I DON’T REMEMBER THE EXACT YEAR, but it was before we worked together at Esquire that I was in a cab going down Fifth Avenue on my way to the office earlier than usual one morning when I saw the photographer Peter Beard emerging from Central Park with a beautiful woman, a model I recognized but couldn’t name. They were both barefoot and laughing.
A journalist I knew told me later that Peter often insisted on taking new women friends on predawn walks through the park and that it was part of his charm. She knew about this firsthand.
“Photographers,” she said. “You know…”
I did know. But the glamour of being a photographer was misplaced. Peter’s sybaritic reputation (Bob Colacello famously described him as “half Tarzan, half Byron” in Holy Terror, his book about Andy Warhol) masked the meticulous nature of his work. Peter always prepared for shoots, sometimes compulsively, submitted budgets and all the rest that it took to keep working, and then obsessed over what he brought back before distressing and drawing on his prints (sometimes with his own blood) to turn them into documentation in the way that art critics use the word. He wasn’t vain about his images, but you could tell he loved some of them more than he could articulate. He’d tap at a print with one of his crooked fingers and nod to himself.
Most of the photographers I knew were like that: not especially good at explaining themselves but loving what they did more than writers loved writing. And they all guarded their work, but in very different ways. Annie Leibovitz never wanted to show you any but what she thought were her best two or three frames. Neil Leifer loved his pictures so much he wanted to show you everything, and would talk about how you had to “prepare your own luck.” Walter Iooss said he sometimes had trouble recognizing his best shots but was so calm about it he almost always got his way when he said he preferred one image over another. David Strick described a “sense of confused awe” that came with the surreal movie-set shots he was known for, but he usually knew what he had before he looked at his contact sheets. To work with any of them you had to remember that their talent spooked them a little, and you had to respect the larger idea of photography as the soul-stealing juju it is.
As an editor I favored large, type-free, full-frame images—a photographer’s sensibility which, I was told, was obvious in my assignments and photo selection. I positioned myself as a purist and talked about knowing the great Eddie Adams at the Associated Press, which was true, although I am sure his awareness of me then did not go deep. But I studied his work, how he caught the off moment as well as the explosive image. It wasn’t just his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1968 picture of the street execution of a Viet Cong prisoner, it was his portraits of West Virginia coal miners and Anwar Sadat looking out a window and Louis Armstrong cleaning his trumpet in Las Vegas. I told photographers that I wasn’t interested in the obvious picture, and beyond that they were on their own.
That changed when I couldn’t get what I wanted. Over the years, I occasionally said I would look only at images for a particular assignment that were framed horizontally if I already had such a layout in mind. I threatened to make photographers use lens filters with our cover’s dimensions and logo to frame their cover tries. I even refused to sign off on expense accounts if there was not an admission or catalog receipt proving attendance at a gallery show I wanted a particular photographer or photo editor to see. And there was always someone new to work with.
There were many, many good “shooters,” as some liked to be called, and an entire school of smart, artful celebrity photography was fanning out behind Annie. Plus, the great lions of fashion from the 1950s and ’60s were still hungry for work. The suave and eminent Norman Parkinson, who shot several stories for Smart after he stopped working for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, told me that if he didn’t work he didn’t have any fun. “Parks,” as he was known to his many friends, had had plenty of fun reinventing his style decade by decade since the late 1930s—always with what appeared to be spontaneous images. Most charmingly, he insisted that he was a craftsman, not an artist, and also said, “A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.” I loved that.
The obvious implication was that magazine editors wielded almost feudal power. I kept that in mind when I was making assignments but never used the quote on photographers. “Surprise me,” I’d say, falling back to my little speech about not being interested in the obvious. “Of course you’re not” was Peter Beard’s response. He said otherwise we wouldn’t even know each other.
He was taking two assignments for Esquire Gentleman—stand-alone special issues timed to the spring and fall fashion collections in 1993. Fifteen years earlier, I’d edited the text when Outside had run images from The End of the Game, the first collection of Peter’s documentation of the destruction of African wildlife, even though, as Peter said, it probably “wouldn’t save a single fucking elephant.” His next project, Eyelids of Morning, was about the crocodiles of what was then called Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana), and was my favorite photo book. But then his images for the first of these assignments—an “existential safari” to Miami Beach with the novelist (Candy), screenwriter (Dr. Strangelove) and Esquire vet Terry Southern—were obvious. We dressed them up with language about taking the obligatory swimsuit piece to a “harrowing, hallucinogenic new level” and called Miami “a place where nature’s spectacle is overwhelmed by stress and density,” but all we really had were good-looking models almost naked on a beach. I told Peter I thought the pictures were obvious.
For the second assignment, he chartered small planes to Kenya’s northwestern frontier and hired hundreds of Turkana tribesmen as extras to surround his mostly naked white models as background and shot tribal elders at the center of the story in Armani blankets, Dolce & Gabbana patchwork sweaters, Byblos scarfs and Norma Kamali leopard-print coats. The elders all looked great and kept the clothes.
That’s where the glamour was.
−ENDIT−