From his early photos to his latest feature documentary, The Treasure of His Youth. The Photographs of Paolo Di Paolo (2022). How to showcase almost six decades of Bruce Weber’s iconic works? The retrospective at the Stone Bell House in Prague takes up the challenge (through January 19th 2025) and it does so in a whimsical way, with halls and rooms dedicated to fashion photography, landscape, reportage and portraiture (from Brad Pitt to Fellini and Mandela).
“It doesn’t matter whether a particular photograph was taken as part of a fashion campaign, as a random photograph on the street, or for a magazine’s portrait series,” writes curator Helena Musilová. “Everything is brought together by Weber’s ability to capture a profound emotional charge, moments of vulnerability, intimacy, intense experiences, joy, pain, fatigue, love, triumph.” And by his ability –we’d like to add– to tell a story; to reveal one’s truth and life journey.
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- Bruce Weber • My Education • Photo: Jan Kolsky.
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- Bruce Weber • My Education • Photo: Jan Kolsky.
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- Bruce Weber • My Education’s Bear Pond Room • Photo: Jan Kolsky.
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- Bruce Weber • My Education • Photo: Jan Kolsky.
Prague pays tribute to the most consequential fashion photographer of the past 50 years. Imitated by many, especially when he lets his models move freely before the lens (seemingly unrehearsed/ unposed and yet miraculously well-framed). As Playgirl, we were drawn, however, to the photographer of nudes, on display in the Bear Pond room. Here we were struck by the B/W photos Weber took in the Adirondack Mountains and published in the seminal book by the same title (1990). Images that redefined the male nude, by creating a new ideal of beauty –or rather, by returning to “ancient ideals of form, proportion, symmetry and eurythmy.” Poetic images that inspired every photographer we’ve interviewed (read the Playgirl interviews with Ken Gruenholtz, Rick Day, Michael A. Downs, Christian Oita, Craig Macleod…)
“He worked with models (…) at the height of their youth, which he liked to capture in motion, in connection with nature,” continues Musilová, combining “elegance, sensuality, nostalgia, but also vivacity, insight and movement.” Movement, with the boys’ jumps and flips and the sense of joy they exude; sensuality, with their athletic bodies, so beautifully captured; nostalgia, because “the experience of ideal beauty as personified by the young human body comes with an awareness of its finiteness,” writes Musilová. Or is it the “sense of longing”, that Weber himself talks about in Chop Suey? “In my fantasy, I’d have been one of those kids, clowning around without a care in the world,” says Weber (voice over). “We sometimes photograph things we can never be.”
