An Exclusive Q&A With Photographer Steven Meisel
The prolific fashion lensman discusses his iconic images of supermodels Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Amber Valetta, timed to the opening of his exhibition ‘Role Play’ at Phillips in New York City
By TIM BLANKS
FEW PHOTOGRAPHERS have skated as successfully as Steven Meisel has across a multitude of worlds, all in the name of fashion. Prolific scarcely scratches the surface. You could label him an auteur, in the cinematic interpretation of the word, because however different each shoot is from the next, there is a signature, a kind of completeness, which speaks to the obsessive perfectionism of his vision. No detail is too small. Every shot is meticulously planned in advance and logged in his bandanna-wrapped head.
And like many great auteurs, Meisel has made stars of the women who’ve performed for his lens. The supermodels who in the late ’80s began to dislodge Hollywood celebrities from their pop-cultural dominance were directed by Meisel: Linda, Christy, Naomi and all those who came after, among them the woman who has played perhaps the most perfect Trilby to his Svengali, Amber Valletta. “Working with him is like working with a director,” Valletta says. “He’s so clear about what he wants. Each time he describes a character, you know exactly what he’s looking for. There’s no guessing. And I think that kind of communication is a part of his genius.”
Meisel, who turned 60 last year, was born in Manhattan and grew up on Long Island. After attending Parsons, he became a fashion illustrator for Women’s Wear Daily before being tapped by Elite models for test shoots—and then, soon after, by Vogue to photograph the collections. Since then he has produced hundreds of magazine editorials (including every Vogue Italia cover since 1988) and countless ad campaigns. The astonishing range of his output—from over-the-top couture glamour to sharp social satire—betrays a chameleon-like imagination. “He was the first person,” Madonna once told Vogue, “to introduce me to the idea of reinvention.”
Although Meisel himself has always been a closed book, rarely granting interviews, he acknowledges that every shoot is ultimately a part of his own story. Valletta, for instance, bears an uncanny resemblance to his mother, a former band singer with Sammy Kaye, now living in Palm Springs, California—and clearly an enduring inspiration. “Interesting, he’s always shot me in a wholesome way, even when the shoot is crazy,” Valletta muses about a collaboration that has seen her enact a vast array of characters, from Anna May Wong to Grey Gardens’ “Little” Edie Beale.
Meisel has recently revisited his past—at least as reflected in his work—as he compiled an overview of his photographs to be offered by Phillips (in the selling exhibition, Role Play, launched in Paris and is currently on view in New York City). The familiarity of the images is startling: They’re fundamental to the fashion lexicon of the past three decades. Given the assumed ephemerality of his subject matter, the timelessness of the pictures is equally remarkable. “He will always be able to find newness in something, as if it was always there, so his work doesn’t date,” says J.W. Anderson, the young British designer who has recently worked with Meisel on campaigns for the Spanish fashion house Loewe. “It’s like it was meant to be.”
Meisel’s surrender to that destiny is absolute—a blessing for fashion, because with every click of his shutter, the universe expands. As Donatella Versace says, “With each image, he creates a complete world, one that is at the same time total fantasy and also absolutely true.”
Tim Blanks: Your selection of images for the Phillips show seems to be a concise career overview. Is that how you saw it?
Steven Meisel: It wasn’t just my decision. I would have pushed it further, to be honest. They had first given me a selection, then we went back and forth. It was a compromise.
TB: The earliest image, from 1987, is of model Sean Bohary. I remember your shooting him in those days for Per Lui. Those images had such a transgressive, ambiguous edge. Did coming out of the New York culture of places like the Mudd Club shape you?
SM: When I was at the Mudd Club, I didn’t have a job yet. Besides, I’d been going out since I was 14, so there was much more before that; so, no, the Mudd Club didn’t influence any of those photographs. That was just me; that’s all I can say. It’s how my eye sees.
TB: Do you think you were looking for yourself in those photos? There was a strand in your work for a long time of very ambiguous, beautiful people with long black hair.
SM: I think I’m in every picture that I take, regardless of whether it’s a super-commercial something; it’s all me. So am I looking for myself in those kinds of photographs? It’s not intentional; it’s just a sensitivity. Thinking of the Sean pictures: Am I looking for me in them? No, I am them.
TB: Does that mean that everyone in your photos is an alter ego in a way?
SM: Um, not in every one, but yes, to a certain extent, sure.
TB: Thinking of your photos of Linda [Evangelista], for example, there’s a real symbiosis in those images.
SM: Yeah, that’s me, absolutely. That’s a part of who I am. But I have to be honest—I don’t know what I do. I learn more about what I do from other people asking me questions or commenting. It’s nothing I think about; I just do it.
TB: But are there moments when you stop to think, “God, I did that one well”?
SM: No.
TB: You mean it’s always on to the next thing?
SM: Yes. Emotionally, it’s very difficult for me to look at old work. That’s why it was so hard to do the Phillips thing. I either look at what I could have done better, or I start crying. I’m ridiculously sensitive, that’s just who I am, so it’s really tough for me to look at old pictures.
TB: Even when you’re looking at those pictures which I think of as a conspiracy between you and Linda? You don’t feel a thrill?
SM: I always get sad.
TB: You mean melancholy at the transience of everything?
SM: I’m not going to get into the whole meaning of life—of which there isn’t one anyway—but yes.
TB: What thrills me is your ability to re-create atmospheres, to evoke times and places and artists that meant so much to me. I’m assuming they meant a lot to you too.
SM: It’s a part of who I am, of who you are. It’s our experiences and our eyes and our hearts, of growing up when we did.
TB: Do you ever feel you missed out on anything, and you’re re-creating an earlier time out of that urge?
SM: No, I don’t think so. You mean, were there better periods? I think that things certainly had more taste. But then we get into the world we’re living in now, and I’m a realist. So, no.
TB: You’re something of a satirist, too.
SM: Absolutely. I would hope my sense of humor is obvious in everything. I don’t consider myself just a fashion photographer. It’s more than that. I’m also a very funny person, and I have a good sense of humor. And I hope people see that.
TB: What makes you laugh?
SM: Oh, Christ, I can’t answer that.
TB: It seems to me we’re living in an increasingly idiotic age.
SM: That, unfortunately, I don’t laugh at. I don’t find that funny. But I laugh all the time, at stupid things.
TB: I think of you more along the lines of a director than a photographer, putting together a production with the same team of people all the time: hair, makeup, set designer, lighting, star. Like the Steven Meisel Repertory Company.
SM: The Meisel Repertory Company is in my head and my heart. That’s where it comes from. I do do it all. I have many people to help me, but it is me.
TB: I’m getting Orson Welles.
SM: [Laughing] Maybe you’ve been at the bar too long. But I’ll take it.
TB: I keep coming back to Linda and the performances she’s given for you. I’ve often wondered how inspired you were by the Avedon series with Suzy Parker and Bradford Dillman acting out the public drama of the Taylor-Burton relationship.
SM: I thought that was brilliant. Did it inspire me? Sure. Everything I ever saw that I loved inspired me and is part of who I am. It’s all cemented in there. But I don’t sit and think about it.
TB: Was there one moment for you, a flash when you knew this was what you wanted to do?
SM: To be totally honest, no. I always ate up everything. But if anything, I thought, “Oh, my God, I could never do that.” I was still at Women’s Wear Daily, and Mr. [Alexander] Liberman had asked me to go to Paris to do the collections. But I couldn’t take any more vacation time or sick days, and I was thinking I couldn’t possibly quit, what am I going to do? So we just worked it out that I was hired, so I could get some money. But I was petrified. I never thought that I could do that, no. I’d loved photography since I was a child, but there was never a lightbulb that went off that said, “This is exactly what I could do.” I think it was insecurity and fear that drove me.
‘With each image, Meisel creates a complete world, one that is total fantasy and also absolutely true.’
—Donatella Versace
TB: I have head shots for hair salons in Greenwich Village that Anna Sui and you used to do for the Soho News.
SM: Yeah, we did. I was still at Women’s Wear. Sometimes Anna will ask me about something—“Do you remember this?”—and I don’t recall any of it. Then she’ll show me, and I remember.
TB: Would you describe yourself as obsessive?
SM: No, I don’t think so.
TB: Would you say you’re a man with a vision?
SM: Yes.
TB: How would you describe that? The ability to look at, say, an 18-year-old Karen Elson and completely remodel her into a star.
SM: I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s all the time. I don’t have an answer for that. I just know it.
TB: Is that talent a blessing or a curse?
SM: I guess for those who benefit from it, it’s a blessing that I see that way. Lately I find it a larger responsibility than I had thought about. I’m not being an a—hole, but I have changed so many people’s lives. I hadn’t really thought about it until recently when a girl or a guy I’ve worked with has brought it to my attention. “Steven, did you know at that time I was homeless, and you changed my life, and I’ve been waiting 12 or 15 years to tell you this?” So it’s not at all a curse to be able to help people and change their lives for the better. I’d say it’s a blessing.
TB: I mean for you, though, never being able to relax, always being driven to transformation.
SM: It’s not a conscious thing. When I see them, it’s not that the word transformation comes into my head. It’s just something about them that I see on a shoot. I guess I do see the best in them.
TB: Do you think you see in archetypes? When you’re looking at a novice 16-year-old, you can tell how to turn her into a swan.
SM: Yes, I can.
TB: Every model mentions the incredible precision, the speed, the sureness with which you make them into the person you want them to be.
SM: I don’t know why. I just know when I look, I see it. It’s how my eyes saw as a kid.
TB: Did your mother trust your input?
SM: I guess maybe she would have asked me whether I liked this or that better, but she was pretty good herself. She still is.
TB: I guess when a model works with you, there’s an expectation that she’ll become the Next Big Thing.
SM: I hate that. I think the business has changed so much. It’s more like how many likes you get on Instagram, which I do not do. I’m not into it. I don’t know what makes a star anymore. I’m just doing what I do. So is there an expectation? Not from me. And I hope not so much from the model, because I don’t want to disappoint anybody. My goal is just to do what I need to do on that day.
TB: If you feel the industry is changing—
SM: You know that it has; it’s our world, our society.
TB: In some of your most controversial portfolios—the oil spill, the horror movie story, the plastic surgery story—it feels like you’re pushing for more extreme reactions. The satire is quite apocalyptic, even bloody.
SM: There’s humor, but there’s anger. Like the oil spill story with Kristen [McMenamy]. That wasn’t supposed to be humorous, because the oil spill was horrible, and I was just pissed at the situation. The plastic surgery story, on the other hand, was just a comment. And horror movies? I love them. Which reminds me of something extremely frustrating that people maybe don’t know: I get two days to shoot these things, whereas years ago—speaking of how the business has changed—I had four days. And before that, I read articles about shoots that took weeks. It’s so condensed now, and in those two days, every time you have to stop when you’ve made a picture, and then you have to make a movie for the Internet. I hate how little time I have to do it. With the horror story, it was “Damn, I could have really gone on,” but I didn’t have the time.
TB: That story caused a huge fuss because it was presented as a comment on domestic violence.
SM: With that one in particular, I’m like, “No, it wasn’t about abuse.” If it had been about abuse, there would have been no sense of humor, because it’s a serious matter. But this was just my tongue-in-cheek love of classic horror movies. I remember I did one shoot in a cemetery with Linda and a group of people, and still people say to me it was about Yves Saint Laurent. Maybe he died that week, but that had nothing to do with Yves Saint Laurent. I don’t know what they’re all talking about. People just say what they say. They come up with their own ideas.
TB: I can imagine how irritating it is to do what you did—re-create your favorite scenes from your favorite horror movies—and that isn’t the story that’s being told about the shoot. And then the controversy is used as a stick to beat fashion with.
SM: I know, and then I get s— about it. And I didn’t even say that originally. That’s why I don’t do interviews, because then I read things and I’m thinking, “Where do people come up with these things?”
TB: But I think there’s still a subtle, subversive quality in your work that disconcerts people. Even if they’re not necessarily thinking about domestic violence, there’s always the context—the fashion magazine—to add that incongruous twist.
SM: Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t.
TB: Do you feel misunderstood?
SM: I don’t think about it. I don’t feel it with my work.
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