At twelve, he discovered drinking, drugs, and punk rock, a sound track to suit his psyche. He’s said he saw Rock ’n’ Roll High School, starring the Ramones, about fifty times in the summer of 1979, the last he spent in New York with his father. He was fourteen. But Bob and Terry remained connected. In another interview, Terry admitted, “I inherited all the schizophrenia, depression, anxieties, and a Napoléon complex, even though we’re both six feet tall.” So it’s hardly surprising that father and son had a tumultuous relationship. “I tried to strangle him a few times,” Terry once boasted. “All the classic father/son Greek mythology stuff.”
Both have said that father moved in with son in Hollywood for several months before they argued and Terry told Bob “to get lost,” in the latter’s words. “I left my Louis Vuitton suitcase filled with all my nice warm clothes at his house and that was it. I see now that I had to follow this road into hell and go all the way through it.” According to a 1995 profile in the New Yorker that Bob Richardson called “a hatchet job,” the teenaged Terry later “arranged” an apartment for his father to move into, but he chose to leave again and subsequently became a sort of photographic hustler, “living with this millionaire who had this huge mansion in Beverly Hills,” Terry said in a 1998 interview. “He would bring home young prostitutes and get my father to photograph them,” until Bob got fed up and refused and the millionaire “had him thrown in jail.”
Right after that, Bob moved to San Francisco, and Annie Lomax left her second husband and moved with Terry to Ojai, a hippie town like Woodstock, east of Santa Barbara. At first Terry hated it, but then realized that he was suddenly a big fish in a small pond “because I was from Hollywood,” he’s said. “I became the star of the school. . . . All of a sudden, I just blossomed.” He got a car (which he would run into an electric pole while high on pills and beer), started a punk band, took drugs of all sorts, including his first taste of heroin, was arrested at his mother’s instigation after throwing a TV across a room, and “got into more trouble there than I did in Hollywood, because all you can do in small town America is drink and have sex. . . . The ultimate California dream: you’re in high school, your crazy mother is freaking out, yelling and screaming, and you’re punching holes in the wall.”
Terry had started taking pictures as a teen, but when he showed them to Bob, “he discouraged me so bad that I threw away my camera” and didn’t shoot again for years. But in the early nineties, he returned to photography, taking courses, assisting, and shooting. “He would send me his contact sheets,” Bob wrote. “Editing them and mailing them from SF was not working. He moved up to SF where we would work every day for a long time. He is still the best and least grateful of my students.” Terry initially disdained Bob’s late-life choice of a point-and-shoot camera, insisting on a Nikon like the ones his father used to use. An editor who has seen both at work says they handle cameras exactly the same—cradling them lovingly in their hands like babies.
Clearly, Terry’s feelings toward both his parents are complex. In his often lurid pictures, “there’s a motif of childhood defiled,” Benjamin Wallace wrote in the New York magazine profile approved by the damage-control public relations specialist Richardson hired when his career was threatened by accusations of sexual misconduct. “Using the title Son of Bob for a book containing pictures of his own feces cannot have been a simple homage. Dedicating [his second book] Terryworld, which includes an image of him flossing his teeth with the string of a still-inserted tampon, ‘to my mom and dad’ was surely an ambivalent tribute.”
It took a year to create Terry’s portfolio. Then he headed to New York and Bob followed, perhaps inspired by Martin Harrison’s book, released in 1991—the first positive attention he’d got in ten years. Initially, Bob stayed “with a hostile Terry,” he recalled. “Editing his work is what I have been assigned. One day he threw a metal chair at me, just missing my head. He ignores the fact that his father is still recovering.”
Terry wasn’t his only supporter. Donna Mitchell, who’d been shooting with Steven Meisel—whose work Bob detested—asked Meisel to help Bob get a job teaching at the School of Visual Arts. Meisel, who collected the few Richardson prints that had survived the bonfire of his sanity, waited two months, annoying Richardson, but then made the call, and Richardson got a class to teach. Richard Avedon did the same at the International Center of Photography and introduced Richardson to Staley-Wise, the foremost fashion-photography gallery in Manhattan. “Thank God for Dick Avedon,” Richardson later wrote, though in a 1994 interview, he still disdained Avedon.
“I was dead” was how Richardson introduced himself to that interviewer. “Everyone thought I was dead, which was exactly what I wanted them to think. It’s how you keep a legend going.” But he added, “It’s outrageous that none of those people had a memorial for me.” He was tall and missing teeth and bore scars physical as well as mental. He said he still smoked dope. He disdained the supermodels: “They have no idea of style, no idea of class. But what they lack in brains they make up for in tits.” And he declared fashion photography a dying art: “They’re in it for the money. They copy Avedon, me, Bruce, Helmut. Take a look at Steven Meisel’s photographs and you’ll understand exactly what happened. It isn’t an age of mediocrity, it’s a rage for mediocrity. Photographers who have no genius get along with everyone. One of their biggest talents is kissing ass, and if they feel guilty, then they buy a house or a car and it makes them feel better.”
Bob and Terry began pitching themselves as a team, showing slides of both their work while a boom box played Nine Inch Nails. They completed a few magazine assignments, and Bob got an apartment on Hudson Street in the Village, though he couldn’t always pay the rent. Terry started using a point-and-shoot camera. Bob wrote to Vogue and Bazaar and asked for work. “They ignored me,” he recalled. “Where and how were these ‘ladies’ brought up?” Franca Sozzani and Fabien Baron gave him assignments and helped him win an ad campaign, but then, he charged, took his pages away and gave them to photographers “who kiss her ass.” Richardson started calling the blond Sozzani “Goldilocks on Acid.” He was back and he hadn’t changed much.
Finally, Terry realized he had to break free and, when he was offered a fashion shoot for the music magazine Vibe, jettisoned his father, who vowed to never speak to him again. Clearly marked as his father’s son, Terry was determined to make his own mark, but couldn’t cut his family ties. Eventually, Bob’s radical mood swings and crazy threats alienated many who’d been inclined to help him, and he moved back to Venice, California. But Terry never gave up on him entirely, and when Bob penned “Outsider,” his autobiography-in-fragments, in the early aughts, his son sought to get it published, to no avail.
By then, Terry had had some success and generated controversy Bob admired. When editors at W magazine decided Terry was an anti-Semite and dropped him after he exhibited photos in a gallery show of postpunks wearing swastikas, harkening back to his father’s photo of Anjelica Huston on the edge of a bathtub occupied by a male model in a Nazi officer’s hat, Bob noted that Terry’s mother was Jewish and wondered, “How do these broads get their jobs?” After Terry went into rehab for heroin addiction in 2002, Bob wrote, “It’s great to have a son whose photographs wow me—I teach him to use all of his suffering in his work the way all artists have—Terry is my revenge.”
In 2005, at seventy-seven, Bob drove cross-country back to New York, taking pictures all the way. Toward the end of the sequence, he shot Coney Island’s Cyclone and a sign on its boardwalk that said “shoot the freak.” He planned to publish them in a book, but a few months after his return to New York, he died, apparently of natural causes. Few mourned the troubled genius. Terry finally got a book published two years later that included what little of Bob’s archives remained, magazine tear sheets of more work, his autobiography, and those final pictures.
By then, Terry Richardson had established himself as a shooting star in his own right. His 1994 photos for Vibe�
�a black-and-white portfolio of images of street kids—were spotted by art director Phil Bicker, who suggested him to the streetwise London designer Katharine Hamnett for her next ad campaign. Richardson showed up with samples, “a bunch of personal pictures—people with their dicks out and all that,” he said, and won the assignment. His first ads showed a girl on an unshaven guy’s lap, her legs spread to show her underwear, framed by wisps of pubic hair, her fingers in the fellow’s mouth, and another girl kneeling before a faceless man, her mouth slightly open, her fingers at his belt. The ads led to jobs for i-D and the Face. “We gave him his first proper magazine story,” says i-D’s Terry Jones, who’d worked with Bob Richardson years before. Jones thought Terry loved to push buttons and cross the line between risqué and risky. “There was always a point when I wouldn’t encourage him.” But his straight-up, seemingly spontaneous, and styleless documentary style—he often shot people against a wall—was a perfect fit for those magazines. He’d pulled off a neat trick: combining the antifashion attitude of Day and Sims with the glossy color, graphic punch, and transgressive sexuality of Newton and Bourdin.
Richardson quickly moved up the fashion food chain and began shooting for Harper’s Bazaar in 1997. But despite entering the mainstream, working for advertisers such as Gucci and Sisley (for whom he shot a famous image of a model squirting milk from a cow’s udder into her mouth), conquering various Vogues beginning in the early aughts, and becoming the portraitist of choice for postgrunge celebrities such as Chloë Sevigny and Jared Leto, he kept one foot firmly planted on the fringe, doing more outré pictures for Sleazenation, Self Service, Dazed & Confused, Numéro, Dutch, and Purple, and his perviest work for himself.
His commercial images pushed the envelope; his personal work tore it to shreds. He seemed obsessed with sexual and scatological imagery, with fellatio, menstruation, and with his own penis, which he would regularly expose, both as a subject and to convince other subjects that they, too, could strip down and show their stuff. After all, Terry had got naked first—and that made it all right. Inevitably, some of those shoots turned sexual (or trisexual, as Richardson often described his father; Terry photographed all iterations of sexual activity), and Richardson’s assistants would photograph the action when Terry and his tool were otherwise engaged. It was all in good fun! Uncle Terry said so!
He’d taken his father’s lessons about image management to heart and promoted himself better than his old man. Where Bob had been prickly and uncooperative, Terry was friendly and collaborative. Where Bob was intimidating, Terry was comic. Where Bob gave a client one picture he’d chosen, Terry shot a million and let clients do the editing. It was easy to brush aside the topless models and choose the images that had his trademark insouciance and just enough rebellion to enhance his rep as a fashion Ramone.
Richardson created that image with his pictures and with the visual persona he’d adopted, but unlike Steven Meisel, he not only stuck to it, he promoted it—putting pictures of himself with his goofy signatures wherever he could, not only in ads and magazine spreads, but on Terry T-shirts and (of course) condoms.III He also made it a thing to photograph models and celebrities in his glasses, giving the same double-thumbs-up sign he always used—reinforcing his image and subverting the concept of reflected glory because, after all, whose glory was it? It all made him a celebrity himself, and by 2013, the Year of Terry, he was reportedly charging advertising clients $160,000 a day, and making $58 million a year. That fall, though, a British teenager with no apparent connection to the fashion business posted a petition addressed to Harper’s Bazaar’s latest editor, Glenda Bailey, on Change.org, asking that fashion brands and magazines stop hiring Richardson. As of summer 2015, she’d gathered more than thirty-five thousand signatures.
Richardson’s appeal was—and remains—clear to Fabien Baron. “The subject matter of fashion has been used,” he says. “There’s too much of it. It’s hard to find a niche. Terry is relevant because he takes throwaway pictures that match the throwaway qualities of today with digital and computers and Instagram. It’s not a fashion picture, but Terry is now. He matches his time.”
Neil Kraft says “a remarkable sameness” has crept into fashion photography today, despite the proliferation of niche magazines, blogs, websites, and Instagram and Pinterest pages. “There are too many outlets. A magazine page doesn’t matter. Doing a shocking story in Italian Vogue and having everyone talk about it doesn’t happen anymore.” Terry Richardson made himself matter despite all that. “Terry is important because his pictures are dirty. He has no range but he does a picture really well.”
Not everyone finds Richardson images shocking anymore, though. “How many years are we into the idea of the modern fashion photograph?” asks Ronnie Cooke Newhouse. “Almost sixty? We’re jaded. We’ve seen so much, and with the Internet, nothing is left. It’s harder and harder to create something new. What’s new is that people aren’t that interested. And in a funny way, we’re not shockable anymore. Decapitated heads are the provocative images of our time. Fashion can’t compete. Even Terry Richardson’s images don’t shock. It’s his behavior that’s shocking.”
Like his father, Terry had the flip side. As different as they were, both could be more than a little creepy. And finally, Terry’s inner demons threatened his career and reputation, just as Bob’s had ground his to dust. In 2004, a blast of publicity accompanied a gallery show of his personal pictures, and the publication of two books, one of them limited to his sexually themed work, called Kibosh. He clearly considered the triple play a career-defining event.
Of Kibosh, Richardson said, “This is my life’s work . . . the most intimate part of me as a photographer. I believe that the phrase ‘I would never ask anyone to do something that I myself would not do’ from the introduction of this book shows the profound respect that I have for the people who collaborated in the realization of this work, which for me is so important. For the realization of Kibosh I stopped working, for months I dedicated myself entirely to collecting the photos and planning the layout.”
The press generated by those events revealed just how powerful his demons were. In an interview, he admitted he was working out “lots of stuff” with the show and the books. “Like, this current show could be about my midlife crisis. Or it could be something to do with the fact that since I gave up drinking and taking drugs, I have to get high on sex and being an exhibitionist. Or maybe it’s the psychological thing that I was a shy kid, and now I’m this powerful guy with his boner, dominating all these girls.”
Through the nineties, Richardson had been a regular heroin user. In 1996, he married Nikki Uberti, a model he’d shot the year before for the cover of i-D. He told the New York Observer he was “high as a kite” when they were wed at City Hall. Six months later, they considered getting an annulment, but stayed together three years. Richardson says they were separated when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at twenty-nine, and though “she had been throwing me out forever,” he wanted to stay, but “I was trying to get clean and I couldn’t get clean and stay in that house. I would just wake up and start drinking and taking pills.” In a short film she reportedly made about their breakup, Uberti (who later became a makeup artist and married actor Eddie Cahill) implied that he’d deserted her.
In his commercial work, Richardson was working with top models such as Stephanie Seymour, Angela Lindvall, Natalia Vodianova, and Stella Tennant. He reportedly segued to dating another, Shalom Harlow, and later, Susan Eldridge, whom he’d shot for his long-running Sisley campaign. But simultaneously, it appears he was playing the field, or at least playing with and photographing some of the characters who passed through his studio. “I was single and I was going to explore sexuality,” he admitted. He deemed these photo sessions “spontaneous sexscapades.” England’s Observer newspaper described the results as “self-made images of Terry thrusting, rucking, prodding, pumping and sometimes, grinning at the camera like a nerd let loose in porno heaven. . . . These photo
graphs seem grounded in, at one extreme, adolescent fantasy gone mad, and, at the other, some darker personal demons: narcissism, obsession, compulsion, even addiction.”
His addictions returned with a vengeance on Christmas Day 2001, three days after a breakup with a girlfriend, he told Observer reporter Sean O’Hagan. “I was at the bottom, man.” Some friends found him comatose “and sent me off to rehab.”IV
The Deitch Projects show made Richardson famous and prompted a spate of press that treated Richardson’s lurid outrages with jokes and ironic distance as if the writers were concerned with being deemed uncool if they so much as cocked an eyebrow.
Toward the end of one story, writer Phoebe Eaton revealed a Richardson “side project” called Breaking in the Carpet, a visual chronicle of his masturbating onto hotel-room carpets wherever he went. But as with Bill King before him, it was Richardson’s personal behavior, not his smutty “personal” pictures, that would have career-threatening consequences.
The psychosexual revelations of Terryworld notwithstanding, Richardson’s career blossomed in its wake, seeming to prove the old adage that any press is good press. He continued to work for many of the Vogues, added prestigious advertising clients, and even shot for the New York Times and photographed Senator Barack Obama for Vibe in 2007.V It would be five years before anyone spoke out against him, and even then he was only referred to obliquely as “one of the top names” in fashion photography when model Sena Cech described her encounter with him in a documentary on modeling made by Sara Ziff, a former roommate. Ziff was a crusader who would later form a nonprofit to advocate for the majority of models who don’t make a fortune. Cech, now retired and a single mother, confirms Richardson was the unnamed culprit who asked for and got a hand job from her at a shoot. “I wasn’t trying to protect Terry,” she says. “There were others like him, a population of similar men, so I wanted to include them.”
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