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| Left: Anne Saint Marie, for a Chanel ad campaign, New York, 1958. Right: Mary Jane Russell, for Harper's Bazaar magazine, New York, 1950. |
Few events in the history of fashion photography rival the serendipitous reemergence of images by legendary photographer and art director Lillian Bassman in the early 1990s. The protégée of Harper's Bazaar designer Alexey Brodovitch, Bassman was a key member of his Design Laboratory at the New School for Social Research in the early 1940s, and she later art-directed with Brodovitch at Junior Bazaar, where they worked with talented young photographers, including Richard Avedon, Louis Faurer, Leslie Gill, and Robert Frank. Having carved out her own reputation as an art director, Bassman began shooting couture in Paris in the early 1950s. Her enviable list of subjects included proto-supermodels Dovima, Suzy Parker, and Carmen Dell'Orefice.
In the following decades, Bassman's photographs fell into obscurity -- until one fateful day in 1991 when the painter Helen Frankenthaler, who rented Bassman's former studio, discovered a garbage bag filled with her old negatives. The rest, as they say, is photographic history.
"I got very excited about seeing those lost images," Bassman recalls. "[Writer and historian] Martin Harrison found another bag of negatives that were even more interesting to me. It was like starting a whole new life for the photographs that didn't exist anymore for me ... they were a new way for me to see."
In the darkroom Bassman breathed new life into her castaway negatives, transforming "straight" advertising shots for lingerie and fabric into voluptuous new works that were, for many, a revelation; they seemed to bridge the gap between art and fashion in ways that today's young photographers are still emulating. Using blurring, staining, and bleaching techniques, Bassman lent her photographs new meaning and sensuality. Liberated from their former contexts, the pictures allowed Bassman to write herself back into the history books at age 80 with a sexy self-titled monograph released in 1997 and edited by Harrison.
In the years after the release of her book, Bassman's work enjoyed a renaissance, and she began photographing couture in Paris once again -- this time with her models swathed in the creations of John Galliano and Christian Lacroix. These seductive, smoky, black-and-white prints, perhaps more than any images that precede them, show off Bassman's classical sensibilities at a moment when fashion photography seemed desperate for new ideas and innovation.
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| Left: Barbara Mullen, for Harper's Bazaar, New York, circa 1958. Right: Dress by Thierry Mugler, for German Vogue, 1998. |
"I didn't find that fashion had changed that much," she says. "You know, through the many years of photographing, fashion went up and down, up and down a number of times. By the time I got back to Paris
for the go-round with The New York Times Magazine, we were back where I'd been before. Galliano, aside from the fact of making some dresses 40 feet long, had basically designed the dress the way I'd always seen that kind of dress ... I concentrated on what was elegant about the body and the face and the gesture."
Despite the undeniable presence of women photographers in fashion today, many believe the industry is still unfairly dominated by men. Yet photographers such as Ellen von Unwerth, Inez van Lamsweerde, and Bettina Rheims enjoy a level of success that Bassman could only have dreamed of when she was starting out in the 1940s. A forceful woman working in a man's postwar New York world, Bassman fought to define her place alongside Brodovitch, with whom she helped establish the modern glossy magazine. "He was a monster, really," she admits, recalling a poster she designed for the Museum of Modern Art that Brodovitch took complete credit for. Yet she also insists the two had "complete sympathy for each other's taste and sensibilities." Brodovitch hounded Bassman to come work for him, even agreeing to pay her despite the fact that he'd always favored women interns who would bend to his will and work for free. And when the two designers went before Harper's editor-in-chief Carmel Snow, Bassman often played Brodovitch's bulldog. "He would never fight for what he wanted, but I was a fighter and it was my job to stand up for him," she says.
It was the generosity of "Dick" Avedon that set
the wheels of Bassman's photography career in motion. Avedon and his first wife, Doe, shared a summer home on Fire Island with Bassman and her husband, photographer Paul Himmel. Living romantic lives of drinking and dancing, the young couples schemed and dreamed together, often talking of Bassman's aspirations behind the lens. Giving Bassman the keys to his new Madison Avenue studio, formerly occupied by George Platt Lynes, Avedon let her use his cameras and loaned her his assistant while he was away on assignment. This testing ground allowed Bassman to experiment and to develop a photographic language that still resonates today. Now in her 90s and living in New York, Bassman says she hasn't shot in the last six months, but she is busy making prints in her darkroom.
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