On a Times Square morning in August 1982, on the side of a seven-story building at the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, the Calvin Klein company installed an approximately seventy-foot-high billboard for its new Men’s Underwear line. The advertisement consisted of a single image: a twenty-five-year-old Brazilian pole vaulter named Tomás Hintnaus, photographed from below, wearing only a pair of white cotton briefs, his suntanned body leaned back against a whitewashed wall, his face slightly turned away from the camera, the bright blue Aegean sky behind him. The Calvin Klein logo appeared in small type at the lower right corner. The image had been shot earlier that summer on the Greek island of Santorini by a thirty-six-year-old American photographer named Bruce Weber.
The billboard caused minor traffic disruption in its first week. The Times Square pedestrian volume in front of the building rose measurably. Within days, the billboard was vandalized for the first time. Within thirty days, the image had appeared on the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time. Within six months, Calvin Klein Men’s Underwear sales had risen substantially. American Photographer magazine would later name it one of “Ten Pictures That Changed America.”
The image was the most consequential single advertising photograph of the 1980s. It opened American commercial photography to the explicit depiction of male sexuality, an aesthetic that had previously been confined to gay publications and underground photography. It made Bruce Weber the most-imitated commercial photographer of the next three decades. It made Calvin Klein synonymous with American sexual modernity. And it cemented the muscular male body as the dominant subject of fashion advertising for the rest of the twentieth century.
Times Square, August 1982
The Hintnaus billboard occupied an elevated position on the side of a building above the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, facing south toward the Times Square pedestrian plaza. From the sidewalk below, Hintnaus appeared as a single colossal figure leaning back against the white wall, his hips and thighs in white briefs at viewers’ eye level, his torso and face receding upward into the implied Aegean sky behind him. The compositional reference, both Weber and Calvin Klein later said in interviews, was specifically Greek and Roman: the contrapposto pose of Michelangelo’s David, the standing-warrior figures of the Parthenon frieze, the proportions of the Doryphoros of Polykleitos.
The public reaction within Times Square was immediate. Tour-bus operators changed their routes to pass the building. Vandals climbed scaffolding to deface the briefs region of the image within ten days of installation. The Calvin Klein company replaced the damaged panels three times across the first six weeks. The billboard’s installation produced enough complaints to several Manhattan community boards that the New York Department of Consumer Affairs convened a meeting on whether public advertising could be subject to obscenity regulation. No regulation followed.
The print version of the campaign launched in November and December 1982 in Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Vogue, Esquire, and Andy Warhol’s Interview. The Hintnaus image appeared on a foldout three-page spread in each magazine. The campaign included six additional Weber images of Hintnaus on Santorini in various Calvin Klein underwear styles. The image’s cultural impact was wider than its commercial impact. Within twelve months, the muscular male body in cotton briefs had become a standard fashion-advertising subject. Banana Republic, Polo Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis, Calvin Klein’s own Calvin Klein Jeans line, and eventually Abercrombie & Fitch all commissioned Weber to produce similar images for their advertising. The 1982 Hintnaus image had created a new advertising vocabulary.
Greensburg to New York
Bruce Weber was born on March 29, 1946, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a small western Pennsylvania city in the Allegheny foothills approximately thirty miles east of Pittsburgh. His father was a department-store owner; his mother was, according to Weber’s later writing, the local stylish woman whose dress and presentation he photographed from an early age. He received his first camera, an Argus C3 35mm, at twelve. He made 8mm films with his sister Barbara through his teenage years.
He attended Denison University in Granville, Ohio, intending to study theater. He transferred after two years to New York University to study film. He moved to New York in 1966 at twenty. He spent time in Paris in the late 1960s and returned to New York at the start of the 1970s. Through a chance meeting, the photographer Diane Arbus, then in her late forties, introduced Weber to her own former teacher, the Austrian-born émigré photographer Lisette Model, who was then teaching at the New School for Social Research. Model accepted Weber as a student in the late 1960s. Her mentorship, with its humanistic emphasis on emotional presence and the documentary tradition, shaped his entire subsequent career.
Arbus died by suicide on July 26, 1971. Model continued teaching at the New School until her own death in 1983. Weber’s earliest commercial work, in 1973 and 1974, appeared in the SoHo Weekly News (a downtown New York alternative weekly) and in Gentlemen’s Quarterly. His first group exhibition was at The Floating Foundation of Photography in 1973. His first solo exhibition was at the Razor Gallery in New York City in 1974.
The commercial breakthrough came in the late 1970s. Ralph Lauren hired Weber as his primary advertising photographer in 1976. Calvin Klein hired Weber for menswear advertising in 1979. Weber’s business and life partner Nan Bush, also a photographer’s agent, negotiated his contracts and managed his studio from the late 1970s onward. By 1981, when Calvin Klein commissioned the new Men’s Underwear campaign, Weber was one of the three most-booked menswear photographers in American advertising. He was thirty-five.
Santorini, Summer 1982
The Calvin Klein Men’s Underwear campaign was conceived in early 1982 by Calvin Klein, the company’s chief executive, his then-wife Kelly Rector Klein, and the company’s art director Sam Shahid. The company had previously had no significant presence in the men’s underwear category, which had been dominated since the late 1950s by Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, and Jockey, with advertising imagery that featured middle-aged men in functional white briefs photographed against neutral backgrounds. Klein and Shahid wanted the new line to be marketed as a fashion category rather than a functional category, with imagery that referenced sports, classical sculpture, and Mediterranean travel.
Klein and Shahid selected Bruce Weber to shoot the campaign on the strength of Weber’s recent Ralph Lauren work. They selected Tomás Hintnaus, then twenty-five and a member of the Brazilian Olympic pole-vaulting team, on the strength of an athletic-magazine clipping Klein had seen. Hintnaus had competed at the 1980 Moscow Olympics for Brazil. He was training for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics at his coach’s facility in California. He had no previous modeling experience.
The shoot took place over four days in late summer 1982 on the Greek island of Santorini, in the Cyclades. Weber selected the location for its whitewashed buildings, its strong Aegean sunlight, and its undeveloped tourism infrastructure (Santorini was not yet a major destination in 1982). Weber, Calvin Klein, Sam Shahid, Hintnaus, and a small crew flew to Santorini in late summer. The crew shot on the rooftop of a small whitewashed building in the village of Oia at the northern end of the island. Weber positioned the camera below Hintnaus’s hipline, instructed Hintnaus to lean back against a whitewashed wall, and shot upward into the bright blue sky. The shoot produced approximately four hundred frames. The single image that would become the Times Square billboard was selected from the second day’s session.
The Weber Aesthetic
The Calvin Klein billboard established the Weber aesthetic. Across the next thirty years, Weber would shoot variations on the same image for almost every major American menswear advertising client: Calvin Klein (1982-2000), Ralph Lauren (1976-1990), Versace (1994-2017), Abercrombie & Fitch (1995-2008), Banana Republic, and his own continuing editorial work in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, and GQ. The visual vocabulary was specific: athletic male subjects in natural settings (beaches, farms, country houses, military bases), photographed in bright natural light, often partially or fully undressed, often arranged in classical Greco-Roman compositional structures, often shot in black-and-white. The subjects were almost always young, lean, muscular, and white. The aesthetic monumentalized the male body in the same way nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts academic painting had monumentalized Greek and Roman gods.
Weber published over twenty books between 1983 and 2020. O Rio de Janeiro (1986), Bear Pond (1990), and Twenty Years of Calvin Klein (1989) were the most-cited. Bear Pond, a collection of black-and-white photographs of nude young men around a New England pond, was produced with poems by the novelist Reynolds Price. It became one of the best-selling photography books of the 1990s. The Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Abercrombie & Fitch advertising campaigns appeared in catalogs that were mailed to approximately twenty million American households per year through the 1990s and early 2000s.
The cultural impact of the Weber aesthetic was twofold. The aesthetic opened American commercial photography to the explicit depiction of male sexuality and male homoerotic desire, an opening that paralleled and supported the slow integration of gay culture into American commercial life across the 1980s and 1990s. The aesthetic also normalized an idealized lean, muscular, young, white male body as the standard of American masculinity, contributing to the rise of late-twentieth-century male body dysmorphia, the growth of the American gym industry, and the documented increase in steroid use among American men in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Weber aesthetic was, simultaneously, a liberation and an imposition.
By 2015, when Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch began shifting their advertising imagery toward racially and gender-diverse models in response to changing demographics, the Weber aesthetic was beginning to feel dated. The 2018 New York Times investigation accelerated the shift.
After 2017
On Saturday, January 13, 2018, The New York Times published an article titled “Male Models Say Mario Testino and Bruce Weber Sexually Exploited Them,” by fashion writers Jacob Bernstein, Matthew Schneier, and chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman. The article documented allegations from fifteen current and former male models who described what they characterized as a pattern of unnecessary nudity, coercive sexual behavior, and inappropriate touching during photo shoots with Bruce Weber across the preceding twenty years. The first allegation had been filed by model Jason Boyce as a civil lawsuit in December 2017, the month before the Times article. The combined accusations described a consistent pattern.
The institutional response was immediate. Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Interview, suspended its working relationship with Weber within days of the Times publication. Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Versace, and Abercrombie & Fitch all publicly stopped commissioning Weber in the same month. Weber denied all allegations through his lawyers, characterizing the accusers’ claims as outrageous and noting that he had “professionally photographed thousands of nude models over my career, but never touched anyone inappropriately.” His commercial career ended in the early months of 2018.
Two civil cases against Weber were settled out of court in 2020 for undisclosed sums. A third civil case was dismissed in 2021. The full set of allegations has never been adjudicated in a criminal court. Weber, at the time of the Times article, was seventy-one. He withdrew almost entirely from commercial photography. He continued to exhibit and publish books through art-world galleries and small publishers. Aperture magazine devoted a feature to Weber in 2025 titled “Bruce Weber’s All-American Obsessions,” in which the writer characterized Weber as occupying a gray area of the graying concept of cancellation. The contested legacy is the subject’s defining feature.
Newton needed a flash and a Parisian apartment. Weber needed Aegean sunlight and a whitewashed wall. Newton photographed women through windows. Weber photographed men against the sky. The 1970s objectified one body. The 1980s monumentalized the other. Both photographers were eventually held to account.