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  Las Meninas, Carmen Dell’Orefice and Melvin Sokolsky, 1960. (MELVIN SOKOLSKY)

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  In which we learn how this book came to be and some of what went into it.

  Introduction: Welcome to Terrytown

  In which we meet Terry Richardson, the most successful photographer of the moment just passed; Hadley Hudson, whom some call the new Terry Richardson; and a model named Rain, a girl who models as a boy and may or may not represent the momentary quintessence of beauty.

  Part 1: Innocence

  In which we take a brief walk-through of the earliest days of fashion photography with Baron Adolph de Meyer, Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huené, Horst P. Horst, Cecil Beaton, and Louise Dahl-Wolfe; watch the form evolve in the work of Man Ray, Martin Munkácsi, and Toni Frissell; chart the rise of Richard Avedon, the defining lens on the twentieth century, and the first supermodels, Dorian Leigh, Suzy Parker, and Dovima; trace the origins of the century-long war between Condé Nast’s Vogue and William Randolph Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar; meet Bazaar’s Carmel Snow and Alexey Brodovitch; and watch as Erwin Blumenfeld makes Alex Liberman and Vogue look almost as good as Bazaar, and then, Irving Penn makes it better.

  Part 2: Experience

  In which the third great fashion photographer, Bert Stern, rises from nothing into the pantheon at Liberman and Diana Vreeland’s Vogue, and along with Jerry Schatzberg, Mel Sokolsky, Bill Helburn, and three stroppy working-class oinks from England, Terence Donovan, Brian Duffy, and David Bailey, make fashion photography a virile profession, costarring the women who love them: Ali MacGraw, Faye Dunaway, Jean Shrimpton, Catherine Deneuve, Donna Mitchell, Dorothy McGowan, and Simone d’Aillencourt.

  Part 3: Indulgence

  In which Europe storms the magazine world, led by an international pack of lensmen called the French Mob, from the lesser-known Pierre Houlès and Claude Guillaumin to the international stars Gilles Bensimon, Patrick Demarchelier, Mike Reinhardt, Uli Rose, and Arthur Elgort. Men who love women, they’re a perfect fit for the new, more realistic fashions of the seventies, and the commercialized magazines that sell them. But beneath the pretty surface are dangerous currents, captured by Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, and Deborah Turbeville. And Bill King and Francesco Scavullo throw down a gauntlet before Avedon, the King of Fashion Photography.

  Part 4: Decadence

  In which things get more than a little crazy; half-naked teenage girls high on beauty, cocaine, and freedom prowl the halls of Italian hotels; Gilles Bensimon rises above the rest of the French Mob and becomes known as the biggest dick in fashion; Chris von Wangenheim blurs the line between fantasy and reality; and Richard Avedon reinvents himself in the tight space between Brooke Shields and her Calvins.

  Part 5: Domination

  In which magazines cede the high ground to advertisers; Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren emerge as Medicis and Bruce Weber as their Leonardo and Michelangelo; AIDS lays low a generation; Bill King dies in a blaze of enmity; and a French art director, Fabien Baron, and an Italian editor, Franca Sozzani, rise and summon the ghosts of Alexey Brodovitch and Carmel Snow.

  Part 6: Disruption

  In which a Jewish Cherokee named Steven Meisel takes over fashion; Anna Wintour takes over Vogue and then the entire edifice of commercial fashion; the cutting edge stretches from London to Barneys New York; grunge may be ghastly but comes to rule the world; Corinne Day and Kate Moss make fashion real again; and Carine Roitfeld, Tom Ford, and Mario Testino counterattack with a stiff dose of glamour; at least until digital photography and impossible images sign the death warrant for the golden age of girls on film.

  Epilogue: Return to Terrytown

  In which the father-son tag team of Bob and Terry Richardson terrorize, provoke, transgress, and scorch the earth, setting the stage for fashion photography’s next visions.

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Michael Gross

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  For Norman Parkinson, who gave me my first fashion photo; Richard Avedon, who suggested I write a book about the models who appear in them; and Barbara Hodes, who inspired me to turn the camera on the people who make them.

  Here is what other people have and you haven’t; here is where some go but never you. Here is your lovely land of never, and you may dream of it, but that’s all.

  —DAWN POWELL

  Preface

  * * *

  The half century from 1947 to 1997 was fashion photography’s glory days. Hundreds of photographers were published in major magazines around the world, but only a few dozen did work that was truly memorable. And only a handful of those were transformational or symbolic of the profession as a whole. So, just as a magazine spread of eight or ten photos has to be edited down from hundreds or thousands of images, I’ve chosen a small cast of characters to tell the large story of this mass art form in a comprehensible way. Others may—and surely will—disagree with the edit. So be it. This is not a work of criticism. It does not try to be encyclopedic, either.

  I have focused on photographers who were unavoidable, who changed the conversation, who lived the life of fashion photography to its fullest, but also ones whom I am drawn to and whose stories were somehow accessible, whether because they were willing to speak about themselves or because firsthand witnesses were willing to speak about their careers. All this means that dozens of great talents—Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson, Frank Horvat, Gleb Derujinsky, William Helburn, Peter Beard, Barry Lategan, William Klein, Gosta Peterson, Denis Piel, Andrea Blanch, Steven Klein, Ellen von Unwerth, Pamela Hanson, Peter Lindbergh, Juergen Teller, Paolo Roversi, and Sarah Moon, to name but a few—are given short shrift in the pages that follow. That doesn’t lessen the impact or quality of their work.I

  My choice of Richard Avedon over Irving Penn to stand for the fifties illustrates all my criteria. Even though Penn, a restrained, monkish technician, was equally talented, the hyperenthusiast Avedon’s fashion photographs were game changers. Penn’s choice to remain aloof, while Avedon chased fashion over more than five decades, made the latter a more attractive subject. I’d also spoken to Avedon but never to Penn—and Penn’s son was less than eager to return phone calls. My personal preference for Avedon’s work sealed the deal. Fortunately, I’d saved every note of every conversation I ever had with Avedon, so he often speaks for himself in the pages that follow.

  As I started my research, I revisited files I’d compiled over the last three-plus decades and got a surprise. They contained a wealth of unpublished material, notably extensive interviews with photographers living and dead. The spine of the Bert Stern section of this book, for instance, is a lengthy interview he gave me in 1994, most of it previously unpublished.II

  Focus opens and closes with Bob and Terry Richardson, father and son photographers, one who worked in the sixties and seventies, the other, very much of the present. I interviewed Bob. Though I’ve met and spoken to Terry several times, he, like most currently working fashion-magazine photographers, stylists, and editors, refused to give an interview. Their reasons for saying no may be as varied as their styles and personalities, but my reporting experience leads me to believe that fear of repercussions in a backbiting, already insecure world now under existential threat is behind those refusals. That said, one longtime Condé Nast editor commented, “The people now have nothing to sa
y, so maybe it’s better that they don’t talk.”

  I’ll leave that for the future to decide. If this book begins to explain how we got from Richard Avedon to Terry Richardson, it will have done the job I set out to do. “The electronic age arrived and the whole thing changed,” says Jean-Jacques Naudet, the longtime editor of Photo magazine in France. “Models and photographers were the top, stars. Not anymore. Now you don’t recognize them.” And fashion photographs, once indispensable documents of fleeting moments, became all-too-easily-manipulated artifacts of a time of fleeting truth.

  It’s a shame that some disdain today’s fashion lensmen and -women as anonymous and fungible; only time will tell if some will emerge as the Avedon and Meisel of this century. Regardless, they won’t, can’t, be the same as those who came before them. The business they’re in has changed—and demanded change—as photography evolved from a difficult and technical art mastered by a precious few to a digital and democratic medium accessible to anyone. Something’s been lost for sure, but something new is surely coming in the age of Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat. We’ll have to wait to see. This is the story of what was.

  * * *

  I. The business started small, then exploded in the sixties and seventies, when many more photographers emerged. For the sake of narrative clarity, I’ve had to leave many of them out, but some of their stories—along with source citations for this entire book—can be found on my website, www.mgross.com. I encourage interested readers to visit.

  II. Interviews conducted by the author—whether for this book or in the past (for the 1995 book, Model, or various newspapers and magazines)—are not included in the source notes.

  Introduction

  * * *

  WELCOME TO TERRYTOWN

  People will always have strong opinions about challenging images.

  —TERRY RICHARDSON

  For a brief, bizarre moment, in 2013, fashion was Terrytown. Nineteen years after Terry Richardson published his first harshly lit, seemingly styleless, yet appealingly candid point-and-shoot-snapshot-style fashion photographs, a decade after he was consecrated as “the irreverent New Yorker who changed photography forever” at his first big gallery show, and mere months after the New York Times Style section profiled him as the “naughty knave of fashion’s court,” all eyes in that world were on the gangling, grungy, distinctly unglamorous forty-eight-year old.

  He was easy to spot. His visual identifiers were many and, taken together, iconic: a lumberjack shirt, heavily tattooed arms, receding hairline, muttonchop sideburns, handlebar mustache, aviator glasses, and a double thumbs-up gesture framing a shit-faced grin. The last might have been inspired by another attribute he often included in photos of himself (he’s been called, not quite accurately, the inventor of the selfie): a preternaturally large penis.

  Though this visually astute imagician presents himself as a walking cartoon, Richardson also embodies half a century of fashion photography; his father, Bob, had been a supernova in the field, before quitting it, a victim of schizophrenia compounded by years of drug abuse. His son, it appeared, was living the life his tragic father had thrown away, though ruling a far different fashion photography universe, one under assault from all sides.

  In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, digital photography flooded the world with imagery. The Internet had taken a once elite art form and made it instantly accessible to everyone. Digital culture had wreaked havoc on the print-media ecosystem, making glossy newsstand magazines, the primary medium for fashion photos for almost a century, endangered if not quite extinct. Notoriety had similarly trumped beauty, turning models, long the faces of fashion, into second-tier signifiers of style. Huge corporate conglomerates had taken over the fashion business—both at its high and low ends—making its imagery fungible and leaving the surviving mass-circulation magazines timorous about offending anyone who might adversely affect advertising revenue. The prime directive of fashion photography—Astonish me!—a phrase attributed to the estimable midcentury art director Alexey Brodovitch, was becoming ever harder to fulfill in a world in which everything was recycled or pastiche.

  Somehow, Terry Richardson rose above all that. He was an astonishment.

  That year, Richardson added a stunning array of credits to his résumé. He shot ads for a fragrance by Isaac Mizrahi; a chain of gyms; H&M; Dolce & Gabbana; Procter & Gamble; Ann Taylor; couture and shoe lines; Esprit; Target; Bulgari (featuring former French first lady Carla Bruni Sarkozy); the luxury jeweler David Webb; Valentino-brand accessories (which he photographed, quite cleverly, on his own hands and heavily tattooed arms); the Kardashian Kollection; and a fashion website. He also created photos for Christian Dior’s couture runway show and Harper’s Bazaar and Numéro magazines; made several breastcentric, career-making videos for the voluptuous model Kate Upton; made tabloid headlines by dating Audrey Gelman, a beauty half his age who was not only the spokesperson for Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, but also a best friend of Lena Dunham’s. Dunham would loosely base on Gelman the character of Marnie in Dunham’s new HBO sitcom Girls. And he shot a raft of celebrities: Georgia May Jagger, Scarlett Johansson, Cameron Diaz, Kate Moss, and Miranda Kerr among them.

  Then, Richardson made another video, this one for Miley Cyrus, the performing daughter of country music star Billy Ray Cyrus, who was determined to shed her clean-cut child-star image and remake herself as a sexually charged twenty-first-century pop princess. Richardson directed the video for her song “Wrecking Ball.” It opens with a beauty shot of Cyrus, a tear dripping from one eye as she starts singing about frustrated love, then it segues to the tattooed twenty-year-old in white scanties, faux-fellating a sledgehammer, then sitting naked atop the wrecking ball of the title, flashing bits of bum and breasts as it swings back and forth, smashing the concrete-block set, and finally writhing and rending her barely there clothing atop the wreckage. The video ends with a credit card reading, “Directed by Terry Richardson,” the letter i in his last name dotted with a childish x.

  Shortly after it was released in September 2013, garnering 19.3 million views on YouTube within twenty-four hours of its release, a hurricane of controversy blew into Terrytown. It lifted the newly sexed-up Cyrus’s profile; the song became her first No. 1 hit. But it seemed to have the opposite effect for Richardson, whose image morphed from mischievous imp to malevolent pervert. The acidic drip-drip-drip of accusations and opprobrium was so relentless that the website Styleite published a post entitled “A Horrifying Timeline of Terry Richardson Allegations, from Trash Cans to Tampon Tea.” A Google search for Richardson misbehavior yielded more than eighty-two thousand hits. Success is a bitch.

  The timeline began with a 2004 description of a woman (an assistant who would later become Richardson’s girlfriend and in fall 2015 get pregnant with twins by him) who’d been photographed fellating Richardson while sitting in a trash can wearing a tiara reading slut in rhinestones. Call me mama!

  Sexual harassment claims were first aired—albeit without mention of Richardson’s name—in 2009, when a working model told a documentarian that she was asked to give a top photographer a hand job at a go-see, or audition. “He likes it when you squeeze it real hard and twist it,” she was told. The next year, model Rie Rasmussen berated Richardson at a party, angry that he’d run photographs of her alongside others “of naked underage girls in his creepy coffee table [book],” Styleite said.

  Soon, a college student named Jamie Peck came forward to tell how an assistant of Richardson’s had invited her to his studio to model. “I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, awesome,’ ” says Peck, who “didn’t think to ask” what she’d be posing for. Two sessions with Richardson followed. She doesn’t remember the first but later recognized herself in two photos showing her in sexual situations with the photographer. “I don’t know what I was thinking” when she returned, she says. “I had stars in my eyes and he hadn’t crossed a line yet.” Peck grew wary when he suggested making tea with her
used tampon. Then, he exposed “his terrifying penis” to her. “I must have said something about finals,” Peck would later write of the moment, “because he told me, ‘If you make me come, you get an A.’ So I did! Pretty fast, I might add. His assistant handed me a towel.” Five years later, she concludes, “It was a caricature of what parents fear when they send their girls to New York.”

  At the same event where Peck met Richardson, Sarah Hilker, an aspiring seventeen-year-old model, refused to sign a model release and ran from his makeshift studio when she “saw him shooting some obviously inebriated chick straddling a full naked erect guy” while the photographer had “one hand on the camera, the other hand” on himself. That year, the blog Jezebel branded him “the world’s most f—ked up fashion photographer.”

  Perhaps the most damning account of Richardson’s behavior came from an anonymous poster on the Reddit Web community, who later came forward to identify herself as Charlotte Waters, a former model who’d posed nude for art classes, but discovered her limits stretched to the breaking point when she showed up for a shoot at Richardson’s studio. She wrote that she was directed to take Richardson’s penis from his pants. Though “never once initiated by me . . . it became sexual act after sexual act, everything you can think of . . . everything slow so his assistant could photograph. . . . I was completely a sex puppet.”

  Richardson allegedly photographed the splatter of his orgasm. Afterward, Waters supposedly spoke to the police; reports differ as to whether she was told the charges wouldn’t stick or she simply didn’t press the matter. Richardson responded to her claims in a letter that was printed by a gossip column, claiming he’d ignored the first wave of charges against him because responding would constitute a betrayal of his work and his character. But when the claims resurfaced, “they seemed especially vicious and distorted,” he wrote, and felt like “an emotionally charged witch hunt,” which he blamed on the anarchy and anonymity of the Internet (the same venue where his studio staff often posted nude photos of models taken in his studio on a website called Terry’s Diary). He continued: although the “hate-filled and libelous tales” were but rumors and lies, they required a response.