“Where Have You Gone Mr. Liberman?”

In the late fall circa 1975, a great gift was bestowed upon me.  What I chose to do with it was another matter.  A meeting was set up with the infamous Alexander Liberman, the editorial director of Conde Nast.  Alex Liberman ran Conde Nast (Vogue in particular at the time).

I remember walking into his large office, and beginning to show him my work.  Now here’s the catch, my work in 1975 was all very personal.  It was landscapes and portraits of laborers, and I’m not sure that I knew why I was there in his office.  The one thing I did know was that I was very scared.

I had a beautiful, carefully presented portfolio with silver gelatin prints mounted carefully on museum board with slip-sheets between each picture.  It was a world I knew and wanted to be a part of.  I don’t know if I was ready for the commercial world of success, assignments, power and money.

He looked very carefully at the work and afterwards exclaimed, “You should be shooting fashion.  You have the eye.”  Now with this comment, my first private thought was “You’re damn right I have the eye.”  But at the same moment, I wondered how did he know?

You see I showed him landscapes and portraits, and he could extrapolate this eye to fashion.  This made perfect sense to me, as I often feel I can do the same thing.

He said, “Get up, young man.”  And took me joyfully to see Roger Schoening, the creative director of Vogue and said, “Hire this man.”  Mr. Schoening took all my pertinent information and I never heard from him again.  I never called him but then again he never called me.

About a year later, I went back to see Mr. Liberman and he seemed annoyed that Mr. Schoening had never hired me, but he said we are reviving Vanity Fair and Bea Feitler is the design director and someone you should meet.  He took me downstairs and introduced me to her, showed her my work and she seemed very enthusiastic.  I kept in touch with her as the magazine was still months from launching but some short time later before the first issue, she died at a very young age.

With her death and my insecurities, I never returned to Conde Nast until many years later.

What I did not know at the time was that what I had encountered in Alex Liberman and Bea Fietler, which I assumed was quite normal, was in effect quite extra-ordinary.

No one since then (except for one time with Bennett) has been able to see a dress through the trees.  People have needed or wanted to see what they were looking for, and generally do not have the vision or perhaps power to take a risk.

Sure once your name has been established, and you have a history and long working relationships, people assign you tasks you have not done before, but no one before or since has ever looked at my landscapes and said “You can do fashion.”

What he saw, I think, was a compositional sense, a sense of beauty and elegance that could translate into fashion.  He saw that I knew how to work with people and was sure I could do this with models.

He had taken the art director, Irving Penn, and had made him into a masterful photographer by giving him over 2,000 assignments over Penn’s career, and now was willing to give me a try.

Alexander Liberman has passed away but to me he was an original voice, surrounded then and today by many who have mastered the art of copy and pretension.

Here’s to you Mr. Liberman.  The world admires you more than you will know.  (Wo, wo, wo)