Bruce Weber (photographer)

Abercrombie & Fitch Spring Quarterly 2000 cover, photograph by Bruce Weber

In October of 1999, the photographer Bruce Weber saw me painting animal faces in a mask-like style at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s annual St. Francis Day Fair. He hired me to do bodypainting for a photo shoot for the Abercrombie & Fitch Spring Quarterly 2000. Survivor was a hit on TV, so they were going for that, with the models like castaways — he gave me one instruction, “Lord of the Flies”, and when I told him I knew what he meant, he let me paint. I painted 19 models in about 3 hours in a swamp in Florida. He photographed each of the models separately (for the cover and an interior 4 page spread), and then the full group as the sun was starting to set. The foto he chose for the cover was of a model painted in a baboon spirit mask design I had been experimenting with all that summer, as we had been incorporating African mask styles into our faces for the opening of the Congo Gorilla Rain Forest at the Bronx Zoo that year. This gallery includes some of his photos (scanned from the quarterly), and a few of my own snapshots from that session. Return to our main website: agostinoarts.com