Wayne Maser

Vogue Girl · April 14, 2018

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Wayne Maser tells his own story with a dash of surrealism that renders it slightly difficult to believe, but reveals what an unlikely and colorful character he is. He was brought up middle-class in Philadelphia, and when he was college age, his father suggested he go to dental school to avoid the Vietnam War-era draft for three years. He was briefly kicked out “for having a bad attitude,” he says, and talked his way back but never practiced. He briefly studied anthropology, using a camera for the first time photographing greeting behavior for a class, and then enrolled in the Philadelphia College of Art, where he studied under Ray Metzker, a local art photographer.

Maser moved to New York in the late Seventies and, went to work as the house photographer at Ze Records, an influential independent label that bridged the gap between disco and post-punk music, shooting press photos and album jackets. Maser feels he “was just, like, getting by–don’t ask me how—it was all easy-breezy,” until he was offered a trip to London to photograph a rock band and arrived to discover the shoot had been postponed. The art director who’d hired him “wanted to meet chicks so we went to Milan,” Maser says. “I walked into Linea Italiana and they gave me a shoot,” he says, even though he had no portfolio. Back in New York, again virtually unemployed, “I wound up doing very heavy drugs,” Maser claims, found himself “walking to Bloomingdale’s to buy grapefruit juice,” and was vomiting on the street in front of the store when an art director he knew from Philadelphia walked by, and he somehow “ended up on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles in a purple iridescent suit, no sunglasses, with the sun glaring in my eyes.”

What to do? “Maybe I could do pictures here,” he thought. “I never had goals like fashion but I decided to do tests.” He found a makeup artist at Jóse Eber’s hair salon, but “I never did the test,” he says. “Two days later, she called and said she had a job for me.” She took him to see Paul Marciano, a member of a family just getting started in the designer jeans business, “and he gave us carte blanche and we started the Guess? campaign,” Maser says.

Marciano and his three brothers were Moroccan Jews whose family ran clothing shops on the Cote d’Azur in France in the Seventies. They’d just moved to California and decided to start a jeans line to cash in on the designer denim craze. Brother Georges Marciano was the designer; Paul was in charge of marketing their product. “I never heard what was advertising,” he said in 1986. By then, Guess? had become very successful, in large part thanks to multi-page ads shot by Maser. “We evolved very fast with Wayne,” Marciano said, “and started to think more about the image and an attitude than the product.” They came to image advertising out of necessity: they produced so many lines a year that by the time magazines published their ads their items were often already sold out. They chose to shoot themes like cowboys, “very basic things,” Marciano said, “that never will go out of style.”

Maser agreed to shoot what became a first campaign for both Guess? and himself on condition that “I pick the girl and she has to be from Europe, he says. “Marciano let me do whatever I wanted. He really didn’t have a clue.” So he flew in Deirdre Maguire, a short-haired model working in Paris, and shot her on the rocks at Laguna Beach. He admits that, “I didn’t know what I was doing,” either, but thinks that’s why the photos “had a newness and naturalness” that was “completely opposite the times.” Calvin Klein “was who Paul aspired to be,” Maser continues, but he feels that flying in a model with a chic haircut from Paris added something special to the mix, a bit of European spin, “taking a French image and playing it off Americana,” that suited the brand’s French-cut jeans and gave his photos that “newness.” Later, he would shoot the sort of voluptuous girls fashion had long disdained as “commercial” or “classic,” and embraced their sexiness.

“All those girls were Elle magazine girls,” he says. They had newness, too.

Maser wasn’t in it for the girls; though he lived with a model, Lara Harris, between 1987 and 1993, he says he preferred the company of editors and stylists—he dated several and is now married to one. “I found them infinitely more interesting,” he says. “I liked taking pictures. It was a very emotional, controlled experience. That’s what I was concerned with. I was a photographer who had no idea about photography. I had no concept of anything. I had no idea what I was doing. Whatever I had, I’d lose. I just liked the photographic experience.”

Maser was soon working for Vogue, but aware he was a relative amateur, the magazine would called immediately after he returned from his first shoot, asking to see what he had. He’d only done clip tests—processing a few test frames of film–and they were fresh from the lab when he ran them over to Vogue’s art department, and found himself in a room with Alex Liberman. Surrounded by assistants, Liberman seemed aloof and dismissive. “What does this boy think he’s showing us?” he wondered, unsure why he’d come before his film was processed.

“I had no idea who he was,” says Maser, who replied, “Would you prefer to see Debbie Does Dallas?” Then he went home, “with a sinking feeling,” he says. “I blew my career. Too much drugs, much too much alcohol.” But after the film was processed and sent to the magazine, he continues, “Liberman calls and says ‘Bravo, Maser,’ and for the next couple of years we talked regularly. I loved hanging in the art department. He’d give me suggestions. It was kind of cool.”

Maser was soon shooting for Vogue all the time but he wasn’t a good relationship manager. He had a reputation for abusing models and unchecked behavior. Fashion people traded tales of him being arrogant, out of control. “My behavior was so different, I’d get responses that made it interesting,” he admits. “I’m sure I made it much more difficult than it had to be. Vogue was incredibly un-fun. It’s only good if you drink the Kool-Aid.”

After Anna Wintour took over American Vogue, “it just didn’t seem like fun anymore and I started working with [VogueItalia art director] Fabien Baron,” Wayne Maser. “Fabien was much more fun to work with.” When Baron left that year to return to New York, his plan was to open an independent design studio with Gambaccini, but within days, he was offered the top art job at Interview, once Andy Warhol’s magazine. Baron’s tenure there was short, but he gave Maser portrait assignments that the photographer found much more to his liking. “Wayne and Fabien were a perfect pairing,” says Lara Harris.

Meantime, Maser had gone to Liberman, “and said, ‘Alex, no one likes me,’” Maser recalls. “He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Just keep doing it.’ Alex was quite protective.” But Vogue “really really bummed me out.” He decided to move to California and briefly switched his allegiance to Mademoiselle when a new editor took over, but she was fired in 1993 after just a year on the job and by then, Maser was fed up.

“I wanted out,” he says flatly. “I love fashion photography. I don’t understand how fashion photographers keep making the same picture year after year and not getting bored. Fashion photographers are always answering someone else’s questions. If you’re lucky as a photographer, you get to pose the question you want to answer. It didn’t give me what I was looking for. I find it strange people take it so seriously.” Maser pauses. “There’s a lot of cash involved, though.”

That was likely an incentive to return to fashion a few years later, after Baron took over another magazine—but Maser was no longer committed, and again, didn’t stick around. Nowadays, Maser still shoots fashion—and is married to Baron’s ex-wife Gambaccini; their families spent Thanksgiving 2013 together–but says he is happier making portraits for the Italian edition of Vanity Fair, and downplays his contribution to fashion photography. “Everyone at the time was influenced by Bruce,” he says, but he thinks that he was also an “influence along the way. I sexualized American sportswear with a European feel.”

What’s indisputable is that in just one year, 1986, Maser’s advertising photos almost tripled the wholesale volume of Guess to $220 million. (Conant, Sexy Does It 1986) In 1987, sales reached $350 million. Maser began sharing the Guess campaigns with Ellen von Unwerth in 1988; over the next few years, she’d shoot Claudia Schiffer, Eva Herzigova, and Carré Otis for the label. But Maser was back in 1993, shooting Drew Barrymore. “She was the first bad girl celebrity,” he says. “Drew put them over the top. Annual Guess sales hit $700 million thereafter. Religious and women’s groups may have hated, and loudly protested the Guess ads, but to the company’s customers, their hormones raging, those complaints were no more than background noise, if they heard them at all.

mgross.com

Vogue Girl · April 14, 2018

Vogue Germany December 1993 (Cover)

Model/Star: Nastassja Kinski

vogue.de

Vogue Girl · April 14, 2018

Guess? Spring/Summer 1987 (Advertisement)

Models: Frederique van der Wal & Unknown

Photographer: Wayne Maser

archivio.vogue.it (Vogue Italia February 1st, 1987)

Vogue Girl · April 14, 2018

Vogue Italia October 1989

"Assolutamente Colore per I 'Sopra' dell'Inverno"
Model: Lara Harris
Photographer: Wayne Maser
Hair: Bruno Weppe
Makeup: Jo Strettell

archivio.vogue.it

Vogue Girl · April 14, 2018

Vogue Italia February 1989

"Camicie"

Model: Lara Harris

Photographer: Wayne Maser

Hair & Makeup: Skip Carter

archivio.vogue.it via RosieNikolaeva (aka RocketQueen) @ tfs

Vogue Girl · April 14, 2018

US Vogue May 1989

The New Summer Standard
Photographer: Wayne Maser
Model: Cordula Reyer
Fashion Editor: Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele
Hair: Eric Gabriel
Makeup: Maria de Schneider

Scanned by kelles @ tfs

Note: One page is missing.

Vogue Girl · April 14, 2018

US Vogue November 1992

"Out of Woods"

Model: Tatjana Patitz

Photographer: Wayne Maser

Stylist: Brana Wolf

Hair: Serena Radaeli

Makeup: Gary Berkowitz

Scanned by MissIvana @ tfs

Vogue Girl · April 14, 2018

US Vogue July 1986
Soft Dressing...Pure Pleasure!
Photographer: Wayne Maser
Models: Vanessa Duve, Cindy Crawford, Kim Williams, Michelle Eabry & Unknown
Hair: Pascal Crucq
Makeup: Maria de Schneider & Nariko Tamaka