Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez chose the iconic photographer Bruce Weber as a crucial link in A#9, between the wider artistic projects of Land Art and the specific fashion world of Proenza Schouler. Facilitating the interview is Style.com and V Magazine’s man-about-town Derek Blasberg, whose inquisitive nature lends an interesting perspective to the piece, both as an unacquainted Weber fan, and a close friend of the two designers.

Accompanying the candid interview are images that Bruce has taken across the USA, in big and small towns – each shot bearing the melancholy of loneliness and a soft, masculine beauty.

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When Jack and Lazaro initially discussed this project – finding an image-maker who has truly captured America – the concept seemed daunting. The two of them are from different Americas: Jack grew up in New England, but studied glass blowing in California and, for a period, was a devout Grateful Dead-head; Lazaro grew up in Miami, and after high school was a pre-med major at a school in Florida. Today, both live in Manhattan’s swirl of fashion events and industry obligations, though they often escape to their farm in Massachusetts. What person has experienced all these worlds? Who knew all these Americas? And who has successfully recorded them all?
As Jack and Lazaro spoke about iconic American images, Ralph Lauren campaigns, old Calvin Klein images, the answer quickly became clear: Bruce Weber, the man responsible for those pictures, who has traversed America from the tip of Montauk to America’s Wild West, from the top of Montana to the tip of the South, capturing every picturesque person and picturesque landscape along the way. Through his unique vision, Weber has been able to capture and inspire an America in everyone.

When the two decided on Weber and asked me to help moderate their conversation, what I thought might pose a problem (that none of us had met the famous lens man) turned out to be an asset. When the gregarious grey-bearded gentleman arrived at an antiquated coffee shop near his Tribeca studio (this being a pilgrimage to a great man, the two had arrived early), Weber discussed his life, his work, and his experiences. The way he spoke was deliberate and florid, telling stories in such a creative, fantastical way that he recreated vivid images with just words. He provided Jack and Lazaro with a lesson not only in photography, but also in life, love, and the pursuit of the perfection of Americana.
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Lazaro: The way we’ve discovered America recently has been road trips, driving out west and traveling around in cars, getting into land art and Marfa and the work of Donald Judd.

Bruce: I’ve done the same thing myself, driving to places that maybe a lot of magazines wouldn’t send me. Recently, I had a friend from Nebraska; he’s a teacher and he’s studying for his doctorate in molecular biology, who just happens to be really handsome, and we had an idea to go on a trip. I had this other friend, who’s a painter –

Jack: And he just happened to be really gorgeous too?

Bruce: Yes, he has this sort of crooked nose, and he’s awkward and sort of nerdy. But he’s very elegant at the same time. They are the oddest couple; you wouldn’t ever expect these two guys to be friends. One has his head in the clouds and the other has his feet firmly on the ground, one is a big womanizer and the other guy has a steady girlfriend. I thought it would be interesting to take a road trip with them to this big surfer, hippy community on the Northern Pacific. I would edit and write in the morning, while all the guys (my assistants, these fellas) would go to the beach. It sorted of reminded me of the way I started out taking pictures. We had two suitcases of clothes, mainly stuff I liked and had collected, stuff that I had from friends or from when I was younger and skinnier. After that trip we took more through other parts of America and I realized I wasn’t recording just the American landscape, but the idea of two men having a friendship, and how they grew into each other; their easiness with each other. I photograph a lot of guys, especially American guys, and they’re all afraid to touch now or to run down the beach naked.

Derek: When was this trip?

Bruce: This was over the last three years. One of the trips was going up to the Adirondack Mountains, where I have a house.

Lazaro: Where in the Adirondacks? We just got a house in the Berkshires.

Bruce: Did you? Congratulations. You’re going to love it.

Jack: We’re tying to escape the city as much as possible.

Bruce: My place is up in the Upper St. Regis Lakes and you have to take a boat to get there. I’ve done pictures there and I’ve done films there. It’s a real home for me and the woods are very beautiful- very intact, with amazing vegetation. The winters are really cold, so there are no ticks or snakes.

Jack: Really?

Lazaro: Jack loves that.

Jack: I can’t deal with ticks. I just had to pull two ticks off me last week.

Lazaro: The Berkshires is infested with ticks.

Bruce: On another trip, I had a friend of mine who I went to college with, a writer, come with me. A few of us started in Miami and then went through the panhandle, then through Alabama and spent some time in Mobile at the beginning of the Mardi Gras. We had an amazing time. It’s like time stood still in Mobile.

Lazaro: I’ve never been to the Deep South.

Jack: Me either, it sounds kind of scary.

Lazaro: It sounds very old-school.

Bruce: Well, it’s very old thinking and it can be intimidating. But our world was open and we met people. In New York City, as a photographer, when I first started and I went to NYU, you could walk around the streets and take pictures and no one would bug you. Now, you can’t – you have to have a permit; you have to a release. But at that time you could say to someone, “Hey, I’m just starting out, could you model for me?”
Now that just doesn’t happen.

Lazaro: Why, do they want money?

Bruce: No, it’s just different. Which is why we have to travel to other places.

Derek: Do you come back to New York between these journeys?

Bruce: Yes.

Jack: Is New York your homebase?

Bruce: Here and Miami.

Lazaro: I grew up in Miami, my first 18 years.

Bruce: Oh really, what part?

Lazaro: In mainland Miami. I went to Cuban catholic schools: St. Brendan, do you know it?

Bruce: Yeah, I do!

Lazaro: It’s next to Columbus, which is a very Bruce Weber school. It’s an all-boys school and everyone wears uniforms and ties. All the guys play sports.

Bruce: Don’t you think that a lot of the things we do derive from our experiences in gym class?

Jack: Ah, my god. Gym class sticks out in my memory.

Lazaro: Tortuous. So tortuous.

Bruce: Doesn’t it just stick out as a traumatic experience? I think about that so many times when I photograph all these great athletes.

Jack: Where were you for school?

Bruce: I lived and grew up in a little town in Western Pennsylvania called Greensburg.
I went to school there and then my parents were a little bit nervous about me, so they thought
I would be better off in boarding school.

Derek: Why did they send you to boarding school? Did you need direction or were you a bad kid?

Bruce: I was just shy, introverted. I had a load of friends, but I was very much into reading –

Derek: Were you taking pictures as a young man?

Bruce: No, but I was painting. I grew up in a wonderfully eccentric, but very dysfunctional, family, and the only time we ever got along was when we went to painting class on a Sunday as a family. We would go to the teacher’s house, the whole family – even my grandmother.

Lazaro: Miami is the opposite of that. My parents, growing up in an immigrant community from Cuba, are more honed in on successes, making it in the professional world. The idea of being an artist, or being creative, wasn’t really encouraged. They want something guaranteed, which is why I studied to be a doctor.

Bruce: What was that like?

Lazaro: I had a full meltdown. I was in med school for two years, but then my grades started to slip and I wasn’t happy, so on a whim I applied to Parsons. I said to myself: “If I get accepted, I’m changing my life and moving to New York. If I don’t get accepted, I’ll stay here.” I didn’t tell anyone, so when I got in, I told my parents I’m moving to New York to study… I didn’t want to say ‘fashion.’

Bruce: Ha! See, it all relates to gym class!
Where did you go to school, Jack?

Jack: I grew up in New Jersey and went to a college prep school in Montclair, which was really straight-laced, very ‘Yes sir’ and ‘No sir.’ I never really fit in, but when I went to boarding school, I found my love for art.

Bruce: And what about you, Derek?

Derek: I grew up in Missouri and then I came to New York. Back home, though, I was sort of a jock. I could identify with that American jock persona in your pictures.

Lazaro: Bruce, did you do sports when you were young?

Bruce: I was on the tennis team. But what I remember more from school is this girlfriend, she was the best-looking girl in town. She had this amazing body, and this blonde hair, and she drove a car. Every guy in school was just crazy about her and, for some reason, she liked me.

Derek: It sounds like a picture – one of your pictures!

Bruce: It was. When I first arrived at boarding school, the guy that lived next door was a wrestler. He came into my room with hardly anything on, just a towel, and I remember I couldn’t even look at him. He said, “Hi, I’m James Dean.” He was tough and very beautiful. He said, “I’m insisting the under classmen call me James Dean this year.” And I said, “Well I don’t have a problem with that.” I think those experiences from gym class and not being able to play basketball, or throw the football right, really encouraged me to get to want to know the kind of people that could. Also, too, when I came to New York, it was such a training ground for what I was going to do.

Derek: Did you move to New York for photography?

Bruce: I moved here first for acting, for drama. But I wasn’t really willing to give part of myself up for it.

Lazaro: Were you extroverted? Could you go there as an actor?

Bruce: No, I was terrible! Ha! But it helped me as a photographer. I always say to a young photographer, when they ask me what they should do, that they should read a lot, listen to different kinds of music, open their worlds up a bit, meet new kinds of people – and go to an acting class. Or an African dance class. As a photographer, you’re constantly in a situation where you have to act, or ask someone to act.
Derek: Speaking of acting, are the scenes that you portray in your pictures posed?

Jack: Yeah, are those ‘Bruce Weber shots’ contrived? They don’t look it.

Bruce: I think most of the young people I work with have an American fantasy. So you have to put them in a situation: ‘You’ve just broken up with this girl you’re sitting across from.’ You almost feel like you’re making a soap opera!
I used to work with this editor called Julie Britt, who would take the person on set who wasn’t
the best- looking, who was the most introverted – and by the end of the day she would have everybody on the whole crew madly in love
with them.

Lazaro: How did she do that?

Bruce: She would always start with everyone thinking that she was crazy! Then she would make you see something so incredible about them – it might be their hands, it might be their shoulders, it might be something that’s happened in their life. She knew a lot about the people that we were photographing. That was part of my education.

Jack: You learned to learn about the people on your set?

Bruce: Yes, that’s when things start to happen.

Lazaro: I like how you explore different pockets of Americana. You do the whole New England thing with Ralph, and then the West Coast surfer with Abercrombie, but then you’ll go to America’s South with W magazine. Are there any worlds that you’re still fascinated by?

Bruce: It’s hard. I look at surf culture now and it makes me sad. There’s a really good movie called Breaking Down the Door, which is about these guys, who I’ve photographed, and their first winter in Hawaii. Now, the whole thing with surfing has become so commercial.

Jack: Yeah, it’s become sponsorship and commercial deals –

Bruce: I would go to Hawaii and take pictures on the North Shore, and there was this supermarket all the surfers went to for sandwiches, and it was just the most amazing place to photograph people. I went there recently and Quicksilver was making it a store. So I bought all the T-shirts to give my friends – I’m sure they asked, “Why is he buying the last 20 T-shirts?”

Derek: And why is he crying?

Bruce: I’ve seen a lot of the cultures that I’ve photographed fall apart. The days of just driving up to a high school and asking an athletic director to photograph a team just won’t happen anymore. Or the days of driving in the country and knocking on someone’s door.

Derek: Is that really how you used to find people, just knocking on doors?

Bruce: I was once shooting with Grace Coddington in the outback and we needed a boy for a picture – and one just appeared. Grace, who was single at the time, was laughing ‘cause everywhere we go, all of a sudden an amazing-looking guy will just appear. She goes, “That never happens when I’m by myself!” So I thought if this whole photography thing doesn’t work out, maybe I could be hired by these women to find men!

Jack: That’s amazing.

Bruce: I knew I was going to see you guys today and I brought you this book [Free Spirit In A Troubled World by John Phillips]. I look at it from time to time when I get really depressed about the state of magazines, or the state of fashion. It’s a book from a guy that worked at Life Magazine from 1936 to 1959. I thought it said something about you. The stuff I’ve read about you is that you have the courage to design things in a very commercial world that aren’t necessarily commercial. I have this friend Azzedine Alaïa –

Jack: Yeah, I’ve heard of him!

Bruce: Ha! He’s in this book sewing, and
I think he’s such a great person to look at.

Jack: How he’s managed to do his business, and still have so much integrity – he’s phenomenal.

Lazaro: He’s ideal. When we think of our ideal situation, we think of him.

Jack: There’s still innocence –

Lazaro: A freedom.

Jack: You just don’t feel like he’s sold out in any way.

Bruce: A lot of the guys that I worked with in the beginning – like Ralph, Calvin, Perry, even Karl – had an openness like you guys. You’re not that different. It goes back to this idea of sharing. When I first started, all the designers really shared their work. I, as a photographer, am lucky to share my world. I didn’t feel like I was the greatest, I didn’t have the greatest pictures – maybe because I wasn’t good in gym! – so I really admired that friendship and sharing of my friends.

Jack: And now it’s every man for himself!

Bruce: It would be like, if I came to your studio and found an assistant that I thought was perfect to shoot, and I asked to shoot her – that wouldn’t be uncommon. That’s happened with Ralph – I had an assistant named Liz, and she was so gorgeous, very elegant, like a girl that had gone to Vassar. Ralph looked at her and said, “I want to hire you!”

Derek: When was this?

Bruce: Probably 25 years ago. That’s how it used to be. You could be at a restaurant and see someone, and there would be openness. It was communal, almost hippy-like.

Jack: And now we live in a completely different world.

Bruce: I think you make your own world, and no matter what people say or what all the editors say, you have to make your own world. The thing that I learned about travelling America is that you’re forced to know different kinds of people. Here, you have a chance if you just take it. Maybe I’m not into the suburban mall thing, but I like going once in awhile. I like to see how people are dressing – sometimes, I’ll see someone walking around in something I’ve photographed, and say to myself, “I really photographed that wrong. I should have photographed it like that!”

Lazaro: That’s Middle America, which is what we were talking about earlier – it’s like, “Who are these people?”

Derek: Hey, I’m from those people!

Lazaro: No, but you’re not there now. I think it’s important to go to those malls, and to see what the masses are interested in.

Jack: It’s easy to forget that there are people who are so far removed from our world, who are putting things together completely naturally.

Bruce: I think that’s really healthy. People always want to talk to me about the pictures
I did with Calvin Klein years ago, and I’m so far away from that in my head. Recently, I visited an artist friend down in Virginia called Sally Mann. She showed me this book she did of young girls at an age when they’re just becoming women. I saw this picture of a girl sitting on a couch who was slightly heavy-set, but had a sweet face. She was wearing jeans that were a little too tight as she was a little heavy, and a sweatshirt that read Calvin Klein. I looked at this picture and said, “Sally, all those years I photographed those clothes wrong.”

Lazaro: So has your aesthetic changed?

Bruce: Helmut Newton once said to me, “When you take photographs, you’re always taking the same picture of yourself.” So it’s changed in that way, ‘cause I’m different now.

Jack: You still only shoot film, right?

Bruce: That’s right.

Lazaro: That’s amazing, ‘cause I feel like an art director now is always behind your back trying to find out what’s going on. That’s a testament to your power – to be able to say, “No, I’m not going to shoot digital.”

Bruce: I think digital is great; I think any advancement in photography is great. But when people ask me why I don’t want to know what I’m shooting, I say I like to treat it like Christmas – sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don’t.

Jack: Then there’s all these happy surprises you catch in film that you might not notice in digital.

Bruce: Jessica Lange, who just published a book of some great pictures, and I were just talking about the process of photography. The intimacy can be lost in a digital situation because you’re working with a tech person, and their assistant, and the amount of people on set just grows and grows.

Derek: And everyone chimes in, even the caterer.

Bruce: Exactly. If there’s something wrong I want to feel it, and then I will fix it – and if I don’t fix it, I have to live with it. I would rather have that mistake.

Jack: Do you print anymore?

Bruce: I have a place out in Montauk, and there’s this beautiful little shack on a cliff, about as big as this table, which I can build a little darkroom onto.

Jack: There’s something interesting about getting back in touch with materials, and actually using your hands. Lazaro and I are sometimes far removed from that – when we first started our line, we were actually sewing things and touching materials. Now we have factories. I would imagine it would be nice to get back in the darkroom, back to those chemicals. I imagine you really have to trust your printer – about how long does that trust take?

Bruce: About 20-some years!

Lazaro: It’s funny, the things that we’re learning while doing this magazine – like the idea of the perfect print, the perfect layout.

Bruce: I think it’s great that you’re learning it though.

Jack: We’re also learning about our friends, their work and this industry.

Lazaro: It’s turning into a nice overview of our perspective of America. And for us, your work has this innocence, this romance –

Jack: It doesn’t feel contrived, or that you’re trying too hard. That nonchalance is what we’re always trying to incorporate into our work.

Derek: What I think is so interesting too is that among the three of us, all from different parts of America, when we think of the seminal American photographer, we think of you.
Are you doing the same thing today you did
25 years ago? Are you still looking for the
same America?

Bruce: What I think I’ve always been looking for is a sense of family. My family was really important to me: my father was really handsome, like Paul Newman, in great shape, always in the garden with his shirt off –

Derek: Hoisting a wheelbarrow –

Lazaro: It sounds like a Bruce Weber picture!

Bruce: Yes! And then there would be me in a turtleneck in the summer, with a paintbrush and carrying a fashion magazine, afraid someone was going to hurt me! Ha! No, I’m kidding,
I wasn’t that wimpy. I think that I had such a strong sense of family, and I’m still looking for that. People say, “Have you photographed everyone you want to?” And my response is no, ‘cause I’m always making new connections to family and what that is about.

Lazaro: For me, the kiss of death would be to have found everything, to be satiated.

Jack: For sure, once you’re satisfied with what you’ve done, you stop trying. Do you still have that drive, that hunger to find new things, new families?

Bruce: One of the things I’ve learned through filmmaking is how much we really don’t experience what we create. You guys aren’t standing out in front of a magazine stand as people look at your clothes in a magazine; you’re not sitting in the audience of your fashion shows listening to what the people are saying about the clothes.

Lazaro: That’s such an interesting concept.

Bruce: But then, in filmmaking, you’re sitting there in the audience with the people who are watching it, and you see the mistakes – or  someone so much as coughs in the film, and you just want to go home and cry.

Jack: So there’s always a curiosity, which is so important.
Lazaro: That’s a big fear of mine, to stop being curious or become jaded, to stop exploring a new world.
Derek: I don’t think any of you need to worry about that – you seem to always be interested or intrigued by something.

Bruce: I’m taking pictures nearly every day. But they’re different; recently, I went to a friend’s island and started taking pictures sort of like a home story, but not for a magazine – for myself. That’s very American, the work ethic. If I have to say something about my life in America, I would say that it’s been about work ethic. I grew up in a place where people worked in coal mines and factories. I think this world is open, but you have to chase it in America. Maybe that’s what’s different from here and other parts of the world.

Lazaro: And the role of a photographer is to record the world that’s around them.

Bruce: I always think it’s nice when someone falls in love with someone in my picture. That’s the nicest thing that can happen – if someone has a fantasy.

Derek: I think that happens often in some of your pictures!

Bruce: OK, I didn’t know! That’s nice!

Lazaro: I think with any creative person, their work is a reflection of who they are. You can’t really separate your psyche from your work.

Bruce: Like crushes. I was just working with Carine (Roitfeld) recently and I told her, “I’m going to walk down the street and I’m not going to look to the left or right of me,” ‘cause I kept finding people that I thought were right for the story. I’m always falling in love with people, having crushes on them. I think that’s a very American thing. I don’t really care if it’s a guy, a girl, a dog or a horse – I want to have that crush.

Derek: You can see these crushes in your work.

Bruce: Photography is a very intimate thing. Georgia O’Keeffe did some extraordinary photographs in her lifetime with Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz said that when he first took those photographs, all these men would come up to him and ask him to take pictures of their wives. And he would say, “I don’t think you really want me to, ‘cause it would be so intimate.” For me, that’s the goal: intimacy.

Jack: And to have fun with it.

Bruce: Yes. You guys are so lucky to do what you do, to start making something out of nothing. I think you just have to be careful not to let people take the fun away from it.

A BLOG presents the online release of A MAGAZINE curated by Proenza Schouler.

A fast-forward step from last month’s online release of A#1, we proudly announce that A#9 is the final step in our very first online project, beginning the ever-expanding archives of the A World.

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Proenza Schouler are Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez, a New York-based design duo who took their mothers’ maiden names to name their label after graduating Parsons School of Design in 2002. Barneys bought their graduate collection in its entirety, beginning their stellar rise to the top of the New York circuit. They have since won the CFDA Perry Ellis Award for new talent in 2003, the CFDA Womenswear Designer of the Year Award in 2007, and the CFDA Accessory designer of the year award 2009.

Their womenswear designs offer a fresh and feminine vision in elegant, directional styles that range through tailored sportswear to layered cocktail and eveningwear. Exacting a modern, clean aesthetic with technical fabrics and an expert use of muted colours with bold highlights, Proenza Schouler take abstract inspirations from a wide array of modern art references, from the large-scale land art of Donald Judd’s Marfa, Texas to the Pop Art movement. Their muses include the actress and fashion icon Chloë Sevigny, who appears on the cover of the magazine, starry-eyed in a soft and alluring image by Richard Burbridge.

Throughout the month of March and beyond, A BLOG explores Proenza Schouler’s ‘Made in the USA’ issue – a landmark for Jack and Lazaro as the first American designers to make an A. Their research for the magazine took the boys in unexpected and exciting directions, from roadtripping across the United States to discover Donald Judd’s Texas artist collective, to chatting with the legendary Bruce Weber in a candid interview with Derek Blasberg, and offering their archives to an assortment of prestigious photographers and stylists to reinterpret for A#9. This magazine is not only an eye-opener for readers, but for its two curators also.

Please click here to see A#9 online at WWW.AMAGAZINECURATEDBY.COM, the final title in this archive series. A#1 by Maison Martin Margiela, A#2 by Yohji Yamamoto, A#3 by Haider Ackermann, A#4 by Jun Takahashi, A#5 by Martine Sitbon, A#6 by Veronique Branquinho, A#7 by Kris Van Assche and A#8 by Riccardo Tisci are also all available to view online now.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYFRITN6txY[/youtube]

Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler hosted the party of the week in New York city on Monday night,  when they invited their collaborators and friends to toast the US launch of A#9. Their choice of venue was a townhouse in Soho Mews, the new luxury condo development in West Broadway.

The crisp pages of their ‘Made in the USA’ edition were showcased inside the townhouse for guests to see the beautiful work of the designers and their collaborators, including that of performance artist Kalup Linzy (who was also in attendance).

And what would the A#9 NYC party be without it’s cover girl, the divine miss Chloë Sevigny? She dazzled in a Proenza Schouler leather belted jumpsuit, exclaiming “I feel a little bit like a super-slut superhero!”

Other guests included cover photographer Richard Burbridge, Derek Blasberg (who interviewed Bruce Weber for a piece in the issue) and Yvonne Force Villareal of Art Production Fund, the veritable ‘force’ behind much of Proenza Schouler’s brilliant spectacle in June at Pitti Immagine in Florence, Italy.

The party was as low-key an event as such a New York society crowd permits, with beers in icebuckets and a tire swing on the terrace (albeit a designer one by Aaron Young of Cumulus Studios!). ‘Kids’ actor Leo Fitzpatrick and artist Nate Lowman hit the decks to dj for the event, as various art, music and fashion personalities enjoyed the summer evening sipping beers and champagne, including P.S.1‘s  Tim Goossens, model Sigrid Agren, Vogue’s Hamish Bowles and up-and-coming young illustrator Aurel Schmidt.

Surely a last hurrah for Jack and Lazaro after riding a crazy wave in the past few months, culminating in the completion and launch of A#9, their reception of CFDA Accessories of the Year award, and their work with Pitti Immagine as the special guest of the womenswear pre-spring collection presentation. Congratulations guys!

Photos by Steve Eichner, Sherly Rabbani and Josephine Solimene.