Focus

by Michael Gross

  * * *

  “OUT OF THE NEST”

  Alexander Liberman and Si Newhouse issued a challenge to Vogue’s new editors. “We had to find a whole new group of models and photographers,” says Jade Hobson. “It was women’s lib, remember?” says Vera Wang, another Vogue sittings editor. “Suits and sneakers to the office.” Even though Middle America sometimes still considered feminists hairy-legged harridans in Birkenstocks, the postliberation Vogue woman was bigger, blonder, shinier, healthier, decisive, and sexually adventurous.

  The French Mob seemed designed for that moment. “Hypersexual photographers with their pick of the most beautiful women in the world,” says Wang. Mirabella wanted models whose “open smiles beckoned and whose all-American looks shouted stylish informality,” the editor wrote. “We simply couldn’t afford to push women away anymore.” Men who loved women were playing her song. Arthur Elgort, the auxiliary Frenchie, emerged as a soloist. His ability to capture “a sense of movement” made him one of Mirabella’s favorites, and to her, Elgort marked “the last turning point in the history of American fashion photography.” His work struck her as quintessentially modern and American.

  After studying at New York’s Stuyvesant High School and Hunter College, where he’d majored in painting, Elgort decided to be a photographer because “I wasn’t a bad painter, but I wasn’t good, either.” After college, he had his heart set on shooting fashion pictures. “My mother looked at Vogue. There must have been something there.” His motivation was simple: “It was girls. That was a good reason.”

  Right from the start, he saw how to do it. “I had an idea: I was outside. I went to Central Park all the time. I didn’t want to be an Avedon. I enjoyed girls.” He started with pictures of dancers at ballet schools, a personal obsession. Then he began testing girls from the Zoli modeling agency, which opened in 1970. A fan of exotic beauty, Zoli would “give me models who were hard,” says Elgort. Making them beautiful was great training.

  Elgort’s next stop were the darkrooms of Carl Fischer and Gosta Peterson, a Swedish illustrator-turned-photographer who’d specialized in shooting children in the fifties and moved into fashion at Mademoiselle in the early sixties. “I started to photograph people, not models,” Peterson says. “Liberman wanted me to come to Vogue, but I said I wanted to do my thing. I liked people with character, rather than girls who looked so pretty. That’s why I couldn’t shoot for Vogue.”

  Elgort admired Peterson, Saul Leiter, and Frank Horvat—snapshot photographers all. “I learned from Gus because he just did it, he didn’t worry about it,” Elgort says. Peterson told him to shoot fashion models the way he did the dancers he loved. He pored over photography books. Soon, he was shooting for Mademoiselle.

  “Fashion-wise, Mademoiselle was always on the cutting edge,” says Roger Schoening, its art director in 1960, when 35 mm cameras became common. They made it easier to shoot in “natural settings as opposed to formal studios. Handheld meant you could move around very quickly.” Schoening gave Elgort his first assignments. “I said you’ll never know how good I am unless I get a lot of pages,” Elgort recalls. “Schoening said, ‘Give me ten pages and we’ll see.’ ” Elgort shot the spread with an editor, Deborah Turbeville, who was trying to become a photographer herself, taking the successor to the Brodovitch Design Laboratory courses, then taught by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. “Everyone thought she was a little bit nutty,” Elgort says. Schoening used Elgort a lot but “never thought of him as a superstar.” Elgort realized, “I wasn’t going to do much here, so I took a chance and went to Paris.”

  He started out testing new models as he’d done in New York, “then all of a sudden I get a job from Vingt Ans, then L’Officiel and British Vogue. I worked pretty fast.” He fell in with the Frenchies. “We all ate together and had girlfriends we tested together. I liked the girls more than the guys.”

  Like all the Mobsters, Elgort had a model girlfriend, Bonnie Pfeifer, who’d come to Paris by way of New York, where she was a finalist in a Model of the Year competition in 1968. Her first job landed her the cover of Seventeen. Then, she took off for Europe. Her next job was with Gilles Bensimon, ten pages for French Vogue. “That’s how I met all the boys,” she says. “They’re hot on the trail, but I’m not interested.” She assumes they discussed her. “That’s what they did, talked about girls all the time.” She and a model boyfriend broke up, “and all of a sudden, I got booked on a job with Arthur.” They became a couple “right away. He was hilarious, we worked hard, we laughed. With Arthur, I could be one of the guys and talk about girls, too.

  “The boys were practically all play, pretending to be grown-up, successful photographers, but they were girl-crazy boys.” And they shared models. “They talked about it, and I wasn’t going to go there. I was glad to be with one guy.” The Mobsters spent weekends at one another’s country farmhouses—and Pfeifer was part of the gang. “I have brothers; I’m not intimidated.”

  Arthur and Bonnie were a good team. “It was easier with somebody you knew really well,” Pfeifer continues. “Basically modeling is looking in a lens but interacting. Photographs combine both your personalities. You couldn’t always connect, but Arthur and I connected great, and it started with the camera between us.” When a shoot wasn’t working, Elgort would say, “Okay, fall,” and Pfeifer would “stumble and push somebody, and it would break the mood, get something going,” she says.

  Starting out in Europe was great, Pfeifer thinks, “because if they believed in you, the magazines let talent take a chance, because not a lot of money was riding on it, compared to in America.” The tear-sheet principle also applied. “You couldn’t get jobs in America without wonderful, creative stuff from Europe.” Once a photographer had published tear sheets, or samples, it was easier to get more work.

  Elgort got those tear sheets quickly—“He couldn’t go a couple of hours without taking pictures,” says Pfeifer—and the couple crossed the Atlantic regularly. By 1972, they had an apartment in New York’s Eldorado, a twin-towered luxury building on Central Park West. Their dining room table flipped over for the Ping-Pong games the Mob loved. “Then we started having different clients and taking trips apart,” says Pfeifer. “We grew up, and one day he pushed me out of the nest. I was upset, but he was right. We were growing apart.”

  Elgort first shot for American Vogue in 1971, but it took two more years before he became a mainstay. “I met Liberman, and he said, ‘Now, you’re going to work for me at Vogue. Do Mademoiselle, too, but don’t try so hard anymore.’ He liked me.” Liberman endowed Elgort with the ultimate prize, a Vogue contract. Elgort’s essential humility showed through when they discussed his deal. “You put my kids through school,” he told Liberman.

  “I love Arthur,” says Jade Hobson. “He was so spontaneous. A lot of his pictures are just off moments,” such as the time Patti Hansen in a white one-piece swimsuit was caught at the Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida, “his winter studio,” just drinking a piña colada.

  Elgort’s assistants worshipped him. Ross Whitaker, who joined the studio in 1977, calls their first meeting “one of those Robert Frost moments that completely changed the direction of my life. I was a technical, still-life photo kid. I think my naïveté impressed him. He said, ‘You have to get a passport; we spend half the year in Europe.’ All of a sudden, I’m doing London, Paris, Milan. Arthur taught me how to be a photographer. He never left the house without a camera. He taught me to look at photography as storytelling.”

  “Arthur Elgort is the most wonderful, generous, extraordinary mentor a young person could ask for,” says Peter Michael Kagan, now a music-video and short-film director. In 1979, he went to work for John Stember, another of the peripheral Mobsters. After a year, Kagan moved to Elgort’s studio. “The sound track was gorgeous,” Kagan says. “He was an usher at Carnegie Hall as a young man and had an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz. Great classical, too. His whole world was unbelievably true elegance.” He shot with elegance, too,
seamlessly switching cameras and film formats, “so many difficult cameras at one time, all flying around while he’s making on-the-fly calculations,” says Kagan. “He was one of Liberman’s favorite reportage guys. There were others doing it, but no one as fleetingly as Arthur was.”

  Elgort’s effortless style is manifest in his best-known image for Vogue, a 1979 photograph of model Lisa Taylor driving across the George Washington Bridge in New York, with her hand to her chin and elbow out the window of a Mercedes 450SL, hair flying in the wind. Getting it was anything but effortless. “We started on one side and drove back and forth and back and forth,” Elgort says. “She was a very good driver. I told her to keep an eye on me. I remember her saying, ‘Don’t stop, just keep going until you get a picture,’ and it was very hard because it was very difficult to focus.” Elgort waves off the shot’s importance: “It was just a picture. I was doing my job. I didn’t think about it.”

  “Arthur is very funny,” says Taylor. “He just keeps you laughing. He loved it for the art, and he had a way with people. He was the real thing. He didn’t like posing. If you posed, he started talking and got you to move. I didn’t know how to pose, so he and I hit it off.”

  As the eighties began, Elgort fell in love with a dancer, Grethe Barrett Holby, whom he met when her sister, Kristin, better known as the model Clotilde, married photographer Jacques Malignon. “I went out with her, but not right away,” Elgort says. “She had a boyfriend. Then, she called me up and made believe she wanted pictures. I was already fortysomething. I’d had fun, although I didn’t like to go out at night. I wanted to sleep. I took drugs but not, like, cocaine.”

  He didn’t like advertising much, either, though he did his share: “You have to do advertising to keep a studio.” But though he worked for brands such as Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent, none of his advertising work mattered to him. “I was more a magazine photographer. I enjoyed it more. You didn’t have an art director.”

  Elgort remained a magazine photographer, and a mainstay of Vogue, for the next two-plus decades, taking iconic yet casual photos such as his 1995 shot of the British model Stella Tennant diving fully clothed in designer tweeds and a pair of Wellingtons into a swimming pool after a tiring daylong shoot. In 2010, he had a stroke. Fighting back, he returned to shooting, and late in 2014, when he was seventy-four years old, New York’s Staley-Wise photography gallery mounted The Big Picture, a career retrospective accompanied by a book of the same name. Its opening night was jam-packed with photographers, friends, and admirers: Bruce Willis; editors Grace Coddington, Grace Mirabella, Jade Hobson, and Amy Astley; the photographers Gosta Peterson and Pamela Hanson; and the models Christy Turlington and Stella Tennant. This tribute to the enduring, and still working, happy snapper was a reminder that even in fashion photography, every once in a while, at least, a nice guy wins.

  Part 4

  * * *

  DECADENCE

  It got all-over crazy, all the time.

  —BITTEN KNUDSEN

  Chapter 29

  * * *

  “AN INTOLERABLE AND MENDACIOUS FICTION”

  Si Newhouse and Alex Liberman had judged the changing mood of fashion consumers well. But Vogue could not live on happy snaps alone. “A magazine can’t be all sugar and happy,” says Polly Mellen. “I love Arthur Elgort and he did wonderful things, but it wasn’t exciting enough for me.” The Frenchies “loved the girls, they played with the girls and the girls played with them. Their pictures didn’t turn me on, but, yes, they were important. It was the way Alex was feeling and what he wanted. He was the boss.” And he wasn’t a one-trick pony. “We’d want a mix,” says Jade Hobson. And Liberman not only knew how to orchestrate it, with Vreeland gone he could. “I’m guessing Alex thought there wasn’t anyone in the wings who could take Mrs. Vreeland’s place,” says Mellen, “unless it was Alex himself.”

  The May 1975 issue of Vogue, then one of the magazine’s most criticized issues, now greatly admired, illustrated the tightrope Liberman walked at what seems, in retrospect, the apex of his career. Judging the book by its cover—a pretty shot of model Lisa Taylor by Francesco Scavullo—tells nothing about the improvised explosives tucked inside. The issue contained beauty stories by Penn and Avedon, but in the decades since, they’ve been forgotten, whereas two stories by fashion photographers then relatively unknown in America are touchstones in the history of the genre.

  Helmut Newton’s “The Story of Ohhh” and Deborah Turbeville’s “There’s More to a Bathing Suit Than Meets the Eye” set off a tsunami of complaints and subscription cancellations, but demonstrated how far the fashion photo had evolved since Avedon’s nude of Christina Paolozzi. Newton’s portfolio of sexually ambivalent images, shot in Saint-Tropez, included an iconic picture of Lisa Taylor sitting in a dress with her legs spread, twirling her hair while coolly eyeing a passing bare-chested man. Turbeville’s photos, shot in a bathhouse that to some evoked Nazi death camps, seem tame today, but at the time even a Vogue editor called them “slightly aberrational.” An offended New York Times art critic, Hilton Kramer, confirmed their importance when he condemned them as “pathological . . . clamorous and unsavory.”I

  Certainly, they demonstrated the new status of the fashion photo, which was enshrined as fine art that same year at Hofstra University in Fashion Photography: Six Decades, reportedly the first-ever comprehensive museum survey of the subject.II Not everyone was happy about that. “This is a development likely to be disturbing, not to say enraging, to many people who take photography very seriously,” wrote Times critic Kramer. “The fashion picture, judged by the standards of the documentary esthetic, is an intolerable and mendacious fiction.” Writing on the same subject in the Wall Street Journal, Manuela Hoelterhoff said, “It presents some truly frightening social commentary.”

  Liberman had lured Newton back to American Vogue shortly after its editor transplant by asking him to shoot a forty-five-page portfolio in the spirit of his work for French Vogue. Though he’d taken interesting pictures, such as one of a model being chased down a runway by a low-flying plane, shot for British Vogue in 1967, Newton’s visual ideas—often hatched in late-night alcohol- and nicotine-fueled sessions with his wife, June—had not yet become particularly clamorous, unsavory, or frightening. But Liberman’s phone call led to the event that would prove a professional turning point for Newton.

  In the months before that call, Newton had sometimes worked as long as a week on twenty hours’ sleep, so he “arrived in New York completely worn out,” he wrote in his memoir, “run-down, short of breath, and my heart was banging away, but I didn’t take any notice of this, I just started work for Alex.” One Friday night a few weeks before Christmas, he ended up in an emergency room, but was told nothing serious was amiss and sent on his way. The following Monday, he collapsed while shooting in the street, stood up, then collapsed again, “except this time I couldn’t get up.” He’d had a massive heart attack. June, who’d recently picked up a camera for the first time when Newton was ill, finished the Vogue job, launching her own career as a photographer under the pseudonym Alice Springs. Newton wasn’t completely recovered for several years, but thereafter he felt he had a new lease on life. “Everything seems to cure itself when I’m working,” he wrote. “There is something about a camera. I find it can act as a barrier between me and reality.” Henceforth, his cameras would provide more than defense; they would give him the means to giddily provoke and offend.

  Liberman was a fan of men’s magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse that, about a year earlier, had begun to stretch the boundaries of the permissible in soft-core porn by showing pubic hair in the photos of the nude women that were their calling card. “Apparently, Alexander Liberman, the editorial director of all Condé Nast magazines, felt that the most ‘interesting’ photography was in men’s magazines,” says Stan Malinowski, a Playboy and Penthouse photographer who would shortly be recruited to shoot for Vogue. “So he had all the women editors perusing through m
agazines from Playboy to Hustler, looking for talent.”III

  A few months after Newton’s hospitalization, Hugh Hefner, the founder and president of Playboy, announced the launch of a new publication to be called Oui, based on Lui, a Playboy copycat published by Daniel Filipacchi, a onetime Paris Match photographer who’d established a second career as a magazine owner. Oui, which shared content with Filipacchi’s magazine, was created to serve a younger, better educated male reader. Its photography was just like its older brother’s and helped make it an immediate success, with sales topping a million copies when it was just three issues old.

  Stylist Tina Bossidy was named Oui’s fashion director in 1973. That meant shooting men in clothes alongside women without them. She had already worked for Town & Country photographers Slim Aarons, Bill Silano, and Chris von Wangenheim, the last a neophyte shooting for Bea Feitler at Harper’s Bazaar.

  When Bossidy arrived at Oui, a number of Lui photographers were shooting for the magazine. “I was stuck with them, so I decided to get someone who interested me, and that was Helmut Newton,” says Bossidy. He was easing his way back into working, so on their first sitting, which took place in Haiti, June Newton issued strict orders to Bossidy that he couldn’t do anything stressful. But Newton didn’t hesitate to drag Bossidy along as he checked out local brothels, where one dined looking into the open doors and windows of busy bedrooms. “You saw parts,” says Bossidy. Whether they inspired the rape scenes he shot is unclear, but “Helmut always tried to push the envelope,” and Oui gave him “an incredible platform to do fashion sex pictures.” For a while, working for Oui embarrassed the photographer, but “he got to play with sex with Oui,” says Bossidy. “He didn’t get to do that with French Vogue.” The experience liberated his creative id—and allowed the inner Newton to emerge. He’d shot vaguely erotic fare for magazines before, such as a series in which models seemed to flirt with store mannequins, but nothing like the Oui pictures. Newton and Bossidy next created a series of “flashing” pictures, which reflected the latest craze for streaking, running naked through public gatherings, in a Florida shoot based on John D. MacDonald novels. The photos showed women in disguises, ostensibly escaping indiscretions, baring body parts along US 1, a north-south highway that runs up the East Coast of America.