From the New York Times archives

July 7, 1991
Fashion; Hot Shot
By RUTH LA FERLA
Sherilyn Fenn luxuriates in the hot studio light like a cat lazily sunning herself. Wearing bright lacquered nails and very little else, Fenn, who played the sultry Audrey Horne on the now defunct television series "Twin Peaks," is fixing the camera with a come-and-get-it gaze that recalls the young Jane Russell.

Crouched behind the lens, chanting "more, more, more," Steven Meisel is urging Fenn to heat up her performance. Then, all at once, the shutter is silent, the single movie lamp goes black, and Fenn gets up to break for lunch, shedding much of her magic as she goes.

The actress, who is being photographed for an advertising campaign for Dolce & Gabbana, an avant-garde Italian fashion company, is actually short, slightly plump and flat-featured. But all that matters to the controversial fashion photographer is the instant in which he frames her. This is the moment in which he tranforms his subjects into creatures of unreal, extravagant beauty. "When this happens" -- Meisel joins his hands to form an imaginary aperture -- "that's what counts."

For Meisel, glamour and beauty are also the end products of painstaking, surgically precise manipulation. Unlike Bruce Weber, who carved out a reputation for himself in the 1980's by photographing comely young men and women in a naturalistic style, Meisel, who is in his late 30's, has become the man to watch by specializing in artifice. Although his turf is fashion, he is most widely known for his provocative yet faintly chilling portraits of Madonna and other mega-celebrities in Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and Interview.

"We used to call this the clinic," he says of his forbiddingly whitewashed studio on Park Avenue South in Manhattan. Meisel, who is shunned by many in the industry for his shrill, peremptory manner, becomes gleeful and sweetly candid when he talks about the days, in the mid-80's, when he and his cohorts donned surgical masks to "operate" on -- make ready for the camera -- such now-famous beauties as the models Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista. Meisel says the images he produces, which tend to be stylized and meticulously lit in the manner of old movie stills, are the product of a creative alchemy that blends the talents of photographer, model, stylist and makeup artist alike. But Evangelista counters that it is Meisel himself who is clearly, forcefully in charge.

At one photo session, not long ago, the photographer playfully gave Evangelista a "facelift," pulling her skin taut with string and surgical tape, an experiment the 25-year-old model took with good grace. "Sometimes I feel like Steven's Barbie doll," she says evenly. "He knows my every flaw. But I don't think it would be any fun for him to start out with something perfect."

Far from it. Meisel's obsession with transformation once led him to make up and photograph a young man as a woman. (The portrait appeared in Interview.) "We called him Astrid and convinced everyone that he was a famous model from the 60's," he says with a cackle. "People were actually saying, 'Doesn't Astrid look wonderful! How did you coax her back?' "

But it is the seditionary in Meisel, rather than the prankster, that has pushed him to more shocking extremes. In his portfolio, alongside such hyper-elegant images as that, from a recent Italian Vogue, of a willowy model regally posed in a Valentino gown, are others of a searing ferocity. In one, Evangelista, wearing fishnet gloves, claws at her face as if to tear it from its moorings. James Danziger, who has shown Meisel's work in his downtown Manhattan gallery, calls him an "anti-beauty fashion photographer."

"There's a sense of death in his pictures," says Juan Gatti, who is the former art director of Italian Vogue, "the drive to recreate something that time forgot."

The touch of the macabre in even Meisel's most gorgeous pictures, along with his somewhat satanic appearance -- he dresses exclusively in black and lets his glossy raven mane cascade to his shoulders -- have doubtless contributed to his almost mythical status as a brooding fashion guru. Michael Jackson recently approached Meisel for guidance in revamping his outdated image. More recently the actress Sean Young called him to inquire about a possible makeover.

The photographer's scandalous doings are regularly chronicled in the gossip columns. The photographer Bert Stern is said to be incensed over Meisel's pinup-style pictures of Madonna in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, which he says plagiarize his own photographs of the young Marilyn Monroe. On the subject, Meisel coolly replies, "Hey, everybody samples." This summer, New York police officers were seen ripping from subway walls Meisel's "safe sex" posters, shot to raise money for AIDS research, which showed male couples in a variety of erotic postures.

Amid all the uproar, Meisel remains unflappable. He is after all a hot property, not only in Milan, where his work has given Italian Vogue a bold new identity, but also on his home turf. Meisel likes to boast that he commands advertising fees between $20,000 and $30,000, "just for walking in the door."

In his studio are Lucite-framed magazine covers of Madonna, Audrey Hepburn, Liza Minnelli and other cultural icons. Yet Meisel claims he is not about to let these celebrity portraits overshadow his fashion work. "Young photographers," he says with a sneer, "all they talk about is photographing personalities. But for me, fashion and models are more glamorous than ever."