alex tatro: Who is Steven Meisel?

“When I met Steven I was struck by his beauty: what a beautiful man, beautiful skin and beautiful cheekbones; he hasn’t changed!” Naomi Campbell tells me, bubbling. Another long-time friend of Meisel’s, designer Anna Sui, remembers their first encounter vividly: “He had such a presence and was so amazing to look at. I thought ‘I have to be friends with this guy right away!’” Outside his circle, Meisel is said to be enigmatic and secretive, appearing in public under the defensive line of a hat, scarf, dark glasses, and long black hair, from which only a hint of makeup or a crafted eyebrow escapes. The look evokes associations as numerous as the women who have posed for his camera. Like Manuel Puig’s storyteller in Kiss of the Spider Woman, there is little doubt that Meisel understands the lives, the umbra, penumbra, and scintillating facets of legendary women in a way that very few men can touch. In a 1999 interview with photography critic Vince Aletti, Madonna called her dear friend a diva (just like her), recognizing Meisel’s communion with women of magnetism and beauty — a mutual reinforcement that has proven itself over time.

Early in his career Steven Meisel did not photograph women for a living; he drew them at Women’s Wear Daily where he sat next to veteran fashion illustrator Kenneth Paul Block. In the ’70s the fashion trade journal still used illustrations on its cover, as certain department stores did for advertising, like Lord & Taylor. Meisel remembers his office companion fondly, who regaled him with firsthand stories of Jackie Onassis and the real Coco Chanel. Meisel enjoyed the regularity and security of his desk job and he relished his task, also teaching two nights a week at Parsons where he had studied illustration. But something else was calling, which had announced itself before. As a teenager he had spotted Saint Laurent-muse Loulou de la Falaise, and cover model Marisa Berenson living across the street from his high school stomping ground. For them, he had taken out a camera. In fact he even made a habit of staking out the modeling agencies for a brief chance at capturing those wonderful women, like a “paparazzi” Meisel has said. During our conversations, Meisel confided that unlike many of his peers today he doesn’t constantly carry a camera. “When I think about it, am I really a fashion photographer?” The answer to that seems easy enough, unless of course you are Steven Meisel. In truth, the answer Meisel points to in his work starts sometime around 1979 when the world began to see his future and its fuller, more complex, and provocative figure. Much of Meisel’s most recent work fucks with fashion and its superstitions, wish fulfillment, self-loathing, and bittersweet fancies. In this work, Meisel is a pictorial satirist, breathing the spirit of William Hogarth, albeit fringed with today’s particular brand of elegance. When his images are allowed to speak, they do so with earnest conviction, as I discovered when I asked him about the recent Vogue Italia issue dedicated to black beauty, in which the spectacular editorials were entirely his:

STEVEN MEISEL: Obviously, I feel that fashion is totally racist. The one thing that taking pictures allows you to do is occasionally make a larger statement. After seeing all the shows though I feel it was totally ineffective. I was curious, because it received a lot of publicity, whether it would have any effect on New York, London, Paris, or Milan; and I found that it did not. They still only had one token black girl, maybe two. It’s the same as it always was and that’s the sad thing for me.

Did you have a big team of people?

I have too many people, tons. I can’t be on every single detail. I hire people to do this and that. They wind up having assistants; and it’s an assistant to an assistant who gets me coffee. But meanwhile I am up in some hill someplace and I still can’t get a cup of coffee. I don’t know what half of them do. There is a certain core team though – the stylist, the photographer, the model, the hair and makeup, the first assistant – who really do the hard, hard work.

And of course there are the magazine editors. You’ve been working with Vogue Italia since 1988 and it really bears your stamp. Why has it been such a fruitful relationship?

In terms of the Vogues that I work for, certainly Vogue Italiais the most lenient and allows me to do more or less what I feel like doing. Not that they don’t also kill things, but that doesn’t happen often; it’s been the most creative outlet that I have. I tend to think Italy is very conservative, which is weird, I know. Franca Sozzani, the editor, gives me room and is extremely supportive. We worked together beforeVogue Italia, when she wasn’t yet the editor, on another magazine called Lei. And then there was the men’s version,Per Lui. She really likes what I do and I am grateful.

Which have been your favorite editorials?

My favorites are the ones that allow me to say something: the black issue; the poking fun at celebrities one; the paparazzi thing; the mental institution one; the ones that I have a minute to think about; all the ones that are the most controversial in fact. But it’s not because they are controversial that I like them, but because they say a little more than just a beautiful woman in a beautiful dress. I love that too, but to try and say something is also my goal.

What do you say to critics that accuse you of glamorizing issues like the war in Iraq or terrorism?

I hate war. I wasn’t trying to glamorize it. I hate violence. I hate violence against women. I am trying to make a statement against it and yet everybody then says that I am for it? Basically, if you put something in people’s faces they might see it, which in this case means “DON’T DO THIS! STOP THIS!” Everybody interprets these things in their own way, but it’s not my intended meaning. I am simply holding up a mirror.

Some of your stories have crossed the line, like “State of Emergency” in 2006.

I did get flack from that campaign. The magazine refused five or six images, but I am used to that by now. After you’ve been doing this for so long, after being investigated by the FBI, what else can’t you handle?

If it’s a full blown investigation or just a furtive glance, Meisel gets your attention – which is likely why Valentino, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, and Calvin Klein have entrusted him with repeated campaigns over the years. Meisel lives up to Diana Vreeland’s (editor in chief AmericanVogue 1963–1971) little jingle “We are in show business” more than most. His 1995 campaign for Calvin Klein Jeans riffed on porn screen-tests and prompted a federal investigation into the age of the models. Cathy Horyn of The New York Times suggests Meisel has had carte blanche since his bombshell collaboration with Madonna for the 1992 book Sex, which Meisel emphatically dismisses. Nevertheless, fashion is now a massive global machine to which Meisel happens to hold a velvet-lined ignition key.

STEVEN MEISEL: I was photographing the girls that I loved. I liked glamour and these girls were very glamorous. The fashion was very excessive. The period was very excessive. It wasn’t something I did consciously: we would go on vacation, go to dinner, hang out, and talk on the phone. We were friends; it was my beginning as it was theirs.

So what we call the supermodel moment is really your personal history written large?

It kind of is. We were having a great time and documenting it. We used to go to the shows in New York and Paris and they were much larger events, or maybe it was new to me and more exciting. In Paris, we had adjoining rooms. It was always Christy, Linda, and Naomi. We were having fun all around the Ritz. We played and had a great time, and I still do when I see them. Now I go to work and it’s a different world. I’m different and the models are different. What am I going to say to some sixteen-year-old girl who doesn’t speak the same language?

But you came to fashion at an early age, didn’t you?

Yes! I was a stupid, fashion asshole! I loved the magazines and I just connected immediately at a very young age, probably in the fourth grade. I loved it. Later, in the sixth or seventh grade I used to take a camera, an instamatic perhaps, and snap models on the street. I still have those. I blew them up and they’re actually good, great even. When I was a kid the models you saw in the streets of New York were out of another world – people would stare. They looked the way they look in magazines, right out of Vogue, on the street! They were superwomen. They were unbelievable. Now its jeans and t-shirts and stuff like that. It was a different period. They did their own hair and their own makeup. You had to be very creative. They went to jobs done. That’s the way they were.

Meisel’s way with models leaves a lasting impression, and not just on the printed page, as if there were a formative Meisel technique. Indeed, he coaches models in posture, expression, and attitude. Linda Evangelista says, “With Steven you don’t feel alone when you are on set. So many photographers can be insecure, they don’t know what they want and you don’t know if you are pleasing them. It’s not like that with Steven. He is confident and makes you feel safe. The atmosphere on set is light. If he says what you are doing is good, then it is because he has the most impeccable taste and judgment, like when he makes a call on color, lighting, or placement.” Naomi Campbell says that the atmosphere on the set is “always controlled and concentrated, even when loud music is playing.” Meisel, she says, is a true artist. “He makes you feel beautiful, like a chameleon, like I can take on any character imaginable. He taught me how to be a blank canvas.”

In 2004 you were included in a MoMA show. What did you think of it?

I never went to the exhibit because I didn’t want to be a part of it. Firstly, I don’t like group shows and when I read what the theme was I didn’t like it. I didn’t agree with what the person was saying in her proposal letter. But my agent said I should do it – we never agree. I said, “If it’s so important, you talk to them, but I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” The curator chose the pictures and they were not pictures of mine that I liked. So for me the whole thing was something I wish I had listened to my heart and my instincts on. There really was no point for me to do it. And I didn’t want to read reviews and people discussing whatever, pontificating about nothing.

http://032c.com/2008/who-is-steven-meisel/