes, Meisel had been addicted to fashion magazines since his childhood in Fresh Meadows, Queens; his mother let him skip school to read hers the moment they arrived. By the sixth grade, he was collecting model composites, cards that typically showed three or four photos of a model along with vital statistics such as weight, height, clothing size, and eye and hair color. Meisel scrutinized them the way other little boys looked at Playboys and baseball box scores.
In school, he studied fashion illustration, but found classes boring and left before graduating to get a job as an illustrator at Women’s Wear Daily. Fashion was his passion: “It was part of me. I didn’t have to think about it.” He already had a fashionable uniform he wore every day: black faux motorcycle boots, black pants, a black coat, and a headband or a denim hat. His other passion was music; a grandfather had been a songwriter, his mother a singer, and his father worked in the record business. “My grandparents knew Tony Bennett, Sinatra, Peggy Lee, that era,” he says. “I would meet the Beatles or the Stones.” By 1977, the twenty-three-year-old was a star himself, both in WWD’s art department and in New York City’s punk and gay clubs. Among his best friends were the punk-rock poet Patti Smith’s piano player, Richard Sohl, a childhood friend from Queens (whose nickname DNV derived from the book and film Death in Venice, about a homosexual obsession); Stephen Sprouse, an assistant to the designer Halston; and a transgendered girl from Iowa who called herself Teri Toye.
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