If there is one group of the creative class that deftly inhabits the clichés built around them, it is fashion photographers. They are drama queens, they are ultracompetitive, they are serial womanizers; they constantly redefine the term "debauched." Michael Gross's new book, Focus…does not skimp on the gossipy goods. There are descents into madness, prolific drug use, orgies, blackmail photos and suicide attempts, successful and otherwise. There is so much womanizing that the theme of infidelity is basically a subplot, and pretty much boils down to the following: A stunning model walks into a photographer's studio; a marriage dies. But this book…is also smart, well researched and written with an insider's eye. This is not a comprehensive history, and Gross…states from the outset that it isn't meant to be. It focuses, he writes, on those photographers "who were unavoidable, who changed the conversation, who lived the life of fashion photography to its fullest."
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Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers
Narrated by Kirby Heyborne
Michael GrossUnabridged — 15 hours, 47 minutes
Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers
Narrated by Kirby Heyborne
Michael GrossUnabridged — 15 hours, 47 minutes
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Overview
In his follow-up to the New York Times bestselling Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, Michael Gross probes the lives, hang-ups, and artistic triumphs of more than a dozen of fashion photography's greatest visionaries: Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Melvin Sokolsky, Bert Stern, David Bailey, Bill King, Gilles Bensimon, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Corinne Day, Bob and Terry Richardson, and more. From Avedon's haute couture fantasies and telling portraits to Weber's sensual, intimate and heroic slices of life, and from Bob Richardson's provocations to his son Terry's transgressions, Gross takes listeners behind the scenes and reveals the revolutionary creative processes and fraught private passions of these visionary imagicians.
Editorial Reviews
05/02/2016
Gross (Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women) opens this paradoxically unfocused book with an interesting exegesis on the grandfathers of fashion photography, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. These men practically invented the oeuvre, with technical and stylistic innovations, including seamless backdrops and candid snapshots, “in direct contrast to what was being done” by others in the industry. Their segue from portraiture and penury into successful careers as fashion photographers is a study in upward mobility in America. But after a strong start, the text devolves into an endless litany of photographers, models, photo shoots, and magazine layouts. Far too much attention is given to magazine publishers and the various editors at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, including Edna Chase, Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland, and finally Anna Wintour. The parts involving art directors Alexei Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman are fascinating in their own right, but they dim the book’s already faltering emphasis on fashion photography. (July)
"Deep-diving...groundbreaking."
"A juicy history of scandalous lives."
"A sizzling, gossipy read...Relentless reporting."
"A delicious read. Sweeping...thoughtful..."
"Focus finds the fire beneath the ice of glossy magazine pages, and does it without burning down the house.”
"An often-shocking tale rife with bed-hopping hotties, rampant drug use and cut-throat antics. Gross knows his stuff, delving deep into the fascinating rivalries and wicked manipulations that take place behind the cameras."
A “bombshell tell-all. . . Shocking.
"Michael Gross takes us on a compelling journey through a hugely desirable culture—a culture which sometimes destroyed its most brilliant children and which is now slipping as irretrievably into the past as Versailles or the Swinging '60s."
"Laying bare friendships, breakups, rivalries, and liaisons among fashion photographers over the past six decades, ...interweaving anecdotes, interviews, and images by renowned photographers like Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, and Corinne Day, Focus delves into the stories behind their cameras, exposing both their unparalleled talents and private affairs."
"Gross has deftly woven an intricate web of fashion, photography, and magazine publishing that is simply unrivaled... Focus is a sensation... [It] brilliantly blends the wild histories of seemingly disparate lives... Gross is a modern-day Vasari, giving us The Lives of the Artists in no small measure."
This is the best book on the real world of top photographers in the fashion industry ever. Having hired and worked with many of them covered in Michael's book I can tell you the back stories are mind blowing. Anyone remotely connected to fashion should read his book!
"FOCUS is the House of Cards of fashion."
Michael Gross's FOCUS is that rare thing: an equally delicious and deeply informative book, a news-breaking romp through the world of fashion photography, from its beginnings early in the last century to the recent controversial exploits of super bad boy Terry Richardson. Richard Avedon, Bert Stern, Deborah Turbeville, Helmut Newton, Steven Meisel: these and so many others whose work I've enjoyed in VOGUE and BAZAAR are given context and smart analysis, and magazine editors and owners appear, too, revealing an industry of art and commerce. An outstanding work of cultural history.
"I thought I knew practically everything about the fashion industry, but Michael Gross has corrected me. His thoroughly absorbing narrative dazzles with the most profound investigation and research. Focus is an enthralling and riveting read!"
"An exciting read, full of anecdotes and whispers of a fashion era long gone, a must for photography enthusiasts, magazine historians, fashionistas, and lovers of haute couture gossip."
"An often-shocking tale rife with bed-hopping hotties, rampant drug use and cut-throat antics. Gross knows his stuff, delving deep into the fascinating rivalries and wicked manipulations that take place behind the cameras."
Wine, women and song. Boys too, if required. Not to mention drugs. Cool dudes, flashy cars, psycho-tempers, and sex everywhere to choose from. Work junkets all over the world and surrounded by beautiful people looking up at them rather than vice versa, The photographers were the real story.
A "don't miss . . . must-read."
"A cultural history of how photography shaped the rest of the fashion industry... a survey of men behaving badly...Gross captures so well the century-long rivalry between Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar... Important."
"Hot dish."
I loved reading all the juicy details that Michael uncovered in this fast-paced—and clearly insider—look at the rarefied, sexy world of fashion photography.
A deep-diving exposé into the world of iconic fashion photographers...groundbreaking.
"Smart, well researched and written with an insider's eye." ---New York Times
"A juicy history of scandalous lives."
"Hot dish."
"Smart, well researched and written with an insider's eye." —New York Times
"Focus does not skimp on the gossipy goods... Smart, well researched and written with an insider’s eye... Engaging and on point.... Canny."
"Hot dish."
04/15/2016
Since the 1940s, fashion photographers have competed for the prestigious covers of such magazines as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. At the top of their game, these notoriously ambitious players include "game changer" Richard Avedon—as well as Terry and Bob Richardson, Bert Stern, Irving Penn, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, and Mario Testino. The selection of artists is based on Departures contributing editor Gross's (House of Outrageous Fortune) own criteria: those "who were unavoidable, who changed the conversation…but also ones who I am drawn to and whose stories were somehow accessible." Along with tales of famous shoots and industry backstories during the "glory days" of the genre, Gross writes of the sexual promiscuity and recreational drug use of these (mostly male) photographers in this exposé. Although the subtitle is a bit on the nose, the subject matter will be historically significant to those who are concerned with the photo artist's role in the golden age of modern fashion photography. VERDICT Recommended for enthusiasts of fashion and fashion photography.—Shauna Frischkorn, Millersville Univ., PA
2016-04-13
The reality of fashion photography "can be murky, often decadent, and sometimes downright ugly."In a gossipy exposé focused less on aesthetic vision than biographical dirt, journalist Gross (House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World's Most Powerful Address, 2014, etc.) follows the careers of the talented, arrogant, philandering, combative, self-aggrandizing photographers whose work appeared in, and defined, such iconic fashion magazines as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Glamour, and Elle from 1947 to 1997. Richard Avedon (1923-2004) gets major attention, since he was the darling of Harper's Bazaar before Diana Vreeland lured him to Vogue in 1962. Avedon, writes Gross, created "a hybrid of street photography that sought to capture reality and the elegant remove of past fashion photography." As successful as he was, the overbearing, egotistical Avedon saw all other photographers—most notably Irving Penn ("the abiding genius of Vogue")—as rivals. When he chose a model, no one else could use her. "He was one of the great contributors to fashion," said photographer Melvin Sokolsky, "but he had no space for anybody but himself. If anybody else took a picture, he couldn't give it credit." Gross portrays Penn and Avedon as divas, but they were not alone. Gilles Bensimon, "chief shutterbug" of French Elle, was another: he liked to twirl his penis in public. "The biggest dick in the business," commented a fellow photographer. Sex, consensual or not, permeated the business. Bert Stern, who took a notorious series of photos of Marilyn Monroe, nude, shortly before she died, used "those images of Monroe at the end of her rope" to sustain himself for the rest of life, as his career tanked, his marriage to long-suffering ballerina Allegra Kent ended, and drug addiction landed him in hospitals. Interviews, some conducted for Model, Gross' previous foray into the fashion industry, reveal piles of sometimes-tangy, often scurrilous gossip. Not a pretty picture of sex, drugs, beautiful women, and raw ambition.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170818983 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 07/05/2016 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Focus “A WITNESS”
A chilly rain was falling on November 6, 1989, when several generations of New York’s fashion and social elite gathered in the medieval-sculpture hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a memorial celebrating Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor, curator, and quintessence of self-creation.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, for whom Vreeland was a fashion godmother, and Lauren Bacall, who’d been discovered by her, both arrived alone. Dorinda Dixon Ryan, known as D.D., who’d worked under Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar, was seated next to Carolyne Roehm, one among many fashion designers in attendance. Mica Ertegun and Chessy Rayner, the society decorators, sat with Reinaldo Herrera, holder of the Spanish title Marqués of Torre Casa, whose family estate in Venezuela, built in 1590, is said to be the oldest continuously inhabited home in the Western Hemisphere.
One of Vreeland’s sons delivered a eulogy, as did socialite C. Z. Guest; Pierre Bergé, the business partner of Yves Saint Laurent; Oscar de la Renta, the society dressmaker; Philippe de Montebello, then the museum’s director and Vreeland’s final boss when she ran its Costume Institute; and George Plimpton, who cowrote her memoir, D.V. But the afternoon’s most telling fashion moment came in between Montebello and Plimpton, when photographer Richard Avedon, who’d worked with Vreeland from the start of his career, took the stage.
Avedon was a giant in fashion and society, an insider and an iconoclast, a trenchant critic of the very worlds that had made him a star, arguably the most celebrated photographer of the twentieth century. Never one to mince words or spare the feelings of others (“Oh, Dick, Dick, Dick is such a dick,” a junior fashion editor once said), he used his eulogy as a gun aimed at Vreeland’s latest successor at Vogue, Anna Wintour.
Though he never once mentioned her name, he sought to wound Wintour, who’d arrived at the memorial with her bosses, the heads of Condé Nast Publications, S. I. “Si” Newhouse Jr., the company’s chairman, and Alexander Liberman, its editorial director. Just a year earlier, they’d let Wintour replace Avedon as the photographer of Vogue’s covers. Only a few in the audience knew that Avedon had actually shot a cover for the November 1988 issue, Wintour’s first as editor in chief of Vogue, and that no one had bothered to alert him that Wintour had replaced it with a picture by the much-younger Peter Lindbergh. Avedon only found out when the printed issue arrived at his studio.
He never shot for Vogue again.
A year later, Avedon served up his revenge dressed in a tribute to the woman he’d sometimes refer to as his “crazy aunt” Diana. Avedon recalled their first meeting in 1945 when he was twenty-two and fresh out of the merchant marine. Carmel Snow was about to make true his short lifetime’s dream of taking photographs for Harper’s Bazaar, the magazine she edited that he’d first encountered as the son of a Fifth Avenue fashion retailer. Newspaper and magazine stories about the Vreeland memorial would linger on in Avedon’s recollections of their first meeting, how he watched her stick a pin into both a dress and the model wearing it, “who let out a little scream,” he remembered. Vreeland turned to him for the very first time and said, “Aberdeen, Aberdeen, doesn’t it make you want to cry?”
It did, he went on, but not because he loved the dress or appreciated the mangling of his name. He went back to Carmel Snow and said, “I can’t work with that woman.” Snow replied that he would, “and I did,” Avedon continued, “to my enormous benefit, for almost forty years.”
But that charming opening anecdote was nothing compared to what followed. Avedon extolled Vreeland’s virtues, “the amazing gallop of her imagination,” her preternatural understanding of what women would want to wear, her “sense of humor so large, so generous, she was ever ready to make a joke of herself,” and the diligence that made her “the hardest-working person I’ve ever known. . . .
“I am here as a witness,” Avedon concluded. “Diana lived for imagination ruled by discipline, and created a totally new profession. Vreeland invented the fashion editor. Before her, it was society ladies who put hats on other society ladies. Now, it’s promotion ladies who compete with other promotion ladies. No one has equaled her—not nearly. And the form has died with her. It’s just staggering how lost her standards are to the fashion world.”
Sitting at the front of the audience between her two bosses, wearing a Chanel suit that mixed Vreeland’s signature color, red, with the black of mourning, the haughty Wintour, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses, gave no hint that she knew Avedon was speaking to her. But even though he saw her ascendance as a sign of the fashion Apocalypse, it’s unlikely that even the prescient Avedon could have foreseen all the other, related forces then taking shape that would, in little more than a decade, fundamentally alter the role—fashion photographer—that he’d not only mastered but embodied.
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