Beauty Break: The Celebrity Portraits of Victor Skrebneski (1929-2020)
Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 9:00PM by Nathaniel R
One of the most celebrated fashion and celebrity photographers of the 1960s-1980s, Victor Skrebneski, has passed away at the age of 92. Above you'll see a self portrait and next to it one of his most iconic images, Vanessa Redgrave shot in 1967.
Skrebneski's heyday was a smidgeon before our pop-cultural awareness dawned (we grew up during the heyday of celebrity photographers like Herb Ritts, David LaChapelle, and Annie Liebovitz), but we knew Skrebneski's images before we ever learned his name. He did amazing portraits of Bette Davis, Dolph Lundgren, David Bowie, Diana Ross, Kathleen Turner and more. His black and white work was often extremely sexy and there are a few NSFW images after the jump. He shot movie stars masterfully, you must agree...
ALL IMAGES IN THIS POST © VICTOR SKREBNESKI
You can buy a coffee table book of his work here.
Sharon Stone 1994
Bette Davis 1972
Diana Ross 1977
Dolph Lundgren, 1987
Kathleen Turner 2000
David Bowie
David Bowie with his supermodel wife Iman
Candice Bergen
Raquel Welch 1971
Dennis Hopper
Personal story time!
When Nathaniel was a baby gay the first film festival he ever heard of outside of Cannes was the Chicago International Film Festival. That was both because Nathaniel grew up in Detroit so there was the proximity issue. But it was also due to a series of very risque widely discussed posters Skrebneski did in the 1980s commissioned by the festival. They began with just models in various stages of nakedness wearing only Chicago International Film Festival t-shirts but soon Skrebneski had celebrities naked except for the shirt including Cindy Crawford and Anna Nicole Smith. Dolph Lundgren was reportedly the first celebrity ever to wear film festival memorabilia to advertise a film festival. Nathaniel may have hypothetically bought the Dolph Lundgren poster. Or stared at it enough to commit it to memory at least.
Here were some of the posters (click to embiggen)
They might seem tame by today's standards of regular exploitation of male bodies but trust that they were a shock to the system in the 80s. At least for baby gays!
These final two images are far more recent, taken to celebrate various anniversaries of the festivals in the classic style of that series.
Reader Comments (11)
dolph lundgren was on the cover of the first gay mag i ever bought - man, that issue was appreciated...
update: the mature gay me would kill for that bette davis poster
He had a great eye- fabulous work!
Oh, Bowie and Iman... such a beautiful couple.
Oh my...! Watching the posters I'm wondering if in the moment you looked at them:
a) You "turned" into baby-gay
b) You confirmed that already were one
Wow
My goodness, that man loved a shadow.
What a legend. Even P.S. and Voidy are being positive. That's power, that's influence, that's immortality.
My My MY!!!
Stupid shadows!
He liked muscles then!
forever1267 -- lol!
Trying to get me in trouble here at work