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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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