A member of the Outrigger Canoe Club, Waikiki, Hawaii, 1982.He leans against the fender of a big convertible with a rag in one hand and a cigarette in the other, bare-chested, in printed swim shorts, white socks and black shoes.
Bruce and Talisa on my Chris-Craft, Bellport, NY, 1982.Who are these two to each other—lovers, siblings, the same beautiful idea photographed twice?
Nathalie Gabrielle, Arizona, 1982.The nude pressed to living rock is one of modern photography’s founding equations, the body and the stone traded for one another until each borrows the other’s substance; Edward Weston made it a…
Tom Hintnaus, Santorini, Greece, 1982.To photograph the male body in 1982 was to inherit a problem photography had spent a century not having to solve: how to offer a man to the look that advertising had trained on women.
Andy Minsker, Colorado Springs, 1983.What a portrait usually grants us, the sitter’s returning look, is here withheld.
George, Upper Saranac Lake, Adirondacks, New York, 1983.Is he a god, or a young man named George standing on a rock in the Adirondack woods?
Greg Louganis, Los Angeles, California, 1983.Three white letters ride at the hip of his dark briefs, USA, and they change everything.
John Sauerland, Olympic Swimmer, Hall of Fame Pool, 1983.Wetness is the whole subject: hair darkened and plastered into filaments that fan from the crown, each strand separated and glistening as if drawn with a fine dark pen.
Matt Dillon, Los Angeles, California, 1983.Bruce Weber’s “Matt Dillon, Los Angeles, 1983” captures a moment poised between innocence and self-recognition.
Ricky Womack, Boxer, Colorado Sports Festival, 1983.A young boxer stands in profile against a hung canvas, gloves raised in a loose guard, the laces of the near glove trailing free, EVERLAST stamped across the wrist.
Eton Boys, London Deb Party, 1984.Bruce Weber is one of the great mythmakers of American photography — the eye behind the most indelible campaigns of the 1980s and 90s, from Calvin Klein to Ralph Lauren, an artist who turned…
Andy Minsker, 1985.The head fills the frame at a three-quarter turn, cropped so that one ear sits hard against the left edge and the far cheek runs off the right.
Chet Baker at the Shangri La, Santa Monica, CA, 1985.By 1985, when Bruce Weber gathered Chet Baker at Santa Monica's Shangri La for the sittings that fed his film Let's Get Lost, the trumpeter had already outlived his own legend by two decades.
Extras at Zoetrope Studios, Hollywood, California, 1985.To photograph the overlooked is to confer a value the world withheld.
On the Rooftop of the Shangri La, Santa Monica, CA, 1985.Five women lie on towels, photographed from directly above, so that the picture reads as a single mass of limbs and hair before it resolves into people.
Paris, France, 1985.The carved wooden foot of the armchair grips nothing but the gritty gravel of a Paris rooftop, a claw where you expect a parquet floor.
Patrick Swayze, 1985.The landing itself is withheld. A dark dog hangs at the top of its arc against a pale sky, paws gathered, tail streaming, and we are not shown whether it drops back into the waiting hands below.
Rodney, Shangri La Hotel, Santa Monica California, 1985.Silver does most of the talking here — a length of lamé knotted low and falling in liquid pleats, the one molten surface in a picture otherwise built from chain-link diamonds and the long pale smear…
Tony Ward on the roof, NYC, 1985.Look at the profile first — Tony Ward turned dead away from us, chin lifted, that wet sweep of hair combed back off the brow like a matinee idol smuggled out of the 1930s.
Uma Thurman, New York, 1985.How old is the girl in the denim jacket, and who decided she should look like this?
Dave at 29 Palms Parking Lot, California, 1986.What is he laughing at, this boy stretched out on a strip of carpet in a Twentynine Palms parking lot?
Doug Meyer, NYC, 1986.He is turning his face out of the picture, away from us and up toward the source of the light, at the exact instant the shutter closes on him.
Jean Luiz and Luiza, Copacabana Palace, Rio de Janeiro, 1986.In a second she will either lower her mouth to his or straighten up and the whole thing will dissolve into laughter; for now the picture holds them a breath short of the kiss.
Jens-Peter Arvid Johnston for Calvin Klein, California, 1986.A young man sits on a wooden folding stool with his knees drawn up, wearing a plain white T-shirt and white briefs, one hand pressed flat against the side of his face so that it covers his eyebrow…
Jorge and Luchiana at Tia Penha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1986.Heat undresses a crowd faster than desire ever could, and a packed Rio bar proves the point.
Lisa Marie, Palm Beach, 1986.Light is the real subject here: a hard Florida sun that has dried some of the water and left the rest standing in beads across her back, each drop a small lens throwing its own bright point.
Lovers, Prainha Beach, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1986.A small round dial rests half-buried in the white sand, its faint markings the only inscription in a picture otherwise built entirely from skin.
Luiza Brunet, Room 500, Copacabana, Rio, 1986.One thing the picture most wants to explain, it withholds: a reason for the raised arms.
Madonna, Life Magazine, 1986.The vantage is a backstage dressing-table mirror, and it turns one platinum-blonde head into two.
Madonna, New York City, 1986.Nothing in the room but a sheet of seamless paper and the long bruise of shadow it throws to one side — the oldest furniture in the fashion business, a void priced by the hour.
Madonna, New York City, 1986.Fame turns the body into a place others believe they already know.
On the set for “Obsession for the Body” by Calvin Klein, Miami, FL, 1986.Look at the man perched at the apex, one knee drawn up, a length of white cloth slipping from his fingers like a flag of surrender to the Miami sky.
Rickson and Jorge fighting, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1986.Two men in black trunks, working at each other in flat Rio sunlight.
Rickson Gracie and his son Rawkson, Prainha Beach, Rio, 1986.A man stands on the sand with both arms straight up, fingers spread, watching a boy who is airborne above him, arms and legs extended, mid-flight and unafraid.
Rodney Harvey, Actor, 1986.To photograph a beautiful young man is to make a claim about time, and to lose it.
Blake, Palm Beach, Florida for Calvin Klein Obsession, 1987.Water is the oldest way of starting over, and here a young man pours a whole bucket of it over his head as if to be, for one second, new.
Isabella Rossellini and Viggo Mortensen, 1987.Isabella has kicked off one sandal, and it lies on the step below her like an abandoned argument, its thin straps still holding the shape of the foot that left it.
Marco De Conciliis and Rodney Harvey filming “Let’s Get Lost,” Cannes, France, 1987.One boy leans in and presses his mouth to the other’s temple, eyes shut, while a raised hand pushes up through his own dark hair, two gestures caught in the same instant, one given, one self-absorbed.
Max and Ken, Point Conception, Santa Barbara, California, 1987.Two boys in a field of dry grass, and a white sheet between them.
Ric Arango, Villa Tejas, Santa Barbara, California, 1987.Start with the bare foot, toes curled over the edge of a wooden plank swing, taking a little weight.
Rick and Luisa, Point Conception, Santa Barbara, California, 1987.In the years when American advertising discovered that a body could sell anything, and fashion photographers found their pictures moving from the magazine page to the gallery wall, Weber was making…
Running at Point Conception, California, 1987.Five men run at the waterline, left to right, and no two are at the same point of the stride.
Stuntmen, Point Conception Beach, Santa Barbara, CA, 1987.One man stands upright on the saddle of a white horse, arms thrown wide, while a second hangs inverted against his chest, a polished dress shoe pointed at the sky where a head should be.
Villa Tejas, Santa Barbara, California, 1987.In a Californian grove, leaves ankle-deep and the light falling in broken patches through the canopy, five men have taken off their clothes and arranged themselves among the trees.
Christy Turlington for Calvin Klein Eternity, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, 1988.Martha's Vineyard is named in the title and visible nowhere.
Paul Wadina, Lower St. Regis Lake, New York, 1988.This luminous photograph epitomizes Bruce Weber’s revolutionary vision of masculine beauty.
Tom, Bear Pond, Adirondack Park, 1988.A single taut line crosses the whole frame on the diagonal, thin and bright as a scratch drawn into the emulsion, running from the young man’s raised hand down toward the dark water where a ring of…
Tyke on the Work Boat, Lower St. Regis Lake, Adirondacks, NY, 1988.One fingertip breaks the lake, and everything in the frame leans on that single point of contact.
Untitled, 1988.A single-masted sailboat leans hard into a gust, mainsail and jib both bellied taut, cutting close along a fringe of white pine that crowds in from the right edge of the frame.
Villa Tejas, Montecito, California, 1988.The sun here is the great leveler: it lies with the same even generosity on bare skin, on the lichen-spotted stone of the balustrade, and on the dense clipped hedge that closes the frame like a dark…
Villa Tejas, Montecito, California, 1988.Two men reach across the gap between them, fingers just meeting above a shallow stone pool, and the whole scattered company of nudes seems to hang from that single clasp.
Bear Pond, ca. 1989.The figure occupies perhaps a fortieth of the frame: a pale body dropping through the dark mass of the trees, arms flung back, legs together, still holding the shape of the swing that let it go.
Jason and Christian on the island at Bear Pond, Adirondack Park, New York, 1989.Two men wrestling in long grass tie a knot no sculptor would dare invent.
Jason, Bear Pond, Adirondack Park, 1989.The face arrives upside down: mouth above, eyes below, the brow at the bottom edge and the wet hair rising in dark points along the top.
Mark Kletner, Laguna Beach, California, 1989.The comb has left its signature in the wet hair, parallel furrows still dark with water, drawn straight back from the crown.
Matt Dillon, 1989.Everything here is white but two things: the dark herringbone of the jacket and the grey wool of the socks.
Mike Tyson and Naomi Campbell, Atlantic City, NJ, 1989.Everyone on this boardwalk is dressed. The man at the center is not.
On Top of the Porsche, Lisamarie and John, Santa Barbara, 1989.Two nudes on the flank of a Porsche in the middle of a California hillside gone to lupine: he crouches over her, mouth to her mouth, one hand cupping her far shoulder; she lies back along the curve…
Peter Beard, Montauk, New York, 1989.From a shelf of granite above the Montauk bluffs, the land gives way to water in long soft grays, and a man sits where the rock is broadest.
Calvin Klein men’s underwear campaign, Silver Cup Studios, Long Island City, New York, 1990.On the raised white platform at Silver Cup Studios, six young men have been arranged into a living frieze, and the floor drops away at the front into a shallow film of water that returns their legs…
Claes and Little Bear at Campground on Bear Pond, Adirondack Park, 1990.Late sun comes in low under the trees and lands in long stripes on the ground, and in one of those stripes a young man lies asleep, face down, naked, one arm across a golden retriever who is also…
Elaine Irwin for Vogue Paris, Miami, FL, 1990.Follow the gold fringe to its ends, where each strand of beading tapers into a bright bead and stops, and the ornament begins to read as something poured rather than sewn.
Jonathan Schnek, Actor, Santa Barbara, California, 1990.The picture reaches straight back to the Hollywood portrait studios of the thirties, to the hard raking key light that George Hurrell used to carve a face out of blackness, leaving only a bright edge…
Naomi Campbell in Azzedine Alaia, Paris, France, 1990."Azzedine Alaïa asked me to film and photograph his collection in 1989.
Nestor and Patrick, Golden Beach. Florida, 1990.Late in an overcast Florida afternoon, the coast gives a light without a single hard shadow, a soft even brightness that comes off the water and the pale sky at once and lays itself evenly across two…
Ric and Rowdy, Golden Beach, Florida, 1990.Both of them are airborne, and neither will quite catch the other.
Ric, Golden Beach, Florida, 1990.A man in a white crocheted tank top, naked from the waist down, leans into the mirrored door of a painted armoire until his face nearly meets its double.
Aretha Franklin, Bellport, NY, 1991.How do you photograph someone the culture has already crowned?
Carré Otis, San Francisco, California, 1991.A short fringe of leather trails from each handlebar grip, an afterthought of a detail, and yet it is where the whole photograph starts to move.
Cast photo from "My Own Private Idaho", River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, Los Angeles, CA, 1991.Two faces crowd the frame, and only one of them looks at us.
Helmut and June Newton, Hollywood, CA, 1991.They lean in and kiss, mouths meeting exactly at the center where their two profiles almost mirror one another, her arm curling around his shoulder, his hand pressed flat to her lapel.
Marcus Schenkenberg, 1991.Why does the picture give us the same man twice?
My Own Private Idaho,”Michael Parker and Shawn Jordan, Los Angeles, CA, 1991.Look at the hands. One boy presses a knuckled fist into the other's bare shoulder; the second answers by jabbing a single finger toward his rival's waist, just above the unbuttoned denim.
Drew Barrymore, Bellport, NY, 1992."I took this photograph of Drew Barrymore at our house in Bellport on Long Island in 1992 for Interview Magazine.
Kate Moss, New York, 1992.A second earlier her lips were closed and the wind had her hair the other way; a second later she will squint fully against the sun and the look will be gone.
Summer Snowstorm, Little Bear Ranch, McLeod, MT, 1992.One golden retriever has commandeered the roof of a buried sedan and sits there bolt upright, a wet little flag of fur at its chin, surveying the McLeod valley like a bandleader who knows the…
“The Gang,” Freak Snowstorm in August, Little Bear Ranch, Montana, 1992.The one word the picture insists on is Chevrolet, spelled in cursive chrome along the rear fender, half-swallowed by the snow that has laid itself over the whole car.
A guy named “special,” Old Westbury, Long Island, 1993.A naked man seen from behind, his arms laid along the neck and rump of a dark horse that has lowered its head to graze.
Camp Longwood, Upper St. Regis Lake, NY, 1993.Two hands reach for each other across a gap of a few inches and do not quite meet, one girl already airborne off the dock, the other bent double trying to catch her.
Charlie Sexton, NYC, 1993.The wide black hat brim keeps his eyes for itself, tilting a band of shadow across the upper face so that Charlie Sexton meets us only from the cheekbones down.
Drew Barrymore, Jamie Walters and Blue, Bellport, New York, 1993.Warmth is the hardest thing to photograph, yet here it is, pressed into the grass: two people and a big pale dog folded into one drowsy heap on a summer lawn.
Patricia Arquette and John Holland, McLeod, MT, 1993.Fashion photography had gone looking for the American West again, for weathered faces and real work, and it found this rancher in Montana with his battered Hohner accordion.
Patricia Arquette, McLeod, Montana, 1993.Whose are the bare legs crossed in the back seat, feet propped in the open rear window, while Patricia Arquette leans out of the driver’s door with one hand pushing through her platinum hair?
Cy Twombly, Rome, Italy, 1994.An old man sits in a bentwood chair beside a tall white plinth, in a room with shuttered windows and a great deal of light coming through them.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Coney Island, NY, 1994."This sitting with Leonardo DiCaprio for Interview Magazine was a revelation to me.
Naples, Italy, 1994.Their faces are the one thing this photograph refuses us: two bathers at the tideline, backs turned, held in the seam of white light between a pale cliff of worked stone and its shadowed twin.
Nino, Capri, 1994.We are standing above it all, where the rocks give way to a made thing: a bathing platform poured like grey batter into Capri’s shoreline, its steps worn pale, and a naked young man descending them…
Twombly's studio, Rome, Italy, 1994.Bruce Weber photographs Cy Twombly’s Rome studio in 1994 as a room caught mid-thought: a monumental unstretched canvas tacked to the wall, its dark storm of black and yellow shedding thin white…
Camp Longwood, Adirondack Park, New York, 1995.The water was a mirror a second ago; now a dog has broken it, and the ring of ripples is still widening toward the far pines.
Damien Woetzel, Ethan Stiefel, Albert Evans, Nickolaj Hubbe, Jock Soto, and Nilas Martins. Adirondacks, NY, 1995.A Greek key runs along the hem of one dancer’s short white skirt, that ancient meander stitched as a border, and it tells you at once what code the picture is speaking: classicism, theatre, the body…
Helena Christensen, Capri, 1995.The picture refuses to tell us the score, or the story, or why a woman should be playing billiards with nothing on.
Iman and David Bowie, Cape Town, South Africa, 1995.The vantage is intimate, close as an embrace, pressed against a whitewashed column that holds up the right edge of the frame.
Kelly Slater, Surfer, NYC, 1995.Every disguise is also a confession. A world surfing champion sits for the camera in a borrowed white cowboy hat, a shirt open to the chest, a string of puka shells at his throat, and the costume…
Sean Penn, Little Bear Ranch, MT, 1995.In Weber’s portrait, Penn leans over a worn table, cigarette in hand, a glass resting by his elbow.
Kate Moss, 1996.A dining room in some grand old Chinese house: carved panels going black with age, a framed photograph of a man in a cap and round glasses with his medals catching what light there is, and beneath…
Kate Moss, Vietnam, 1996.Hand the most photographed woman of her generation a cheap plastic camera, point her back at us, and what does the picture become?
Working Class Heroes, 1996.Three young men at a hotel pool, all shirtless, all in work trousers and belts.
Hunter and Peter, NYC, 1997.Where does one body end and the other begin, when the crowns of two heads press together and the arms curve outward into a single closed loop?
Kate and Jane, Golden Beach, Florida, 1997.The inflatable float was probably still bobbing in the shallows a moment ago; a moment from now the toddler may squirm off it into the sand.
Kate and Lucie and her daughter Ella, Cabin 4, Camp Longwood, Adirondack Park, NY, 1997.Everything here is lather: suds bank in glassy cells along the rolled lip of the enamel tub, cap the wet hair of all three bathers, and catch the light in a thousand convex mirrors.
Kate Moss, Golden Beach, Florida, 1997.Blowing bubbles is one of the oldest jokes in Western art, a tradition of vanitas paintings in which a child exhales a glistening sphere to remind us that life is exactly that brief and iridescent.
Louise Bourgeois, 1997.She comes to the sitting already a monument, and Weber answers by setting a jagged black paper crown on her white hair, half coronation, half joke shared between one maker and another.
Peter at my loft, NYC, 1997.The light is morning light, low and lateral, the kind that comes into a loft through one tall window and lies along a body before the day has decided anything.
Peter Johnson and Murray, New York City, 1997.What the picture keeps from us is the young man’s gaze: his eyes are shut, his face half-covered by a leathery hand, so that the one human we might read is turned inward and unavailable.
Peter Johnson, haircut, Palm Springs, CA, 1997.The barber’s hands hover above the young man’s crown, one steadying a black comb through the freshly built pompadour, the other pinching small scissors mid-snip.
The Gang in Big Sky Country, Little Bear Ranch, McLeod, Montana, 1997.Count the dogs and you've already misread the picture.
The Official Meeting of the Montana Rolleiflex Camera Club, Little Bear Ranch, Montana, 1997."When I first started taking pictures back in the early '70s, I traveled a lot with my sister Barbara Dewitt, who managed musicians on tour like Frank Zappa, Ike and Tina Turner, Iggy Pop and David…
Alesund, Norway, 1998.Any minute now one of them will sit up, brush the pollen from a dark lapel, and the meadow will close over the shape they made.
Carolyn Murphy sharing a pizza with her dog, Orlando, Florida, 1998.Start with the greasy wedge of pizza she has lowered almost to the brick, pinched between two fingers, and the whole preposterous equation of the picture clicks into place.
Chris and Fai, San Onofre, CA, 1998.The light arrives from behind, low and off the water, breaking into a thousand hard sparks along the crest of a wave and spreading a pale silver haze across sky and sea.
Skye wearing a Philip Treacy hat, Golden Beach, Florida, 1998.The sitter is a golden retriever named Skye, shot in three-quarter profile against a plain grey studio ground, mouth open in what any dog person reads as pleasure and any editor reads as a smile.
Carlson Twins, 1999.Grass, dark water and two entangled bodies place this picture squarely in an American tradition that runs back to Eakins and his swimmers at the old mill pond.
Cate Blanchett, Backstage, West End, London, 1999.Propped against the mirror, just behind a palette of half-used eyeshadows, stands a small photograph of another woman, a profile borrowed from an earlier era of glamour.
Charlize Theron, ca. 1999.The star is exactly what the picture withholds: no red carpet, no couture, just a young woman face-down on bare earth beside a golden dog.
Kate Moss, Everglade City Florida, 1999.She leans back against a white square column that has been wrapped at two heights with heavy nautical rope.
Peter at the Chop Suey Club Studio, New York City, 1999.A man lies along the bottom of the frame, naked, his body the one continuous thing in a wall papered edge to edge with photographs of other men.
Peter Johnson and True, Golden Beach, Florida, 1999.The beach named in the title never appears.
Brothers, Lane and Kyle, Golden Beach, Florida, 2000.Notice the single wet hand that rises out of the water to cradle the second boy’s own head, the only limb the picture allows above the surface.
Kate Moss in Jil Sander, Sevilla, Spain, 2000.We stand near enough to read the nap of the felt, the wide flat brim of a Spanish hat throwing its underside into shadow, near enough to count the freckles under her eyes, the small white crescents…
Muhammad Ali and sparring partners at Gleason’s Gym, Brooklyn, New York, 2001.A boxing glove is a comic prop as often as a weapon, and here the greatest fighter of his century uses one to clown.
Santa Barbara, California, 2001.A turquoise pool in hard Californian sun.
Joseph Sayers & Natalia Vodianova being filmed by Lance Accord for the Pet Shop Boys video ‘I Get Along/Email’, Boylan Studios, NYC, 2002.A single strand of Vodianova’s hair has escaped the wind and drawn a dark loop against the white ground, and once you notice it the whole photograph reorganizes around such filaments: the boy’s damp…
Santa Barbara, California, 2003.The rear door of a red Mercedes stands open and two people are tangled together across the back seat, half out of it.
True and Tai, Montauk, NY, 2003.A golden retriever has arranged himself along the dome of an elephant's skull the way a stole gets thrown across a chair — boneless, entitled, both front paws dangling over the great creased brow as…
True and Tweet, Golden Beach, FL, 2003.How does a giraffe come to be standing on a suburban Florida lawn, lowering its improbable neck to greet a golden retriever enthroned in a white Adirondack chair?
“A Letter to True,” True and Tai, Montauk, New York, 2003.Look at the gap between them: a small golden retriever planted in the grass at the left edge, ears up, muzzle tilted skyward, and across a yard of empty clifftop the vast kneeling bulk of an…
Jeff, Charlie and Kate with the boys, Golden Beach, Florida, 2006.Salt has dried to a fine grit across every shoulder, catching the light in a thousand small points so that the wet skin seems dusted with silver.
Amy Winehouse, Miami, Florida, 2007.The horseshoe rides high on her shoulder, its open end turned up to hold what luck it can, and above it the cursive word Daddy’s.
Daria, Kate and Lara, Miami, Florida, 2008.Two thirds of the frame is nothing but white cotton, a slack landscape of duvet and pillow whose folds carry every gradation the paper can hold, from the bright crest of a wrinkle to its faint grey…
Clark Bockelman grooming a French poodle, Golden Beach, Florida, 2013.The grooming of a show poodle is an old theatre, shears and topiary treating a living animal as a thing to be sculpted, and here it is staged in a Florida room with a bare-chested youth cast as the…
Charlie Hunnam with Aki, East Hampton, New York, 2014.Nothing here is going anywhere — the motorcycle is a Triumph, built for speed, but its kickstand is down and its rider half-dismounted, leaning against the saddle, one boot in the East Hampton dirt…
Capri, 2020.A cliff fills the left third of the frame, pale and sheer.