The Fabulous Baker Boy

Bruce Weber has, we are glad to report, especially fond memories of Ireland.

“One of the first times I ever visited Dublin was for a Vogue shoot,” he tells me. “I meet this couple in a pub and tell them I’m looking for a Georgian house to shoot in. Of course, they own one. By the time I’ve set up, all these Guinness girls and socialites are dropping by and the next thing you know there’s a party going on.”
Sounds like business as usual in the Weber-verse. This is, after all, a photographer who has shaped our very notion of glamour. Where to start? His portfolio for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and various campaigns for Ralph Lauren and Abercrombie & Fitch have redefined a chiselled Olympian masculinity for the postmodern era.
But behind these pretty boy images, there’s an astute sensibility at work. A frequent and arch collaborator with everyone from the late William Burroughs to the Pet Shop Boys, Weber projects both irony and poetry onto his subjects.
His iconic, quintessentially 90s commercials for Calvin Klein are a paradoxical case in point. Weber may have launched the celebrity modelling careers of Isabella Rossellini and Eric Nies, but those seamless monochrome images of street recruited youth will forever link him in public consciousness with the idea of the Citizen Model.
“It’s funny because I rarely do seamless photography, but it’s the thing people remember,” he says. “But I have always walked around taking pictures of people in the street. That’s always been the heart of my work. Anywhere I end up I want to shoot shop clerks.”   
We’d expect no less from a former student of such warts-and-all luminaries as Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon.  
“I first met Diane in the 60s,” recalls Weber. “I was a farm boy from Pennsylvania and I was really excited to go to NYU, but nobody there understood what I was doing. I wanted to take pictures of great bluesmen like John Lee Hooker. People didn’t get it. Why wasn’t I taking pictures of girls? Diane got it. People think of her as someone who photographed the weird and grotesque, but she loved her subjects. She was incredibly shy and reticent. She didn’t even like going out. They were her world.”
The world of Bruce Weber is harder to define. On the one hand, he’s the very definition of a jet-set photographer, the purveyor of sleek, stylised images of all-American WASPs. He takes assignments for Rolling Stone and Versace. He knows Liza. In his youth, he has hinted, there was even a dalliance with Tennessee Williams.
“It was incredible to even meet him,” says Weber. “This is Tennessee Williams. I knew his plays. Who wouldn’t? And suddenly I knew him. I could hardly get used to the idea he was a real person.”
On the other hand, one can still sense the hand of Arbus and the social reportage of mentor Richard Avedon. Weber’s Adonis is often the small town football player or pool room dropout. He also has an endearingly eccentric portfolio of Newfoundland dogs and their owners.
These seemingly contradictory influences dovetail beautifully into Let’s Get Lost, Weber’s 1989 biographical portrait of jazz pioneer Chet Baker. The Academy-Award nominated film, which is re-released into Irish cinemas this fortnight, is simultaneously gorgeous and brutal to behold. Pictures of the youthful Baker, a statuesque fifties heartthrob, are juxtaposed with monochrome footage of the haggard trumpeter as Weber knew him at the end of his life.
“And yet he was beautiful to look at,” says the filmmaker. “Not just because you could trace the outline of the handsome young man he once was. He had this remarkable face with years of sadness and addiction and character etched into it.”
Taking a cue from the forlorn soundtrack provided by its subject, Let’s Get Lost is a free-flowing affair. Ex-girlfriends, well-wishers and famous fans such as Flea and Chris Isaac provide dreamy recollections in repose. Baker, meanwhile, is already a ghostly presence who cannot always be relied upon to provide history rather than mythology. (Tellingly, he talks of the back alley fracas that led to the loss of his teeth, when most observers are agreed that he probably lost them to heroin.) He’s a wildly magnetic presence just the same. Towards the end of the film, even the director is offering to fetch his subject’s methadone.
“I was never interested in making a documentary that delivers facts and figures,” says Weber. “It was more about a feeling. I wanted that whole West Coast thing. Here’s a laid-back guy who surfed and played this cool, laid-back jazz. Here’s a group of us hanging out. We filmed it over a few years. We were all with a guy we were all in love with. It was more like shooting home movies a lot of the time.”
Sadly, Chet Baker died in a fall from a hotel room window while Weber and friends were still in the editing room.
“We all just lay down on the floor when we heard,” he says. “We had to take two weeks to decide whether or not we should just abandon the whole thing. We eventually decided that we wanted people to appreciate him the way we did. You know I remember seeing him for the first time. I was a kid in New York and he pulls up outside Tiffany’s in a convertible. It’s snowing. It’s freezing. But he has his hair slicked back and the top down. It was the most romantic image I’ve ever seen. That’s what I wanted to capture.”

Let’s Get Lost is released July 4