This film is a wonderful gift from BW, and I hope this (and the other little clues he drops on the way) aren't hinting that he thinks he's moving on, because Bruce Weber has brought a light into my life that I'm not ready to lose just yet. What worried me? That passage near the beginning on Tower Bridge with La Traviata's 'life is passing you can live it to the full if I am strong and leave you to live without me'. And as with Chet Baker (in Let's Get Lost), I'm looking forward to having my musical life enriched by the introduction when I go and find some of her recordings. As he always has done, while he tantalises me with beautiful images, he also introduces me to something - this time the singing of Francis Faye - that I hadn't experienced before. We may not all be able to take a great photograph to record the experience, but we can treasure the intensity of feeling it. Perhaps you need to be a Bruce Weber afficionado to be this turned on perhaps you have to share his wonderful obsessions - but I don't think so, because the whole point of the film is that *everyone* has the capacity to feel this strongly, to be this in touch with the way they feel. More than any other film I have seen, this one embodies, 'here is the glory of art, the sheer white heat of its passion in making and feeling'. His most recent works include a fantastic coffee-table book for Dedon, an art exhibit in Miami of his images of Haiti and a short film for Abercrombie & Fitch.įor the full biography and hi-res images of Bruce Weber and his work, grab the February/March issue of DA MAN by clicking here.This is a wonderful, moving assemblage of fragmentary experiences which, held together only by the voices of Bruce Weber and his friends, gently carries you into the heart of the deepest aesthetic wonder. While there, he was mentored by photographers Lisette Model and Diane Arbus. Weber first studied theater before enrolling in the filmmaking school at NYU in the ‘60s. His documentary centered on the life of jazz musician Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost (1989), earned an Academy Award nomination. His first one, Broken Noses (1987), is a docudrama about a boxing prodigy. Weber has attributed his interest in iconic imagery to his father’s regular routine of taking family films each Sunday.Īlthough Weber is best known for his ads, he has also earned honors for his filmmaking. He has largely been credited with lifting ad imagery to an art form. Here’s a man who, through much of his early life, was admittedly not part of the ‘in’ crowd in his macho farm/steel mill community of western Pennsylvania, but has turned into a supremely confident creator of everything that most humans aspire to be a part of, coaxing naturalistic, extraordinarily amazing images out of people (very young versions of River Phoenix, Justin Timberlake, Sienna Miller, Matt Dillon, Matt Damon, Christie Brinkley, Sean Penn, Kate Moss, Colin Farrell, Leo DiCaprio, Jude Law, Kristen Stewart, Andy Roddick and a slew of others). He’s not an icon for the way he, personally, dresses or looks, but for the way he makes others look. Never shooting on digital, always film, he manages to capture the sublimely beautiful side of even average-looking people. Whatever motivates him, he has striven to make beauty synonymous with his name. He has also been behind most of the (often controversial) campaigns for Abercrombie & Fitch since 1993. For more than four decades, Bruce Weber has been one of the most influential shutterbugs in the world, working for magazines like Vogue, GQ and Vanity Fair and creating a plethora of iconic photos for the likes of Ralph Lauren, Versace and Calvin Klein. Indicative of how popular a photographer Bruce Weber has become over the past few decades, is the fact that his first book, Bruce Weber (1983), now sells for well over 10 times what it did when first published. But photographer Bruce Weber is indeed one of the biggest, most respected icons of the fashion world. He’s a big man with a large face and probably more suited to playing a mall Santa than being our fashion icon. Having had decades of experience working with big names of fashion such as Ralph Lauren, Versace and Calvin Klein, fashion photographer Bruce Weber is one of the most prominent gurus in fashion photography and ad photography. Bruce Weber: Probably the most respected figure in the world of fashion photography and popular photography today.
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