“My Education”
Bruce Weber
Taschen, $150
Aside from his well-known ads for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, and magazine work published in GQ and Vanity Fair, the photographer Bruce Weber made nonfiction films featuring the Italian photographer Paolo di Paolo, the actor Robert Mitchum, the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker, and his dogs surfing in Montauk.
No surprise: Alongside the commercial work and indie films, Mr. Weber took a lot of pictures, way more than you’ve seen. “My Education,” a deluxe tome at once a photo extravaganza and memoir, with text in French, German, and English, limns his decades-long career as an artist. An art object, “My Education” requires a large and sturdy coffee table.
“Education,” a classic, handy organizational conceit, goes far in providing a narrative without delving into the author’s inner life. The book, chronicling Mr. Weber’s love affair with beauty, opens with observations he made in Lyon, France, in 2023 presenting a newly restored print of his Chet Baker documentary, “Let’s Get Lost.” After he visits the Musee Lumiere, where the roots of cinema and documentary began, his appreciation extends to the subjects that thrill him, beginning with family.
Growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, he learned from his parents, “such affectionate and physical beings.” Their “relationship was completely governed by desire.” You might say the same for his most intimate photos of families, couples, and animals lovingly shot. The Scorsese family, Marty and his parents, with an added Robert De Niro at dinner. His Montauk neighbors Julian Schnabel with his wife and children (Vito, his son who would become a gallerist, as a toddler), and Peter Beard and his daughter, Zara. Or Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange. You can feel the heat between them.
Daughter and father: Sofia and Francis Ford Coppola. Daughter and mother: Kate Moss and Linda Rosina Shepherd. Serena and Venus Williams in a portrait not focused on the physical, as with others — for example, the dancer Karole Armitage aloft in a New York City street — but a tender moment between sisters. Paul Bowles in bed eating off a tray, grimacing at the camera. Odd as it looks, the picture captures this expatriate writer and composer’s world in Tangier.
Icons, heroes to the photographer: the actor and racecar driver Paul Newman, who eluded him so long he had to invent a strategy for taking a shot. Uncharacteristically forward, when Mr. Weber asked Liv Ullmann to introduce him to Ingmar Bergman, she warned, don’t direct him. Despairing over an issue with a sliver of light not hitting his subject as it should have for a great shot, “I called out to him, ‘Oh Mr. Bergman, could you move just a little to your right?’ ‘DO NOT DIRECT ME!’ he bellowed. Liv stared at me in disbelief. ‘No, no, I’m sorry. Forget I said anything!’ I called back. Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the picture and forget myself. It happens all the time.”
Notably, Mr. Weber’s shots of buff men in jockey briefs and jeans seem to sell more than product. A whole section here is devoted to the male nude in nature. A spread with two brothers, Kyle and Lane Carlson, another with the Brewer twins. In black-and-white, the photos casually reference men at play, and more formally an appreciation of the body as art. Remarkably, given his commercial career, he has said, “I love photographs that are not trying to sell something.” As you make your way through this massive collection, you see that side.
Large in scale as the book is, you may quibble that only some photos come with rich back stories. At a signing at the Peter Marino Art Foundation in Southampton, he revealed that Isabella Rossellini used to sleep over at his place when Mr. Scorsese would lock her out if she was not home by 10. Her color portrait from Milan, 1981, is spectacularly posed; eyes closed, perfectly made up, she looks coquettish. In the next, she’s goofing with a grandchild. Sequences of the same subject juxtapose young with old, an arc over time. Mr. Weber mentions that he misses the eras of fashion, so glamorous and exciting. That’s why he left Pennsylvania, he said.
Yes, more anecdotes, please.
Other photographers such as Paolo di Paolo left photography as the magazines were changing. “As they changed in my time, I did the opposite. I never retreated, photographing every day. If I gave up photography, I could not breathe.” The results of this life lesson are amply represented here.
Regina Weinreich, author of “Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics,” editor of “Kerouac’s Book of Haikus,” and co-producer and director of “Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider,” lives in Montauk and Manhattan, where she teaches at the School of Visual Arts.