Following in the footsteps of fellow fashion icons Nick Knight, Louise Wilson, Amanda Harlech, and Edward Enninful, photographer Bruce Weber will pick up the Isabella Blow Award For Fashion Creator at this year’s Fashion Awards, held in December. In a career that spans 40 years (and is still going strong), Bruce has found beauty in everything from his pet dogs to the highest of high fashion — the broken noses of boxers to the muscular physiques of the stars of track and field.
Weber has taken portraits of everyone from Kate Moss to David Bowie and Jane Goodall; he’s equally at home shooting editorials and documentary. Throughout his career, his lens has been famed for its intimacy, immediacy, and playful eroticism. His advertising work with brands like Versace, Calvin Klein, and Abercrombie & Fitch has yielded some of fashion’s most instantly recognizable images.
Yet, never content with being simply one thing, Weber has also worked out as a niche as one of the most interesting and singularly talented documentary-makers. His work with legendarily talented and troubled jazz musician Chet Baker, in the Academy Award-nominated Let’s Get Lost, stands out in particular for its emotionally complex portrait of the musician. He’s also made documentaries about young boxers (in Broken Noses), and in Chop Suey he documented some of his fashion and culture obsessions, from David Bailey to Azzedine Alaia and Diana Vreeland.
His creative spirit and his restless pursuit of aesthetic beauty — both in his home of America (and few have captured contemporary America so poetically), and across the world — have made Bruce such an icon.
“Bruce’s endurance is testament to his pure talent, his undeniable creativity, and his singular warmth and generosity,” said Dame Natalie Massenet, Chairman of the BFC. “His expansive body of work in photography and film is iconic, and he himself is rightly an icon of the creative fashion community. He is one of the foremost photographers and creative talents of our age who has helped shape the fashion industry we know today and I have a great deal of admiration for him.”
Credits
Text Felix Petty