Wonder Magazine

WONDER FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography BRUCE WEBER

WINTER 2016

For the project, we were given the opportunity to choose a photographer. For my first part, I worked with the photographs by Bruce Weber; a fashion photographer. I stuck with his black and white photography as that is what he mainly works with. We were to find articles about the photographer to put on our spreads. The next part dealt with a historic photographer. I chose to stick within my theme and chose Richard Avedon; a fashion photographer. I decided to continue with the black and white photographs to make it look more classic. Lastly, we were to read the article On Photography by Susan Sontag, and find photographs that went well with the article. Each section of the magazine were to look like apart of one magainze. We used the grid system within the magazine to help highlight heirarchy, columns, and make it truly flexiable to make a readable magazine. Throughtout the magazine I used the font’s Trade Gothic Condensed No. 18 and Bodoni Book to make my magazine come together. All images within this magazine were taken from Google Images and I do not take credit for any of them.

Designed by Sabrina Sheck Professor: Andrea Hertowski Semester: Fall 2016 Class: VISC 202

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WONDER FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY

WINTER 2016

“Bruce Weber’s photographs have presented a certain ‘made in USA’ innocence in his advertising campaigns, and GQ and Vogue fashion spreads.”

PET SHOP MEN Prestigious Fashion Photographer: Bruce Weber Bruce Weber was born March 29, 1946 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in the United States. After studying photography at Princeton University in New Jersey, Weber moved to New York City in 1966 where he continued his studies at the New School For Social Research, then at New York University. His first exhibition in 1974, at the New York Razor Gallery, marked the beginning of his professional photography career.

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He has become renowned for his images that celebrate youthful masculinity and the male form. His earliest fashion photography appeared in the SoHo Weekly News and featured polo player Jess Aquilon in his underwear. The shoot with Aquilon defined a new ideal for male models, disregarding conventional and conservative hard-edged masculinity, instead offering something slightly more ambiguous; softer and sensual.

Weber is often known for fashion photography, which he doesn’t even know what fashion photography is. Weber states “Yes. I really don’t think: “This is going to be a fashion photograph.” I mean you know even if I’m doing a photograph of a girl in a dress or a guy in a suit, I don’t think of it as being a fashion picture. I love fashion photographs but I never think of them as fashion pictures because I just look at the newspaper and sometimes I see amazing fashion photographs. Or I look at a book by August Sander and I see a lot of fashion in those photographs. I think National Geographic has some of the best fashion I’ve ever seen. It’s always people, if they’re expressing a lifestyle or they’re wearing something that is very personal. For me, photographs like that bring something to life.” Weber almost exclusively photographs in black and white, and prefers to use natural light and natural settings.

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Weber to earn extra cash, modeled for Richard Avedon, Saul Leiter, and Francesco Scavullo, where he met his future agent, producer, and wife, Nan Bush. At the urging of Avedon & Diane Arbus, Weber went on to train in photography with Lisette Model and never lost his instinct for making films. Weber has a lived a life in images. The photographer and filmmaker has created some of the most indelible fashion imagery over the past four decades for Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Interview with his trusty Pentax, all the while crafting a distinctly Weberian iconography of exuberant all-American beauty, marked by an embrace of youthful athleticism, rugged sexuality, and also have many golden retrievers.

Capturing Ralph Lauren’s ‘chic WASP’, Abercrombie & Fitch’s relaxed style or Calvin Klein’s more formal beauty; over the past 30 years, Bruce Weber’s photographs have presented a certain ‘made in USA’ innocence in his advertising campaigns, and GQ and Vogue fashion spreads. 1980, Bruce became the photographer for Abercrombie & Fitch’s notoriously scandalous catalogue full of revealing images of models, and began directing Ralph Lauren’s advertising campaigns.

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Moving away from controversies, six years later, for the same group he directed another song Se a vida é in a water park in Florida. In 2002, he was the director of a song from Release album, titled I Get Along. Moreover, he has taken photos of Harry Connick, Jr. for Blue Light, Red Light—an album of 1991. Two years later, he photographed Jackson Browne for I’m Alive, 1993. Though without any real sexually explicit content in the video, a man’s naked derrière appeared at the beginning which was enough at the time to be considered too controversial. He also filmed Chris Isaak’s Blue Spanish Sky music video.

Fascinated by documentaries and charismatic personalities, Bruce Weber filmed Chop Suey in 2001, a film about wrestler Peter Johnson who he had photographed for four years, and in 2008, filmed Nice Girls Don’t Stay For Breakfast with the actor, Robert Mitchum.

Weber is often known for fashion photography, which he doesn’t even know what fashion photography is. Weber states “Yes. I really don’t think: “This is going to be a fashion photograph.” I mean you know even if I’m doing a photograph of a girl in a dress or a guy in a suit, I don’t think of it as being a fashion picture. I love fashion photographs but I never think of them as fashion pictures because I just look at the newspaper and sometimes I see amazing fashion photographs. Or I look at a book by August Sander and I see a lot of fashion in those photographs. I think National Geographic has some of the best fashion I’ve ever seen. It’s always people, if they’re expressing a lifestyle or they’re wearing something that is very personal. For me, photographs like that bring something to life.” Weber almost exclusively photographs in black and white, and prefers to use natural light and natural settings.

“He has become renowned for his images that celebrate youthful masculinity and the male form.”

Mr. Weber, what’s your favorite picture you have ever taken?

A picture of my mom and dad. It was the last vacation I took with them. I am proud of that picture. I think it is exposed beautifully, I think it is posed beautifully. I think my Dad looked like Paul Newman when he was really young, really handsome. My mom was very beautiful and they were really into each other. They were like young lovers when they were older. So I look at it and I see them as young lovers in that picture. I love that photo the most.

You take pictures, publish books, and direct movies. What do you consider your job description?

I am someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks about the things that I hope for. I end up putting those things in my films and my photographs and my books.

Besides dreaming, what keeps you going?

I try to have a big life. I visit different painters in their studios whose work I like. I maybe do stories on them or photograph them. Sometimes I take a trip. I have been doing a lot of trips around America recently. I’ve been going down south a lot, down in Mobile, I spent a lot of time in New Orleans.

How come?

I like the characters there. I like to meet people on the road. I have also always felt really close to words. I guess if I had to choose something that has really inspired me for my work, it is words and reading. It is weird for me to do this interview today, because I am usually behind the camera. I like to be where you are right now.

Until you meet some of the people I have to work with...

I am sure. I can imagine you taking your story back to a newspaper or magazine and they ask you: “Did you get the dirt?” Those are the moments where you think: “Oh god, I am losing my words, I am losing my work.” It happens all the time.

What’s your solution to that problem?

You have to fight for your work—everybody has to. You have to be able to get knocked down and stand back up. You can’t let it stay on your shoulders. I see a lot of photographers who do their thing and put their soul in it and in the end it is all changed, but their name is still on it. So I do what Dick Avedon told me once and I just go out on each job and take pictures for myself. I’ll photograph trees or if I meet a really handsome guy or girl I’ll take their picture, even if they’re not part of the set. I’m going to try to learn something. Even if a picture is not so good, at least I can go back to bed at night and think: “Wow, did I learn something today?”

How important is the sexual aspect in your body of work?

I’ve always felt like love and affection were really important to me. I like it that people

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have a flirtation with life. I think that’s kind of important. I didn’t think my work was about sex so much as I thought it was about desire. Desire to be close to somebody, to be intimate. A lot of the time people comment on my pictures that they are too sexy or too sexual, but to me it’s just a photograph of a friend and they trusted me and I liked them. I wasn’t afraid to show myself, my feelings about people.

Can you bring that kind of intimacy to a huge production as well?

I have shootings where I have a hundred people on set. When I work for Abercrombie & Fitch for example, we have all these different divisions on set. We have kids, parents, tailors, hair people, make-up people, and models, but I still try to make it as intimate as possible. The wonderful thing about a job like that is that I am photographing a lot of young people who are very insecure about themselves. It is their first time out in the world in that way and yet they kind of connect to each other. A lot of people on my shootings 8

remain friends for a long time or date or get married or whatever. (Laughs) Do you have to show some of those young people how to take a photo?

No, I hope that they’ll show me. I’m recording an amazing moment in their life where they’re just starting out and it’s sort of my job to know where they went to school and what musical instrument they played or what sports they played, not for me to teach them how to be a model or how to take a picture. But I never felt like that word model was so important. It is more just a subject, a person, a friend, a family member.

Your pictures always incorporate multiple layers. How do you bring these elements together?

I think it is an instinctual thing. Sometimes when I am about to photograph somebody and I have to think about their body language, I’ll think about one of my dogs laying down on his back and scratching his stomach. I kind of think about the lustfulness that’s in life. I always tell my assistants who are young photographers that they should have a strong life, have a viewpoint.

What do you mean?

Go out in the world and live!

Is that why you don’t put yourself into the spotlight, so you can live your live without having to hide?

People know my name, not my look. The only reason why I am talking about myself now is because my work is very dear to me. I wouldn’t be sitting here right now otherwise.

I like the fact that I can travel and go somewhere and nobody thinks of me as just a weird guy with a camera. I don’t like the idea that photographers are such personalities now. It is not so important for me. I’d rather let my work stand for me.

Which is a different approach to some of your very famous colleagues who want be treated like movie stars...

I don’t really think about what other photographers are doing. I do look at photo-

“Crafting a distinctly Weberian iconograpy of exuberant all-American beauty, marked by an embrace of youthful athleticism, ruggest sexuality, and many golden retriever.”

graphs in a way of appreciation. I love to have a lot of photographs around me, so I have a big collection. But I don’t reference how other people do pictures or how they live or where they stay.

Which photographers are worth collecting to you?

I have some really beautiful Diane Arbus photos, I have some Edward Weston photographs, a lot of nudes he did. I have a lot of Larry Clark pictures as well. I collected pictures ever since I had 20 bucks in my pocket. I had seen a photograph of Stravinsky that I loved

by George Platt Lynes at the Sonnabend gallery. I had no money, but Mrs. Sonnabend really trusted me. I paid it off, it took me about six months, but I finally got it.

Is photography art to you?

I never questioned if it was an art or not. I just questioned its importance to me, whether it was very important to me – my life-source, my source of living. I always had a great time with it.

It brought me a lot of happiness, a lot of

pain, and a lot of crazy times. I like that about it.

You mentioned before that you are motivated to a degree by your sensitivity to the fact that men are not comfortable with the way they look.

No. What I meant by that is that every time you’re confronted with photographing the man, especially today, if he’s good looking, it’s doubly hard.

Why is that? Why is it doubly hard?

I think it’s hard now because I think people are so—well, I’ll tell you, I just came back from a month in Los Angeles which can really do something to anybody’s mind, let me tell you.

I know. I can’t handle LA for more than two weeks at a time.

Then you can imagine how I felt. We had taken over a floor and a half of the Shangri La Hotel and I did a lot of different jobs while out there, including things for myself and things for this issue for Per Lui and I’ve just been dealing with people who are so nervous about their sexuality. I remember when I first started working for Gentlemen’s Quarterly and I worked with an art director, Donald Sterzin. I knew Donald well and I really loved him and we’d go out and photograph a lot of guys who were just people, who had not had pictures taken of them before. The magazine was always nervous about that. I think when people are that good looking it is always somewhat frightening to other men to look at the photograph and say, “That guy is really good looking.” And yet, that is such a healthy response. I always love it when a girl says that to me about one of my pictures and I like it when a man says that, too. I think that recently people have begun to feel easier about looking at men in pictures— whether they are good-looking has nothing to do with it in a strange way. And then what happened was a magazine like GQ started taking such a conservative view of men. I think it made people who design clothes for men and people who buy clothes for men—who are mostly women, I think, even myself, I don’t really care much about, about . . .

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“Bruce Weber’s photographs have presented a certain ‘made in USA’ innocence in his advertising campaigns, GQ and Vogue fashion spreads.”

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It’s not the most important thing in my life. Anyway, I think these people now had to deal with a whole new conservatism about male sexuality and I think it’s created a lot of confused images of men. One of the reasons I’m working on this issue of Per Lui is that I wanted to work for a young men’s magazine that is not extremely popular right now. I want to help create a place where other photographers know that they can do the kind of men’s pictures they want to do and not be frightened that they won’t get hired or won’t get published. They should be able to have a place to publish their pictures of men where nobody is going to look at them and say: “I think this is a homosexual picture,” or “I think this guy is too good-looking.”

Is that still a response to your work?

Yes. I think it makes a lot of people hostile. Recently, I was photographing this young actor and dancer. He said, “Oh Bruce, I want to show you something.” He pulled up his shirt and he had this tattoo on his back. He said, “Don’t you just love this tattoo?” It really wasn’t a great tattoo so I said, “Yeah, well, it’s okay, but

I really don’t think it’s something we should photograph.” So he said, “Let me show it to you a little bit more,” and he took off his shirt. I thought he was good to photograph with his shirt off because he didn’t have such a great body. It was skinny and pale.

That was nice for a change, especially in California. Afterwards, he turned to his manager and said, “You told me I wouldn’t be taking pictures like this.”

That’s an incredible story.

We went through that all the time. I was amazed that so many young people, kids even, were so worried about their sexual image.

Do you think that your work has played into that in any way? Do you think that your photographs can make some men feel more uncomfortable, in comparison, about their own attractiveness and their own sexual image?

I don’t know. I would hope that any impact of my work has been positive in that sense.

I think it’s really great when a guy can feel good about the way he looks, like a woman does. It’s wonderful to go to Italy, in the country, you see a 75-year-old man coming back from church, and he looks so handsome and has such strength. It’s great to have a man or woman feel that they are something to look at.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen any pictures you’ve taken of old people.

I’ve taken a lot, but you’ve never seen them. This last summer I was out in New Mexico and I did some photographs of Georgia O’Keefe. It was an amazing experience. When she grabbed my hand I looked into her face and I had such a huge crush on her. It was wonderful. People always say to her, “You have this trouble with your eyes and your sight is so bad. Aren’t you very sad about it?” She says, “No. I feel that I’ve seen so many beautiful things in my life and even though I can’t see now as well as I saw then, I still have all those beautiful images.” I think that is a good way to feel about looking at things and about looking at yourself.

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1923 The New Yorker’s Photographer: Richard Avedon American photographer Richard Avedon was best known for his work in the fashion world and for his minimalist portraits. He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography.

“American photographer Richard Avedon was best known for his work in the fashion world and for his minimalist, large-scale character-revealing portraits.”

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wRichard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City. His mother, Anna Avedon, came from a family of dress manufacturers, and his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue. Inspired by his parents’ clothing businesses, as a boy Avedon took a great interest in fashion, especially enjoying photographing the clothes in his father’s store. At the age of 12, he joined the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) Camera Club.

Upon leaving the Merchant Marine in 1944, Avedon attended the New School for Social Research in New York City to study photography under Alexey Brodovitch, the acclaimed art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon and Brodovitch formed a close bond, and within one year Avedon was hired as a staff photographer for the magazine.

After several years photographing daily life in New York City, Avedon was assigned to cover the spring and fall fashion collections in Paris.

While legendary editor Carmel Snow covered the runway shows, Avedon’s task was to stage photographs of models wearing the new fashions out in the city itself.

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s he created elegant black-and-white photographs showcasing the latest fashions in real-life settings such as Paris’s picturesque cafes, cabarets and streetcars. Already established as one of the most talented young fashion photographers in the business, in 1955 Avedon made fashion and photography history when he staged a photo shoot at a circus. The iconic photograph of that shoot, “Dovima with Elephants,” features the most famous model of the time in a black Dior evening gown with a long white silk sash. She is posed between two elephants, her back serenely arched as she holds on to the trunk of one elephant while reaching out fondly toward the other. The image remains one of the most strikingly original and iconic fashion photographs of all time. “He asked me to do extraordinary things,” Dovima said of Avedon. “But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.”

Avedon served as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar for 20 years, from 1945 to 1965. In addition to his fashion photography, he was also well known for his portraiture. His blackand-white portraits were remarkable for capturing the essential humanity and vulnerability lurking in such larger-than-life figures as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. During the 1960s, Avedon also expanded into more explicitly political photography. He did portraits of civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Julian Bond, as well as segregationists such as Alabama Governor George Wallace, and ordinary people involved in demonstrations. In 1969, he shot a series of Vietnam War portraits that included the Chicago Seven, American soldiers and Vietnamese napalm victims.

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THE TRUE AMERICA On Photography Written by: Susan Sontag

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Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads— as an anthology of images.

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to

produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. Now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. Print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, such as paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world but happen to be much pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls,

Photographer Walker Evans

projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.

For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality—photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid—and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph.

Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs

of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph—any photograph—seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Adminis-

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tration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film—the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity—and ubiquity—of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which

Photographer Russell Lee

makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs.

Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption—the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed—seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Photographer Walker Evans

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Photographer Dorthea Lange

Photographer Russell Lee

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WONDER “A feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.”