The names alone are calling: Acadia, Gates of the Arctic, Grand Teton, Big Bend, Glacier, Yellowstone, Yellowstone, Yellowstone. National parks so gobsmackingly scenic that you know they are Heaven’s door—or the Big House door in the case of Alcatraz Island, which has been left unlocked for years now. You take that deep breath—once you are off the access road, out of the parking lot, and nary a gift shop in sight—something that partakes of both wonder and well-being floods the system.

There are dozens of national parks in the United States. Some are historical/memorial—Gettysburg, the César E. Chavez National Monument, our friend Alcatraz—but most are of the nature-sublime school. They are picture perfect, pitch perfect: “The lark’s on the wing, / The snail’s on the thorn…All’s right with the world.” Not so fast. Yes and no. David Quammen’s Yellowstone: A Journey Through America’s Wild Heart and Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of the Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks are in the dissection business. Unsurprisingly, they find the essence of sublime. They also find the rot that both fed and feeds the sublime. Everything has to eat, and everyone has an opinion about what should and shouldn’t be eaten.

National parks may be destinations for us tourists, but in fact they are borderlands. Borderlands, by nature, are haunted, beguiling, and fraught. Political borderlands are a case in point, and so are the cultural/physiographic borderlands of parks. Yellowstone is part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. But that ecosystem, which sounds so vast, is “an island in many respects,” writes Quammen, evoking the island biogeography of Robert H MacArthur and Edmund O. Wilson, “an ecological island, surrounded by a sea of human impact. It’s an isolated landscape.” Species preserved by it include grizzly bear, elk, bison, and especially wolf, and “when they step off the island, they generally die.” Bang. The park is one thing, he writes, but it needs its surrounds, the great lowland ranches that have served as a buffer and wintering grounds for many of the park’s animals. Today, those ranches are disappearing into sprawling suburbs and vacation homes. This is bad news for the GYE: the “creeping crisis” of habitat loss and migration-corridor bisection.

But all parks must contend with this cultural “where civilization and wildness meet,” writes Williams, “‘the border area where two patches meet that have different ecological composition’…These edges create lines of tension.” She is 2,600 miles away from Yellowstone in Acadia Nation Park, Maine — which is, in fact, an island. This wildness is very much on Williams and Quammen’s minds; in many national parks it is a paradoxical state, a cultivated wild: “wilderness contained, nature under management, wild animals obliged to abide by human rules,” or there may be retribution. Humans have left their fingerprints everywhere, from wholesale population displacement—the abomination of American Indian removal—to the greed of the Northern Pacific Railroad that was instrumental to creating Yellowstone, to the decisions of which resident animals were welcome and which were not.

“Can we preserve…a gloriously inhospitable landscape, full of predators and prey, in which nature is still allowed to be red in tooth and claw? Can that sort of enclave be reconciled with human demands and human convenience?” asks Quammen. Wolves, mountain lions, and coyotes got the thumbs down; there was a fatwa issued on skunks; grizzlies were hunted until the spectacle of their feasting at dumps pumped up tourist dollars. Griz became a cuddly, like dolphins and pandas. But bison and grizzlies are not housebroken: Lance Crosby ran afoul of a grizzly and her cubs last year. “The sow, after killing and partially eating him (not necessarily in that order) and allowing the cubs to eat too, cached his remains beneath dirt and pine duff.” Hunted to extinction, wolves had to be reintroduced to Yellowstone, to great fanfare and opprobrium. “Occasionally they preyed on livestock…reawakening among ranching communities a vehement wolf-hatred that had lain dormant for decades, like a deep, sore memory of a blood feud.” And wolves are wanderers. Border? What border? Bang.

Williams and Quammen are crack writers of different stripes, though both are tough, curious, and possess a razory sense of humor. Both know when to get on a high horse, and when to get off. Williams makes a “poetic crossing” through a dozen parks, monuments, seashores, and recreation areas in The Hour of the Land, a poetic crossing, she quotes from Edward Hirsch, that “follows the arc from physical motion to spiritual action…into another type of consciousness, a more heightened reality. It is a move beyond the temporal, a visionary passage.” The greatness here lies in her spirit’s palpability. Williams’ hunger for intimate engagement with nature has found her in tight corners, learning “early on we live by wild mercy,” with the scar from 136 stitches running down her forehead to prove it. Unless it kills you, physical pain is nothing compared to fear, and neither compares to the experience when “fear moves out of panic toward wonder.”

Quammen—though he is more the teacher you always prayed for: the artful exegete—too, has felt the experience. Out tagging wolves with Dick Smith, who leads the wolf project in Yellowstone, Quammen closes on a darted wolf, “groggy and helpless, but he was magnificent. ‘Look at those eyes,’ Smith said. ‘That’s wild. This is what our world is trying to do away with. Right here, that look. We want to keep that look. That’s what Yellowstone is all about.’” (The photographs that accompany Quammen’s book are so startling, they appear to be computer-generated images, but they are not. There is a reason National Geographic is known for its photography: photographers blessed with talent, patience, and good fortune. The photographs in Williams’ book, fewer but no less arresting, are in moody black-and-white.)

Williams burns with her convictions: how American Indian reservations and national parks—surprise!!—walk hand in hand; to the schizophrenia of killing a bison to save an elk, or killing a bear if you trespass its personal space; that “wilderness is not a place of privilege, but rather a place of probity, where the evolutionary processes of life are free to continue”; or the Bureau of Land Management does the bidding for the energy companies. Viewshed? What viewshed? Quammen introduces us to governmental ignorance and corruption, and general human folly as regards to practices within the park (like fire suppression), like a quiet assassin, using a thin-bladed knife rather than a shotgun. The two approaches, in these four hands, work their magic on our awareness through zest, heat, and cool.

Yellowstone and The Hour of Land are rich in history—well-versed history and too often a grim history—and brimming with vignettes of the writer’s personal experiences. Neither book is a eulogy, nor a dramatic song of praise. Both are cleared-eyed as to prospects, both are protective, and both have celebrated Edward Abbey, whom Williams references for his “civil disobedience, or more to the point, wild obedience—a guide to finding one’s whole self in relation to wildness,” a nod of “‘democratic vistas’ that your brother Walt Whitman urges us to embrace.”

This park idea—“confused, inchoate, in some ways cynical at the start,” writes Quammen, “was a good idea that has gotten better, a big idea that has gotten bigger over time.” But national parks cannot be diminished or encroached upon, though the BLM (Abbey called it the Bureau of Livestock and Mining) may try. “When habitat is constrained as a small area,” like in selling off those large ranches around Yellowstone, “animal populations remain small, and small populations tend to wink out, over time, owing to accidental factors such as disease, fire, hard weather, and bad luck,” Quammen notes. The answer is more space, more habitat diversity, more life. “Bigger is better.” How odd and rare to hear those words applied to the environment, and how sane.

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The Moscow-Washington “Hot Line” (or “Red Phone,” though it never was red) became operational on August 30, 1963, when the United States sent a first test message — the standard “the quick brown fox . . . ” to which the USSR replied with a poetic description of a Moscow sunset. A Cold War icon, the hot line was the direct result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which exchanges between the Kremlin and the White House sometimes took dangerously long to send and decode. In bilateral agreement that the world deserved better than to be blown up by slow messaging, the two superpowers moved swiftly to a secure teletype system, now replaced by email.

One of the most unsettling chapters in hotline diplomacy occurred during the volatile later stages of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when President Nixon, according to the memoirs of many close to him, was too drunk or too depressed by his Watergate troubles to take command, or not trusted to do so by his secretary of state and national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. It was Kissinger who handled the back-and-forth on the hotline, keeping Nixon isolated until, as commander-in-chief, the president had to make a statement to the media — one that made things far worse, as Kissinger saw it. “The crazy bastard really made a mess with the Russians,” he tells White House chief of staff Alexander Haig in an October 26, 1973 telephone conversation.

Kissinger: First we had information of massive movement of Soviet forces. That is a lie. Second, this was the worst crisis since the Cuban missile crisis. True, but why rub their faces in it . . .

Haig: How about the rest of it. Disaster.

Kissinger: Yes, a disaster of something that is already a disaster. We are getting a hot line message tonight . . .

Recent books on Nixon and Kissinger draw different lessons from the Yom Kippur crisis, when Kissinger and a handful of his associates, none of them elected, took control of the hotline and the nation. In Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, Robert Dallek describes the crisis, which Kissinger managed to turn into a personal diplomatic victory, as a failed opportunity to realize the inherent dangers in an administration that malfunctions at the highest level:

The fact that the crisis ended without a Soviet-American military confrontation and with a groundbreaking agreement by Egypt to hold direct talks with Israel to rescue its Third Army, which was still surrounded, represented a significant gain for Nixon’s foreign policy. The Yom Kippur War then became not a cautionary tale of the need for an engaged president but a reinforcement of the belief that a weakened president could rely on skilled subordinates to effectively manage an overseas crisis.

The prospect of an under-informed or loose-canon president, allowing or requiring others to shape policy or control damage, looms over several recent books. Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman begins with a Kissinger statement Grandin reads as his guiding principle: “The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.” This mind-set, Grandin ominously notes, is what makes “Kissingerism without Kissinger” alive and well today.

In Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy, David Milne examines nine thinker-politicians who have had a dominant impact on “the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy.” Milne portrays Kissinger, one of the nine, as a man “combining genuine insight with reckless bellicosity, seminal diplomatic achievements, and vivid illustrations of how an amoral worldview can lead to immoral outcomes.” But the fundamental conclusion for Milne, especially with the 2016 election upon us, is that foreign policy and the diplomacy needed to execute it must be based on informed historical perspective rather than personality-driven promises and perspectives:

Ultimately it is through studying history and aspiring towards objectivity — it is the trying that counts, for its achievement is impossible — that foreign policymakers can study dilemmas, contexualize threats, compare their magnitude to resources available, weigh humanitarian and reputational imperatives, and offer appropriately calibrated responses.

 

Image: Mock “Hot Line” from the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, via Wikipedia.

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Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers marks Michael Gross’s return to the arena that he explored two decades ago in Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, his big-selling authorial debut, for which he drew on a fifteen-year run covering the fashion beat for outlets like the New York Times and New York magazine. Then Gross decided to shift gears. “As appealing as it was to spend three months a year sitting next to runways, getting paid to watch the most beautiful girls in the world walk back and forth,” he says, “I wanted to stop, and to write about, in an uninterrupted way, what I thought of as the world of the American aristocracy.”

Over the ensuing two decades, Gross generated four lengthy books on the One Percent through the prisms of real estate (740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building; House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address: and Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles) and art (Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals that Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art). For good measure, he found time to write a synoptic cultural history of the Baby Boom by interweaving the stories of such varied signifiers as Mark Rudd, Marianne Williamson, and Nina Harley (My Generation: Fifty Years of Sex, Drugs, Rock, Revolution, Glamour, Greed Valor Faith and Silicon Chips) and an unauthorized biography of Ralph Lauren (Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren).

In 2014, Gross, again looking to pivot, mentioned to his agent over lunch a friend’s decision to abandon an authorized biography of Richard Avedon — who had suggested to Gross that he write Model — in the face of pressure from Avedon’s heirs.

“I had the lightbulb-over-the-head moment to take Model, turn the camera around, and point it at the guys behind the camera rather than the girls in front of the camera,” Gross said in his East Side apartment. “I immediately knew that I wanted to write about the fascinating culture of fashion photography, which has been dominated by gay and straight men who are fascinated with women in some way or another. And I had my next book.”

Gross rediscovered numerous interviews with fashion photographers, taken during the process of “over-reporting” Model. Piggybacking on this “gift from God,” he wrote a 600-page draft, then pruned to a publisher-mandated 400, following the imperative that “anyone who wasn’t part of the forward motion of the core narrative spine had to go, even though it meant that women and photographers whom I admire are under-represented.”

The final product is a tightly written, exhaustively researched, chronological account of the ways in which such high-profile photographers as Avedon and Irving Penn, Bert Stern and David Bailey, Bruce Weber and Stephen Meisel — to name a short list — intersected with the gatekeepers of the fashion business and magazine publishing, from the days after the Second World War until the digital revolution irrevocably altered the playing field at the end of the twentieth century. As is his custom, Gross skillfully juxtaposes the idiosyncracies, peccadillos, and debaucheries of his protagonists — sometimes teetering on the precipice of Too Much Information — with the shifting cultural and economic milieu in which they functioned. —Ted Panken

 

The Barnes & Noble Review: Fashion became your beat around 1980.

Michael Gross: I started when I was a history major at Vassar by co-writing a series of mystery novels with a fashion model detective character who fought back against icky men. Thus, I entered the world of models. That led me to start writing about fashion in the early ’80s, which led me to Photo District News, where I got a column on fashion photography, which led to Manhattan Inc., where I got a column on fashion, which led to the New York Times — and boom, suddenly I was important, with access to the inner sanctums.

BNR: What drew you to fashion?

MG: I wrote about rock ‘n’ roll for ten years, and rock stars dated models. So models were peripheral parts of my world. Rock stars wore fancy clothes. I became aware of fashion that way. And I got to know girls who knew about fashion. One pretty girl showed me my first copy of British Vogue back in the days of Bea Miller, and I became aware of these pictures that were amusing, shocking, stimulating. It was simultaneously the visual thing of liking fashion pictures and the hormonal thing of liking the girls who appeared in them. Instead of becoming a model fucker, I married a fashion designer, and I segued into writing about fashion. Model was the period at the end of the sentence. It wasn’t consciously a bridge-burning book, but it got a lot of people angry at me.

BNR: Because there was so much “dish,” as people say?

MG: “Dish” is stuff that’s unsourced, that’s “we hear.” Model was obsessively sourced. I would say it was reporting without concerns that constrain a beat reporter. A beat reporter needs to go back to the same people, over and over again. If you burn all your sources, then they will not talk to you, and you will cease to function as a beat reporter. I saw what fashion did to the people I sat with in the front row. I used to draw pictures in my notebook of frowning women. Ten or twenty years of that turned them into something less than enthusiastic participants in the circus. Bitter and unhappy, getting older while the girls on the runway stay young, unable to wear those clothes because they’re cut for twelve-year-olds — for a thousand reasons. I loved the subject matter and the people, but I didn’t want to be beholden to those people. I am not constitutionally fit to be a beat reporter on a single beat for my entire life.

BNR: Your father, Milton Gross, did that.

MG: My father was a sports reporter his whole life, yes. And died young.

BNR: You embarked on this project after a twenty-year hiatus from fashion, although I assume you remained cognizant about developments.

MG: Any normal human being would look back and ask, “Do I regret leaving?” I paid enough attention to know that I didn’t. Every season, I go to at least one fashion show, never more than two or three, just to remind myself how glad I am not to be doing it all the time. I was in the front row at the moment that the fashion world began to change from what it had been, which was a cottage industry, to what it became, which was a form of entertainment. During the twenty years since, I missed the complete and total end of that era, and the conquest of the world of fashion by what I saw enter the tent.

BNR: Describe the dynamics that engendered that change.

MG: Big brands. Big money. Lots of attention. The end of fashion as an elitist preoccupation, and its evolution into a form of mass market entertainment. It’s really that simple.

BNR: What connects Focus with your prior books?

MG: I am interested in deconstructing carefully constructed images, whether I am writing about the model business, in which what we see is the finished product of the perfect picture; or Ralph Lauren, in which what we see is the perfectly manicured world of Polo; or the lives of the rich; or the Metropolitan Museum, which is a seething cauldron of all of the worst aspects of mankind, but what you see is the best of mankind. How did this get to be? What’s going on beneath the pretty surface? That’s what connects them all.

BNR: There are a lot of pairings. Avedon and Penn. Brodovitch and Liberman. Meisel and Weber. Anna Wintour and Diana Vreeland or Liz Tilberis.

MG: Conflict always drives narrative. I didn’t impose those narrative conflicts. All I did was clear away the sand to look at them a bit more carefully. Anna Wintour: besides her professional conflicts, the magazine business changed since the days of Vreeland, and Anna has been as commanding a presence to fashion magazines since the ’80s as Avedon was to fashion photography in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. A certain amount of creativity, but more than anything, I think, the will to be number one. When you are number one, people will try to scale the mountain and knock you off, which inevitably means conflict.

BNR: “Sordid” is in the title, and you document louche behavior throughout the timeline in considerable detail.

MG: I wake up in the morning, and before I have my cup of coffee I read the New York Post, and then, once I’ve had my cup of coffee, I read the New York Times. I like both ends of the spectrum — tabloid and broadsheet. I have worked in both environments. What I do well that perhaps confuses a lot of people is: I do both. I am just as interested in the loftiest, most intellectual ways of looking at my subjects as I am in getting down at ground level and seeing how people who are very influential — fashion designers who create ads that promote certain ways of living or wealthy people who pull the strings of the economy or of government — really behave. What drives them? What is their motivation? What creates these people who express their power and influence in the world? There is a mistaken notion that if you’re writing about the nitty-gritty of human behavior when it gets a little funky, you’re engaged in writing gossip. You’re not. I don’t do anything but accurately reflect the behavior of the people I’m writing about, without being afraid of talking about the stuff that’s a little louche. The reality of human behavior is captivating. Tacitus wrote about people’s behavior.

BNR: How did you decide on proportion within the strictures of 400 pages?

MG: I left a lot out. When I was writing about rich people, I’d always say that I spared the children and I tried not to go into the bathroom. But then again, there were all the people who went to the bathroom not to go to the bathroom but to snort coke — and then you had to go to the bathroom with them! You try to use your judgment, and when, in the case of someone like Bill King or Bert Stern, the misbehavior actually takes over the individual narrative, then, to be responsible, you include the misbehavior and you accurately describe it.

In the book, Bill King represents the ’70s and the ’80s, when the fashion business was devastated, decimated by AIDS. Bill King was an extreme case of decadent behavior of the sort that was quite popular in the ’70s and ’80s, and yet, as extreme as he was, many people indulged in the same sort of behavior, and many paid the same sort of price for their indulgence.

BNR: It’s a disparate cast of characters. Do you see common characterological traits?

MG: A fascination with the moment. A fascination with gesture and mannerism. A fascination, whether it’s negative or positive, with women. And over all of those (because it kept coming up; it wasn’t something that I imposed; people kept talking about it), a kind of erotic voyeurism. The act of photography is, at its best, an act of voyeurism. No, you’re not looking through a peephole in the ceiling of the voyeur’s motel. You’re looking through a camera and a lens. But a separating, a distancing happens when you look through a lens, and it becomes a form of voyeurism. And voyeurism, for good or ill, is a form of worship, and worship sometimes is uplifting and sometimes is derogation.

BNR: Presumably, each photographer that you examine signifies broader cultural currents in the period in question.

MG: I felt that each of them, in their unique and individual ways, best represented their moment.

BNR: How was Richard Avedon the best representative of his moment?

Avedon represented the moment when fashion cut the cord to formalism. He was still more of a couture sensibility than a street sensibility. But for the first time, pictures breathed. Avedon was ceaselessly curious, broadly knowledgeable, so open to stimulus. His photographs become a vessel, and culture pours into the vessel in one end and is moderated, mediated, and comes out as an image that is incredibly representative of the times. Avedon so dominates this book because Avedon was driven to dominate his field for longer than anyone else. The guy died with his boots on, more than fifty years after his first pictures were published. That is a remarkable career in which — to cite Alexei Brodovitch — the average lifespan is that of a butterfly.

BNR: Bert Stern?

MG: The image on the cover of Model is a Bert Stern photograph of David Bailey and Veruschka: model dominant, photographer lying on the ground. It inspired the famous still from Antonioni’s movie Blow-Up, in which it’s photographer dominant, model (also Veruschka) lying on the ground. Originally, Bailey was going to be the photographer for the ’60s, not Bert Stern. I didn’t know that Bert Stern had been one of the three most important fashion photographers in the world in the early ’60s. There’s a reason why. Bert Stern became a speed freak and destroyed his career, and all he was known for any more were his photos of Marilyn Monroe. But I was told by a friend who knows much more about fashion photography than I that I had to do Bert Stern. I discovered was that this was a fascinating life, a case study in self-destruction. He was an important photographer who took a lot of great fashion pictures — more journeyman than genius, but a journeyman who ascended to the top of the heap. But what made him so fabulous was his extraordinary embrace of the lifestyle that brought him down. And his story had never been told.

Bert Stern represented the apogee of the fashion photographer during the mid-’60s, when the fashion photographer became, as Bert Stern himself put it to me, “a thing.” Bert Stern became “the thing.” He became THIS guy about whom Antonioni based a movie, Blow-Up, along with Bailey, the two other members of the English trinity — Bill Duffy and Terence Donovan — and Bill Helburn.

BNR: I was intrigued by your account of the impact of European fashion magazines and photographers during the ’70s, and of Bensimon’s reign at Elle.

MG: There were two main strains in the ’70s. There were the quirky, weird, erotic, dark pictures of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, and a little bit of Chris von Wangenheim, who was kind of Newton Light; and these long lens, outdoor, quick-and-easy, snapshot-style photographers who were French and scored with a lot of models. I covered the Frenchies in great depth in Model but hadn’t done Bensimon. However, I had written a profile on Bensimon fifteen years ago for Talk magazine. The story never ran. Talk‘s publisher was Ron Gullotti, who was formerly the publisher of Vogue. The editor was Tina Brown, formerly the publisher of Vanity Fair. Both came out of Condé Nast. It was told to me that Gullotti did not want to run a story that affirmed the fact that this little French magazine called Elle had put the fear of God into Vogue in the ’80s and the ’90s, had caused the ascension of Anna Wintour, caused the ascension of Liz Tilberis, caused the entire fashion magazine industry and fashion photography to change. That was happened at the moment when Condé Nast fired Diana Vreeland, and Vogue went from selling 400,000 copies a month to 1.2 million copies a month under Grace Mirabella, who put out a magazine full of happy snaps that extolled the new, sexually liberated, empowered woman. The huge irony was that the representatives of this new, empowered woman were the very girls who were being used as dartboards by these horny swordsmen who were dominating fashion photography, even though they weren’t particularly great photographers.

I defy you to find a Gilles Bensimon photograph that could stand on a museum wall next to an Avedon or a Penn or a Newton or a Turbeville. But Gilles Bensimon ran Elle. I quote an executive at the company that published Elle: “Gilles is Elle and Elle is Gilles.” He is the only fashion photographer who ever stood astride that world in that way — the primary photographer on a magazine that he ran. Having said all that, Bensimon was incredibly important to the story of modern fashion photography.

BNR: Bruce Weber receives a very sympathetic treatment. You emphasize his centrality to the shift in creative impetus from the fashion editorial side to such clients as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.

MG: Weber entered the industry at the moment when the epicenter of creativity ceased to be the magazines, and, for a brief period of time, became all about the brands. This was also the literal moment when I began writing about fashion photography, and some of the first things I ever wrote were about Weber. He created the image of Ralph Lauren and of Calvin Klein. He embodied the moment when the advertiser became so important.

But apart from Weber’s pivotal role in the development of the business of fashion photography, the underlying messages of his photographs represented a huge change. Very few fashion photographers can be said to have changed the world. Bruce Weber changed the world. Bruce Weber showed men as sex objects. Bruce Weber allowed women to wear men’s underwear. Sounds stupid, but Bruce Weber was on the cutting edge of a cultural change that is still playing out. I write that if you start with Bruce/Caitlin Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair and work your way backward to where that started in terms of visual imagery, it starts with Bruce Weber photographing Jeff Aquilon with his hands down his tighty-whities for Details, a renegade, out-of-the-mainstream little fashion magazine at that point (it wasn’t yet a Condé Nast magazine). Those pictures changed everything.

It was Bruce Weber who shot a campaign of transgender people for Barneys New York. It was fashion photography not only engaging with its moment, but being right out front and saying a moment is coming and it’s important — pay attention. Bruce Weber dragged society into a world in which gender was recognized as fluid, not binary. Bruce Weber is the first person to put that conversation in the mass market. He was also the first photographer to do those conceptual portfolios that all told a story and added up to something. He was perhaps not the first photographer to create a troupe around himself. Avedon did that. But Bruce Weber certainly perfected that, and made it a leitmotif of his career. You don’t get to keep doing that kind of work for 40 years if you’re not doing great and important work.

BNR: And why Stephen Meisel?

MG: The ultimate postmodernist fashion photographer. He’s a magpie. He picked up this, picked up that, stole from Avedon, stole from Stern, stole from everybody, threw it in his fertile little mind, mixed it all up and came up with something quintessentially new and Stephen Meisel. I wrote a critical piece about Meisel when Sex, the Madonna book, came out. But over time, I saw how strong he was. Meisel’s photographs grab your eyeballs. His name is unquestionably first on a list of the photographers who mattered most in the ’90s.

BNR: Then, at the cusp of the millennium, digital technology supersedes film, and a seismic shift occurs.

Digital changed the tools. Digital changed the science. Digital changed the product. Digital changed the medium — the medium was magazines and advertisements, and suddenly magazines were facing existential threats. Digital changed retailing. Digital changed communication. Digital changed brand marketing. Digital changed the fashion business. Economically, fashion was ceasing to be a cottage industry and was becoming an international phenomenon, which is also driven by the Internet, driven by digital, driven by the fact that an image is transmitted to the entire world instantly. Digital changed the process. You snap the shutter, the image appears on a screen. It’s instantaneous.

The switch from film to digital changed all of these things at once. Let’s not say “digital.” Let’s say technology caused a break. An era ended and a new era began. Some photographers were able to adapt. Other photographers didn’t. Fashion photography continues. It’s different. Magazines continue. They are different. The fashion industry continues. It’s different. Even though there are a thousand bridges over that divide, there’s a divide. There are people who hate it. There are people who celebrate it. There are people who look at it and think, “Mmm, this is interesting.” I’m probably in the third group.

You mourn the end of something that you loved. I love black-and-white photography and fashion photographers of that half century — their expertise, their wonkiness, their craft. It spoke to me. The cold computer-assisted graphic illustration that is masquerading as photography today doesn’t. It’s a different craft. The primacy of individual creativity has been lost. Now it’s imagery by committee.

It comes back to the question of what’s next. I’m optimistic. I persist in believing there’s someone out on the street right now with a cell phone taking the next great fashion photograph. We just haven’t seen it yet — or it hasn’t jumped out of the flood of 7 trillion digital images that we now all see all day long.

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Of the nearly 2 million youth experiencing homelessness in the US, over forty percent identify as LGBTQ even though LGBTQ youth make up only eight percent of the total population. Though they make up such a large percentage of homeless youth, LGBTQ youth are significantly more likely to experience victimization and harassment than their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts. One in five transgender women report having experienced homelessness at one time or another in their lives and many would prefer to sleep on the streets than face the discrimination and violence found in some shelters. Ryan Berg, author of No House to Call My Home, is all too aware of these staggering numbers. His book, which was published last year and appears in paperback this August, chronicles the years he spent as a caseworker in two group homes for LGTBQ youth in New York City. The memoir revolves around the stories of eight youth who whose struggle to make ends meet is compounded by the trauma and abuse they experienced at the hands of their families and communities. It also demonstrates, on a heartbreakingly intimate level, how systemic racism, economic injustice and the failures of the government and the foster care system intertwine to make mobility, safety and financial stability nearly impossible to attain for homeless youth.

In 2015, No House to Call My Home won the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction and the ALA listed it as one of their Top 10 LGBTQ books of the year. However, Berg says he continues to be surprised by how little news coverage and mobilization he’s seen around LGBTQ youth homelessness in general.

“Where’s the community outrage?” he wondered. “People often don’t want to read about tragedy unless there is redemption in the end? Then we need to create that redemption. If we mobilized half as much and showed half the ingenuity as we did in the fight for marriage equality, the LGBTQ community, and their allies, could make a real impact on LGBTQ youth homelessness. These young people have had to face enough indignities. They shouldn’t have to face erasure and neglect from their own community.”

Despite the lack of media attention, Berg continues to receive requests to speak nationally about the book and about youth homelessness. He uses these opportunities to do stage something very different than the traditional literary reading.

“In each city I visit I invite community organizers, service providers and youth to join me. I encourage a community conversation about the unique challenges that that city is facing in relation to LGBTQ youth homelessness. I find that people are typically wanting to engage. They have questions about how communities can begin to fill the gaps in services for young people.”   The readings also give young people who have had experiences similar to those of the book’s protaganists the chance to speak with Berg and share their stories. It is this kind of intimate connection that makes Berg feel like the work he’s doing is worthwhile. “Recently, a high school student came up to me after the reading. She told me her parents refused to accept her identity. She came home one day to find that they had moved away without telling her, leaving her homeless. She said she saw herself reflected in the story I read. Not only in the family rejection, but in the resiliency… She said, ‘I just wanted to thank you. I feel so invisible in my life. Listening to you felt like being seen.’ If this book touches one young person and helps them rediscover their value, I feel it has done its job.”

The release of Berg’s book has also changed his relationship to writing in ways that he didn’t expect. Initially, he says, he had no interest in journalism, but, after No House to Call My Home, he found himself writing more op-eds and short essays about the LGBTQ homeless youth crisis. “I learned over time that the work I do in direct service and my writing life are not mutually exclusive. In fact they’ve become intrinsically intertwined. Each influences the other. Both are done through the lens of social justice. My youth work is about taking actionable steps to evoke change in my community; my writing (hopefully) is about how the power of stories can become transformational and build empathy and understanding for those of us who have historically been marginalized.”

Since the book’s publication, there have been some positive strides in training child welfare professionals to pay attention to the “unique needs and challenges faced by LGBTQ youth,” and more data is being collected on the dangers that LGBTQ homeless youth experience. But, Berg cautions, there is much that remains to be done. The Runaway Homeless Youth Act, for instance, which would have provided crucial government funding for street outreach, shelters and transitional housing and “is designed with LGBTQ cultural competency in mind”, was introduced in January of 2015 but never passed the Senate.

Berg now works at Avenues for Homeless Youth in Minneapolis. Their GLBT Host Home Program is a unique, nationally recognized model because it remains small and volunteer run, circumventing many of the systems that created such disfunction for the youth in his book. The host home program matches GLBT-identified and ally adult hosts with GLBT-identified homeless youth. Unlike traditional foster care, the hosts are not paid to house youth and youth choose the host they would like to be paired with based on an application the host fills out, not the other way around. One of the young people Berg works with at Avenues is a writer and was excited to connect with a published author. “I’m trying to help her find creative writing classes that suit her needs. She blogs and writes beautifully. The fact that we have writing in common seems to strengthen our bond a bit. We can talk about the craft of writing, and I don’t think she has anyone else she shares that with.”

Ultimately, Berg hopes that No House to Call My Home will continue to carve out a space for homeless youth in which they feel safe enough to write their own memoirs. “Personal narrative is a corrective to history, a way for marginalized populations to resist erasure. We tell our stories and collectively we reshape the narrative.”

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