Uncle Terry and the Long Game

Few photographers shaped the visual language of this journal as much as Terry Richardson. His work has an almost aggressive plainness—famous and semi-famous faces photographed against bare white walls, direct flash, no flattery, no distance. Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Jonah Hill. The aesthetic looks effortless and is probably far more calculated than it pretends to be, which is itself a kind of skill.

The rumors have been circulating for years. Models have accused Richardson of sexual harassment and rape. He denies everything. Celebrities rally to his defense. The cycle repeats every few years—allegations surface, statements are issued, the noise eventually dies down, and Terry goes back to photographing Lady Gaga and Barack Obama and Tom Ford. It’s been running long enough that the pattern itself became a kind of industry joke with a very unfunny punchline.

Now internal emails from Condé Nast have leaked, indicating that Vogue, GQ, Glamour, and the rest of the portfolio have been instructed to stop working with him. The timing is not subtle—the Harvey Weinstein story broke weeks ago and the entire industry is suddenly very interested in being seen to do the right thing. Whether Condé Nast would have moved without that pressure is a question the emails don’t answer.

What I actually want to know is whether this sticks or whether it’s crisis management with a waiting period attached. The fashion industry has a long history of rehabilitating people it briefly pretended to cancel. My guess is that in two or three years some magazine runs a Richardson shoot, and the accompanying think-piece asks whether we can separate the art from the artist, and the cycle starts again. The better outcome would be someone establishing, once and for all, whether the accusations are true. But that requires accountability rather than optics, and optics are so much cheaper.