Focus

The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers

By: Michael Gross

Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne

Length: 15 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

Before Instagram was an art form, fashion photographers were pop culture royalty. From the postwar covers of Vogue until the triumph of the digital image, the fashion photographer sold not only clothes but ideals of beauty and fantasies of perfect lives. Even when they succumbed to temptation and excess, the very few photographers who rose to the top were artists above all.

In his follow-up to the New York Times best-selling Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, Michael Gross probes the lives, hang-ups, and artistic triumphs of more than a dozen of fashion photography's greatest visionaries: Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Melvin Sokolsky, Bert Stern, David Bailey, Bill King, Gilles Bensimon, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Corinne Day, Bob and Terry Richardson, and more. From Avedon's haute couture fantasies and telling portraits to Weber's sensual, intimate, and heroic slices of life, and from Bob Richardson's provocations to his son Terry's transgressions, Gross takes listeners behind the scenes and reveals the revolutionary creative processes and fraught private passions of these visionary magicians.

©2016 Idee Fixe Ltd. (P)2016 Tantor

Good story focus and loved through line

If you care about models and designers who prey on them - this is a book for you. I thought that this listen would be more about deals and creation aspect of the fashion imagery , but most of it was chock full of “salacious” events between models and the photographer.
I did love the imagery and made me look up plenty of images on Pinterest or google things.
Otherwise, I couldn’t wait for this book to be over.

Have The Physical Copy Ready

You’ll wish you had a visual aid for all the photos that are referenced throughout the book. Great story and structure, but the amount of interview dialogue can quickly become confusing.

The narrator is soft and gentle, but doesn’t change their dynamics often and they do mispronounce words and names here and there, which can pull you out of the moment.

Overall, a great use of a credit.

Absolutely superb

Where does Focus rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This is one of the best non-fiction books I've heard in recent memory.

What does Kirby Heyborne bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

There is no disconnect between the reading and the book itself, I often felt as if the author were speaking to me.

Any additional comments?

If you are interested in fashion photography or the history of fashion, this book is peerless. Like taking a grad school course from the best kind of professor. Brilliantly designed, researched, written and framed. I finished and immediately listened to it twice more. Inspiring, educational, fascinating on a human level as well as on a historical level. So many stories here, and the author has tied them together in such a perfectly choreographed manner. If this falls anywhere in your area of interest, I highly recommend.