This fall, photographer Bruce Weber’s new show, “My Education,” at the Prague City Gallery, will reveal 300 images taken over five decades.
One image in particular stands out—a portrait of the Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar staring straight at the camera with an almost cartoonish cat sitting on his great thatch of hair. The broad-faced duo wear similar expressions of round-eyed curiosity. At once intimate and playful, it is vintage Weber.
Animals, a Weber trademark, are given their own space and billing in this thematic exhibition, which also covers fashion, documentary, music, sports, film and video, landscape, portraits, and nudes.
Several years in the making and under the guidance of curator Helena Musilová, the show marks Weber’s return to a country he last visited in 2000, when he photographed the late Heath Ledger for Vanity Fair. Arranged across two floors of Stone Bell House, an extraordinary Gothic bell tower that makes up part of the National Gallery in the city’s old town square, it is Weber’s first European retrospective.
That word makes him wince a little. He is eager to emphasize that this is not about drawing a line under a career—at 78 years old, he is not yet finished. “It is not about ‘bests,’” he says. “This curation is about the people, often women, that have meant something to me in my life.”
One section of the exhibition is dedicated to the late Stella Tennant, a British model who heavily influenced his fashion work. There are also numerous shots of Kate Moss, Isabella Rossellini, Joan Didion, Georgia O’Keeffe, Rachel Feinstein, and C. Z. Guest with her grandsons. And then there are the erotic images of muscled men, both nude and wearing underwear, mostly shot at Bear Pond, in the Adirondacks.
The Taschen catalogue that accompanies the exhibition documents the playful glamour of Weber’s world, where reality and fantasy blend so vividly. Photographed mostly outdoors, these exemplars of health—bodies in flight, tousled hair, and intertwined limbs—exude a joyful energy that is both seductive and wholesome.
Weber’s contributions to the catalogue give it the intimate flavor of a family album, one that conjures nostalgia for a time when all-Americanism felt a little less fraught.
“Bruce Weber: My Education” is on at the Prague City Gallery’s Stone Bell House until January 19, 2025
Catherine Fairweather is a West Country of England–based writer
