Focus a Hollywood Reporter “Hot Summer Must-Read”
In its new issue, The Hollywood Reporter’s Andy Lewis names Focus one of its dozen best summer 2016 beach books, calling it “a gossipy peek behind the curtain at the world of fashion photography from the 1940s to the present. Gross (740 Park) knows how to drop names and has any eye for salacious stories […]
Focus is “relentless…sizzling…scandalous,” says Hamptons Magazine
“Before Instagram was king, fashion photographers ruled,” writes R. Couri Hay in this piece (with a photo by Rick Wenner) just posted on the Hamptons blog. “Michael Gross’s new book, Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers, strips their universe down to its underpinnings. Through relentless reporting, Gross lays bare the lives […]
Prunella Darling is mesmerized by Focus
Fashion blogger Prunella Darling (aka Ann Kasper) just posted about Focus. She writes that it is “another page turner [added] to the stack…740 Park, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, Rogues’ Gallery, House of Outrageous Fortune and Unreal Estate – all books that keep the reader mesmerized (the famous who are in the books […]
Flashback: Model on Charlie Rose
Model Lauren Hutton plays a vital role in Focus, which tells why her early champion Richard Avedon banished her from his studio, and how she represented a crucial turning point on his path away from fashion photography. You’ll have to wait ’til July 5th to read that. But in 1995, when I published Model, she […]
Are you down with RPP (Rich People’s Problems)?
I revisit 740 Park, the subject of my 2005 book, in “Fire, Floods, Theft: The Plagues of 740”, in today’s New York Post. All the story is missing is locusts. See if you can ID the frog in the lily pond. UPDATE: Mail Online picked up the story too.
Focus “serves hot dish,” says the New York Daily News
“The author always serves hot dish in books like Model and House of Outrageous Fortune,” Sherryl Connelly writes in the Daily News. “He now reveals the process (wink, nudge) of elite fashion photogs from Richard Avedon to Steven Meisel. Of course, big name models are dragged in, too.” Thanks Sherryl!
Focus on Focus
The first-bound copies of Focus arrived yesterday, hot off the press and still smelling of ink. Here’s mine, posed in front of the first fashion photo I ever acquired, Norman Parkinson’s 1939 image of Pamela Minton leaping off a dune on England’s Isle of Wight. You can pre-order Focus online now for delivery July 5th, […]
FOCUS on Bert Stern
Bert Stern died in 2013 just as I was starting work on Focus, in which he plays a leading role as the one of the most significant fashion photographers of the 1960s. By the time of his death, forty years after a drug-induced nervous breakdown that ended his decade-long run at Vogue, Stern’s fashion work […]
“A sizzling, gossipy read,” says Hamptons Magazine
R. Couri Hay offers a sneak peek at Focus in the Memorial Day issue of Hamptons magazine. “Relentless reporting,” Hay writes, “lays bare the lives of Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Terry Richardson, Irving Penn, Bert Stern, David Bailey, Bill King, Gilles Bensimon and other visionaries…” Focus “strips their universe down to its underpinnings.” […]
Plague Days at 740 Park
After a devastating fire a few weeks ago, the world’s richest apartment building, 740 Park, is now being cloaked in 184 linear feet of sidewalk shed. Why? A source with detailed knowledge of the 1929 building’s woes says that after chunks of limestone fell from its facade last July, causing the FDNY to rush there, […]