Legendary fashion photographer Bruce Weber is full of music.  Witness the jazzy, balletic expressionism of his pictures, the soulful fabric of his films—including the Chet Baker bio Let’s Get Lost—and you see it.  Listen to his cherubic, Zen giggling and you can hear it.  Talk to him for five minutes and you get a concert of the marvelous melodies in his mind.

“I like music as a remembrance of things I’ve done in my life,” he says.  “You know, just that beauty of driving in a car and being with someone you really care about, sharing a song on the radio… I come from the generation that grew up listening to the radio.  And a radio was like an escape tool—like the iPod is for someone today.  I would just count the minutes until I’d get to bed at night and listen to this woman—she was called The Nightbird, Alison Steele—and she had this really dreamy, kinda Julie London-kind of voice.  I’d just curl up in bed and listen to her. My parents would come up and shut the radio off trying to get me to go to sleep and I’d turn it on when they left the room.  I was up until 3 or 4 in the morning listening to her.  When I was a kid I felt like I had an affair with her because I listened to her in bed all the time.”

One of Weber’s earliest gigs as a photographer sent him on tour with Frank Zappa and he attributes much of his musical awakening to that trip coupled with his experiences during college.  “When I was going to NYU film school the school itself was right above the Fillmore East and, you know, I felt like that was important, to go to a lot of concerts.”  Weber’s sister, who worked in the music industry—with acts like Ike & Tina and David Bowie—aided the process by providing Weber with free tickets.  “One of the most memorable nights,” he says, lighting up, “was going to see Laura Nyro.  Later I got to do a story on her.”  This guy, who I have known to fill up an entire convertible with CDs on a single outing to Amoeba Music in Los Angeles, can geek out with the best of ‘em.  “I was a big, big fan of the Allman Brothers,” he says, riffing, or maybe just going down a playlist in his head.  “I really love this album that Greg Allman did called Laid Back—in fact, now that I’m talking about it I’m gonna get it again.  Man, you got me thinking about all this great music!”

Weber laughs when I ask him about the response to “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.”  The short film about his subjects’ willingness (or lack thereof) to pose nude that he made for the YSL men’s fall collection, boasting songs by Weber’s favorite, Marvin Gaye, has become something of a sensation online and Bruce is a little bit shy of all that attention. “You know I like to hide out,” he says.  “My friends from Paris call me and they goof on me a lot about it.  But I try to do my work and believe in it and then go on to something else, you know.  I don’t like to live with it on my shoulders for a long time.”

Time is indeed at a premium when you are as busy as Weber is these days.  Outside of his brand-defining work for Abercrombie & Fitch there is the campaign for Italian jacketeer Moncler, a dizzying number of mammoth editorial spreads for Vanity Fair, W, and all the Vogues, his own fashion line Weberbuilt, his publishing company Little Bear and its wonderful collector’s pieces including the “All-American” series, and… oh!, his movies.  In between everything else Weber has filmed “a bunch” of short films over the last two and half years and is trying to carve out some time to edit them.  “Also, I made a film last year called Liberty City is like Paris to Me about the Haitian community down here [Miami] and it went up in Sundance and then The Sundance Channel, this summer, they did something really crazy: they played all my films—my documentaries, my shorts, my interviews, all this stuff.  I was hiding out in Montauk and it was strange to, like, forget that it was on and turn the TV on and see this movie—I’m like, man, that looks familiar! And then I realize it’s my film.  And then I wanted to hide for a little bit because I thought it was strange, you know?  But then something incredible happened on August 13^th, [his partner and producer] Nan’s birthday.  We were just having this quiet birthday and I was like, hey, Let’s Get Lost is on—let’s just watch like ten minutes of it.  We ended up watching the whole movie!  It was so much fun because we were so relaxed, you know? We weren’t in a movie theatre; we weren’t at a film festival.  It was really great to talk about everyone who is still here, who is not here anymore and how much we miss Chet.”

I ask if Bruce, who shot a powerful, fun and powerful story with Karen Elson in a still-reeling New Orleans a couple years back, and has significant ties with the Haitian community in Miami, is planning on heading down to that earthquake-shattered country.  “I am.  Definitely,” he says.  “Probably in a couple months.  I don’t want to take any seats away from doctors right now.”  And, as it does in Weberland, one question opens up a story, and the music starts playing:  “About two years ago I did a fifty page supplement for the Miami Herald which dealt with the Haitian community and the unjust laws the U.S. government were putting on Haitian immigrants.  See, when a boat comes over and say there is a Haitian person on there, no matter whether they are wet or dry they pick them up and separate the families—fathers from sons, mothers from daughters—and put them in these detention centers which are really terrible places (I’ve been to them).  A couple weeks go by and the Catholic services down here tries to help them but most of them are sent back to prison in Haiti (or killed down there when they get back home).  So, I thought, how am I going to photograph this, you know?  Here I am a fashion photographer always photographing certain kinds of people.  I thought, I’m going to turn this into something that people who I know in the Miami community, who don’t have friends who were Haitian—all they see is pictures of them struggling, trying to save their life by coming to America—can understand.  I thought, what I can do is to take the pictures and let people think, ‘these people are just like us—they’re proud, they’re happy, they’re loving.’”  There is no irony—just a majestic amount of understatement—when he says, “It did pretty well and raised a certain amount of feeling about the Haitian community.  Ted Kennedy saw it and invited us up to Washington to do a show in the Rotunda of the Capitol building.”

Bruce, being Bruce, hired a Haitian musician to perform during the show and the performance had a powerful impact on the late Lion of the Senate.  “Teddy Kennedy got up and spoke, and he had tears in his eyes and he said, ‘I haven’t heard music in this room since Bobby declared he was running for president.  It brings back such great memories.  How beautiful to hear music in here.’”

Turns out there’s more where that came from—and, fortunately, Bruce is sharing it with the rest of us.

bruceweber.com