Wrestling with convention - Bruce Weber's exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery and the Zelda Cheatle gallery

Interview, Dec, 1997 by Brendan Lemon

The work of Bruce Weber would seem to need no introduction for the readers of this magazine, and yet its breadth is such that even those who think they have kept up with his career may be surprised by some of the two-hundred-plus images currently on display in the Weber exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery through February 8, 1998.

That the work of this very contemporary American photographer is showing in the halls of the history-laden, very British museum (with a related show running at the Zelda Cheatle gallery in the same city) is characteristic of Weber, for throughout his career he has consistently broken boundaries. He can be credited, for example, with helping to open up the fields of fashion, fame, and advertising, and with revolutionizing the image of men. Altogether, Weber's work, which includes portraiture, journalism, and landscape photography, proves the absurdity of the rule that photographers must confine themselves to a specific niche; he rightly considers photography's "niche" to be the world. In a groundbreaking way, Weber has wrestled with convention as unrelentingly as the athletes on this page, captured at a sports camp in Iowa, wrestle with each other.