Good Company

Family Style 

April 16, 2026

by Miranda Wollen 

Good Company 

A new exhibition in Los Angeles offers an expansive yet intimate look into Bruce Weber’s five-decade-long practice.

Bruce Weber’s portraits are a lesson in intimacy: Donatella Versace strokes her brother Gianni Versace’s hair on a Miami beach as her son nestles up against them. Louise Bourgeois embraces a large, deformed felt doll on a New York park bench. Shrouded in a cape, the Duchess of Devonshire shrieks with happiness as she feeds a flock of chickens with a flat spoon. These are some of the scenes that make up “Try a Little Tenderness” at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles. The sweeping exhibition spans the American photographer's five-decade-long career and coincides with the publication of his new monograph, Bruce Weber: My Education, 2025.

The earliest pieces on view depict couples embracing. In time, however, expressions of intimacy become more experimental: An image from 1997 features a young, nude Kate Moss blowing bubbles for a flaxen-haired toddler. While David Bowie grins like a child for the camera as he poses with Iman and Nelson Mandela in a photograph from 1995. Elsewhere Pedro Almodóvar and Fernando Iglesias play by the pool in Spain in a shot from 2000. And in a scene from 2012, Danny Trejo grins as he holds a large lizard to his bare chest.

Weber’s practice has always centered on connection: a sensitivity to where his subjects are and the company they keep. The photographer grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, where he spent Sundays making films with his father and sister in the family’s backyard. After coming of age in 1970s New York, Weber set off to document small-town life in rural America from Hawaii to Maine. In the resulting body of work dogs angle toward their owners, children toward their parents, friends toward each other. Over the decades that followed, Weber produced a dozen monographs, countless editorial shoots, films, commercials, and music videos. A watershed moment came during the 1984 Olympics, when his intimate photos of the competition’s hopefuls garnered him a special edition of Interview magazine and a career-defining exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery. Now, over 50 years later, his oeuvre is not just a collection of images but rather a snapshot of the world as he sees it.

‍“Bruce Weber: Try a Little Tenderness” is on view through June 6, 2026 at Fahey/Klein Gallery at 148 North La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA.