Cech had been sent on a go-see for Purple magazine. She wanted to turn it down after seeing in the magazine Richardson’s photos of his assistant, a girl, “and this fat, ugly-ass bald guy, and she was eating off his ass, and I was, like, ‘No way!’ But these Purple people were comfortable with whatever Terry wanted to do, and besides, it paid one hundred dollars, seventy-five dollars in my pocket [after agency commissions],” so she changed her mind and went. Richardson asked her to “do something a little sexy. ‘Can you take off your clothes?’ I have no problem being naked. And then the photographer gets naked, and I’m going, ‘This is weird.’”
Cech thought the scene was gross, but did as she was told, though she later refused when Richardson offered to book her for the actual job. On camera, Cech told Ziff, “That was the end of the story.” In fact, it wasn’t—and what happened later was even more revealing of the morality-challenged zone in which Richardson operated and young models live.
Not long afterward, Cech was in Paris when she was booked for a shoot with Bon Marché “and he was the photographer,” she reveals. She told her agent what had happened the last time, and they told her he’d said he was sorry and wanted to take her to dinner to apologize. The agent swore other people would be there, including a model friend of hers. “It’s a classy client,” the agent said. “Let’s get back on track.” Cech talked to the other girl and learned they’d reeled her in with the promise that Cech would be there, but she went to dinner anyway.
“I don’t know how to explain this,” she continues, laughing nervously. “He started kissing me, deep tongue, at the table in front of everyone.” She asked herself how that had possibly happened and convinced herself the only explanation was that “he really likes you, and he’s a big deal. I’d broken up with my boyfriend in New York, partly over the Terry thing. He dumped me. I’d be crying and he’d be, ‘What’s up?’—and I couldn’t tell him because I kind of cheated on him with the hand job. As soon as you lie, it’s so easy to taint young love.” In the back of her mind, she wondered if Richardson wanted to be her boyfriend. But after the Bon Marché shoot the next day, she never saw him again. “Men have done much, much much worse things to me, and I’ve done so many awful things, I had to forgive those people. I know guys so much fucking worse. He wanted to kiss me? Who cares? I’m not fighting those battles.”
Others were willing, however. The next year, Rie Rasmussen had her moment in Paris with Richardson. Not long after that, Jamie Peck and Sarah Hilker, who’d met Richardson at the SuicideGirls casting, went public with their Terry stories—and more allegations followed, often including Richardson’s studio manager, Seth Goldfarb; Terry’s assistant Keiichi Nitta; and Leslie Lessin, a woman sometimes described as his talent coordinator, “or his pimp, if you will,” says another former Richardson assistant. “Everyone was sober,” Peck recalls. “They’re just high on the fucked-up things they’re doing. I think he replaced his heroin addiction with sex abuse. He gets off on the fact it exists in a legal gray area. But it’s not an ethical gray area. This is a pattern of predatory behavior.”
“I’m not someone who hates him,” says the former assistant, a woman who worked for Richardson in the middle aughts. “I’m neutral.” But her description of Richardson, his studio, and his talent isn’t neutral at all. “He likes a cheap look,” she says of his photos. And she makes him out to be a cheap hustler, in the dictionary sense of tawdry, sleazy, contemptible, and lacking in redeeming qualities.
The assistant—call her Penny—says shock value is Richardson’s gold standard and complicity, willing or not, the key to method. Anyone who works for him ends up in photos, Penny says. “It’s like a fraternity initiation. He wants you to get involved. Acts on camera are part of the deal,” which is only part of the reason Penny asks to be anonymous. She also wants to continue to work in fashion and fears exposure will hurt her career.
Penny says Richardson “hated normal work—fashion, advertising.” He liked celebrity shoots because “it’s part of his fetish. He’s obsessed with celebrity and notoriety, but he’s the star of the show. He doesn’t want to think he’s famous because of his father. He’s definitely insecure and narcissistic.”
Terry’s best days were “Terry shoots,” she continues, when the downside was a lack of paying work, but the upside was that no celebrity handlers, art directors, or editors were around. They were “free-for-alls” starring “people who have no power. He uses who he is to get people to do things. They look for street people, scavenge sex ads, find people in ‘Casual Encounters’ on Craigslist. He’d meet them anywhere. He’s a Lower East Side celebrity, so people volunteer. Sometimes they get paid, sometimes not. Sometimes they’re models and he calls it a test. But he likes freaks more.” Lessin is “the ringmaster,” Penny says. “She calls beforehand and tells them what to wear but not what to expect. She makes everyone sign releases beforehand. That’s one of the shadier things he does.”
Terry shoots revisit favorite themes. “The same fetishes again and again,” says Penny. “He always says he’s not into porn, but he loves coming on girls,” especially into their open eyes. “Anything perverse. He’s supposedly straight, but on camera, he doesn’t mind if guys do things to him.”
Penny says some potential subjects walked out when propositioned. “He’d deal with it in different ways,” ranging from acceptance to ridicule. “It’s a game mentality. It seems innocent, and then you’re in it, and are you going to back out? It’s a freak show, a circus, yet it might be fun, but you’ll probably regret it down the road. It’s like a night out, but there are pictures.”
Fashion photographers “don’t get into it because they want to save the world,” Penny concludes. “A lot of photographers do similar things—but not on camera.”
Then came a time of trials for Richardson. His career had hit its highest heights ever and he could be found working with Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga. But his mother had died in 2012, and his stepfather followed in 2013. As the storm of accusations swirled around him, his girlfriend, the political consultant Audrey Gelman, broke up with him. That’s enough to whipsaw anyone.
Gelman never addressed her relationship with him. But she did go on Twitter that year to answer critics who’d condemned her friend Lena Dunham, who’d posed for Terry. Dunham “tried to see the good i saw in someone & we both have regrets,” Gelman wrote.
To those who disdain Terry Richardson, the problem is clear. “Can one say dinosaur, deluded, manipulative, middle-aged sex predator, and fashion photographer in one sentence? I just did,” says Caryn Franklin, who became a TV host and fashion commentator after six years at i-D. “Fashion will pretend it’s art instead of calling it what it really is: porno-objectification of women all stylishly dressed up as womenswear marketing. But then, women have gotten so used to seeing themselves with their legs wide open and their fannies hanging out, they have normalized it for themselves! What he does behind the scenes however is simply unethical.”
Friends of Richardson’s are quick to point out the complexity of his character. “He’s a simple, soft-spoken, honest guy looking for normalcy and stability,” says a woman who knows him well. “He’s clever and aware of how he’s perceived. We live in a puritanical society and you shouldn’t be indicted for pushing boundaries.” He’s also determined, she continues, not to suffer the same fate his father did. After he cleaned up his act, he’d attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every day. “He worshipped his father and was so afraid he’d become him.” Like several other women who’ve met Terry, this one thinks that beyond everything else he suffered, he was also abused as a child. “But he’s not in touch with it, so he perpetrates it on others.” In that, as well as in his reliving of his father’s triumphs and traumas, he represents a classic case of repetition compulsion, which Sigmund Freud defined as “the desire to return to an earlier state of things.”
Bob Richardson made it hard to pity him. His son strives to make it impossible. “He is really
talented,” the woman continues. “He can elicit life and energy like no else, but he’s out of control.” On the one hand, “he’s desperate for attention, desperate for love, desperate for affirmation.” On the other, “he needs to feel powerful, to dominate, to humiliate, and, uniquely, to photograph it.”
Richardson would probably not agree, but his photographs capture the moment when an era of fashion photography ended. They represent a fashion culture—and perhaps the larger culture as well—that is so inured to shock, so numb to consequences, and so desperate to sell, it will burn down its own house just to get attention or, in the parlance of the day, attract eyeballs.
But that only means the glory days are over. Reinvention is fashion’s prime directive, its raison d’être, its highest calling. So a world still hungry for inspiring, shocking, or just plain beautiful visuals will always seek what’s next. It is the fashion photographer’s job to find it.
* * *
I. Later, Richardson would admit, “Her best photographs were done by Dick Avedon—not me.”
II. Depending on the source, that was somewhere between 1978 and 1982.
III. Early in 2016, Richardson posted photos of a baby shower celebrating the assistant who was pregnant with his twins on Instagram. The event featured penis-shaped lollipops, a cake decorated with an image of the assistant giving birth, and after-party gifts of condoms printed with a sonogram of the fetuses, captioned “cumming soon.”
IV. He reportedly stayed clean until 2008, when he relapsed.
V. After Richardson posted those photos on his website in 2012, the website Refinery29 published a list of other unlikely Richardson portrait subjects, which included such symbols of female empowerment as Gloria Steinem, Diane von Furstenberg, and Oprah Winfrey.
Erwin Blumenfeld, self-portrait (ERWIN BLUMENFELD, COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF ERWIN BLUMENFELD)
Carmel Snow (front row, left) with columnist Eugenia Sheppard at Christian Dior’s last couture collection, 1957 (© GLEB DERUJINSKY 2015)
Alexey Brodovitch (BENEDICT J. FERNANDEZ)
Alexander Liberman in 1946, the year he arrived in America (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Melvin Sokolsky, self-portrait with Simone d’Aillencourt (MELVIN SOKOLSKY)
Diana Vreeland (center) with Pauline Trigère and Nancy White, in hat and gloves, in 1964 (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Marvin Israel (with glasses, at left) at the Paris Couture, 1962 (JERRY SCHATZBERG)
Richard Avedon, 1978 (ADRIAN PANARO)
Jerry Schatzberg, 1964 (TERENCE DONOVAN © JERRY SCHATZBERG)
David Bailey and Terence Donovan on the roof of Jerry Schatzberg’s New York studio, 1964 (JERRY SCHATZBERG)
Brian Duffy, 1977 (JERRY SCHATZBERG)
Helmut Newton, 1962 (JERRY SCHATZBERG)
Bert Stern (IRVING PENN)
Bill King with Erica Crome, London 1967 (BARNEY BOSSHART)
Counterclockwise from front: Mike Reinhardt, Janice Dickinson, Gilles Bensimon, and Pierre Houlés, Carnegie Hall, New York (MIKE REINHARDT)
Regis Pagniez (MICHAEL GROSS)
Anthony Mazzola (MICHAEL GROSS)
Patrick Demarchelier (MIKE REINHARDT)
Bonnie Pfeifer and Arthur Elgort, 1975 (ARTHUR ELGORT)
Steven Meisel and Teri Toye, 1984 (PATRICK MCMULLAN)
Fabien Baron (FABIEN BARON)
Franca Sozzani (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Liz Tilberis (MICHAEL GROSS)
Anna Wintour (MICHAEL GROSS)
Bruce Weber (MICHAEL MURPHY)
Terry and Bob Richardson, 1996 (ROXANNE LOWIT)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Focus is the product of thirty-plus years of reporting on fashion and fashion photography, so hundreds of people deserve thanks for contributing both to my education and to this book. Many were named in the acknowledgments in my 1995 book, Model, and I won’t repeat that long list here, but this new book could not have been written without them. I should single out my oldest friend, Stephen Demorest, who first entered this very special world with me when we decided to write a series of mystery novels with a fashion-model detective named Temple Kent; Mary Michele Rutherfurd and Christine Mortimer Biddle, the first models I ever knew, both also lifelong friends; Jerry Schatzberg, the first fashion photographer I ever met; Anne Russell, who first hired me to write about the field for Photo District News; my editors at Manhattan Inc., the New York Times, and New York magazine, who let me loose in that world; and Tina Brown, who published my brief interview with Steven Meisel and long profile of Bruce Weber in Vanity Fair and, at Talk magazine, assigned the (as it turned out, never published) profile of Gilles Bensimon that has now expanded into this book’s pages on the French Mob.
I thank every person who contributed to those articles and gave interviews for this book. Most are cited in the text. I also thank those who gave assistance anonymously. I especially thank all the photographers who trusted me and spent so much time talking to me. I hope they find this book a worthy tribute.
For help with Focus that is not explicit in the preceding pages, thanks to A. Richard Golub, Adam Hutchins, Alan Kleinberg, Alexandra Pitz, Jacob Bernstein, Alida Morgan, Andrea Derujinksy, Helen Antonakakis, Barbara Camp, Brian Belfiglio, Siiri and Benedict J. Fernandez, Brian Hetherington, Eric Himmel, Burkhard von Wangenheim, Hannah Speller, Camilla Lowther, Malcolm Carfrae, Jennifer Crawford, Cynthia Cathcart, Christy Sadron, Eileen and Montgomery Brookfield, Varick Bacon, Frank and Remy Blumenfeld, Terry Gruber, Laura Harris, Nan Bush, Hillery Estis, Jaclyn Bashoff, Jeremy, Janet, and Susanna Chilnick, Jim Cornfield, Joshua Greene, Robin Morgan, Julie Britt, Kira Pollack, Kristoffer Tabori, Leslee Dart, Lisa Immordino and Alexander Vreeland, Mandi Lennard, Marisa and Palma Driscoll, Melissa Unger, Mary Foresta, Neil Selkirk, Nina Furia, Philippa Serline, Robin Morgan, Rosy Kalfus, Shannah Laumeister, Stephanie Rodriguez, Francesca Sorrenti, Tom Lisanti, Veruschka Baudo, Wynn Dan, Nicholas Coleridge, Faith Kates, Ivan Bart, Marek Milewicz, Iris Bianchi, Sandy Linter, Freddie Lieba, Marysia Woroniecka, Simone Colina, Andy Grundberg, Carol Halebian, Hugh Henry, Marianne Houtenbos, David Netto, Kirsty Hume, Edie Locke, Fern Mallis, Andrea Sasso, Diane Schlanger, Barry Secunda, and Lynn St. John.
I also thank Denis Piel, Wayne Maser, Andrea Blanche, Pamela Hanson, Cedric Buchet, and Gosta and Pat Peterson, who gave extensive interviews that were not included for reasons of length and narrative velocity. Their stories and those of a number of other photographers can be found on my website, www.mgross.com, where I’ve also posted the source citations for Focus.
I did not include fashion pictures by the photographers who star in the book because reproduction in small size diminishes them, and because, in most cases, they are available in large-format photography books. Photographs by almost all of them (including Bill King, whose work has sadly been kept from wide distribution by his heirs) can be found on websites such as Pinterest and paperpursuits.com. I would have liked to include photographs by Richard Avedon, who shot portraits of many characters in this book, and who contributed several photographs to Model, but the Richard Avedon Foundation, run by Avedon’s son and daughter-in-law, demands to review the written content of books in which his photos appear, and I was unwilling to agree to that condition. But I thank Nadia Charbit and Remy Blumenfeld, Andrea Derujinsky, Melvin Sokolsky, Shannah Laumeister, Erica Crome, Claude Guillaumin, Polly Mellen, Bruce Weber, Fabien Baron, and especially Mike Reinhardt and Jerry Schatzberg for helping me gather the portraits of key characters in the story that I chose to include instead.
I also thank Penelope Rowlands, Etheleen Staley and Takouhy Wise of the Staley-Wise Gallery, Lyssa Horn, and Liza Harrell-Edge at the Kellen Archives at the New School, and Dierdre Donohue at the International Center of Photography (ICP) for very special help. For additional research assistance, thanks to the all-knowing Patty Sicular, and to Blake Hunsicker, Amanda Zambito, Bernard Yenelouis, and Marusca Niccolini.
Very special thanks to my exceptional friends Brian Saltzman, Giorgio Guidotti, Lavinia and Ophelia Branca
Snyder, Barry Kieselstein-Cord, Henry Lambert, Esteban Matiz, and Roy Kean.
Finally, I am especially indebted to my agent, Dan Strone of the Trident Media Group; to his assistant, Chelsea Grogan; to my incredibly devoted and talented editor, Leslie Meredith; and to Judith Curr, Paul Olsewski, Paul Dippolito, Sara DeLozier, Isolde Sauer, Martha Schwartz, Donna Loffredo, Betsy Bloom, Lisa Sciambra, Phil Pascuzzo, Jackie Jou, Kimberly Goldstein, Albert Tang, Jin Yu, and Tory Lowy at Atria Books; to Diane Mancher and James Walsh; and to my editors, Richard David Story and Heather Halberstadt, at Departures. And as always, thanks to my wife, Barbara, who spent the last twenty years trying to convince me to take a look at this subject through a different lens. I’m glad I finally listened.
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