Not a pretty picture of sex, drugs, beautiful women, and raw ambition.
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.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6346-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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