Paul Himmel and Lillian Bassman The First Retrospective

Ingo Taubhorn and Brigitte Woischnik

Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen Hamburg

After I submitted assignment 2 I shared it on an OCA Facebook group and a very supportive fellow student, Jayne Kemp suggested I look at Alexey Brodovitch, as my images were blurry like the ones he produced in his collection Ballet(1).  I had not heard of him and Googled. 

As Brodovitch had such a huge influence on Paul Himmel and Lillian Bassman, amongst many others (I’ll write about him too soon), their work came up in the search results as well. 

I was struck by how absolutely beautiful the photos are.  I was also very interested in the two photographers life stories.  I immediately wanted to order a book about them and within minutes of reading Jayne’s suggestion had spent a small fortune at Amazon. 

The book I ordered about Himmel & Bassman is something that I am going to treasure for years and years; I am so bowled over by the photographs and their history.

Both photographers but especially Lillian Bassman are probably known by history of photography experts but their names are not on a par with Diane Arbus, David Baily or Richard Avedon for example, all of who were working at the same time and were colleagues of the couple.  In fact Lillian Bassman and Diane Arbus have a lot of common threads in their histories.  Both came from Jewish immigrant backgrounds, both met and married husbands at a very young age defying their parents’ wishes, both worked in fashion and at Harper’s Bazaar with Brodovitch.  And both worked in partnerships with their husbands.  However, Arbus and Bassman’s lives do not remain similar, as they grow older.  Unlike Diane Arbus, Bassman and her husband did not get divorced and stayed together until they died, both in their 90s although Paul Himmel’s life ended shortly before Bassman’s.  Bassman continued to work in fashion for some time whereas Diane Arbus left fashion behind as much as she could concentrating instead on the people she found who seemed so separate and isolated from society (although she continued to accept jobs from fashion publications as well as topical magazines up until her suicide in 1971).  Bassman crucially had no tragic and violent self-imposed death cutting her career short and propelling her work as Arbus work did, and although her career in fashion lay dormant for a time she nevertheless took the most incredible photos at Paris Fashion week in her 80s.  While she wasn't working in fashion she continued to experiment with photography and explored a variety of subjects such as body builders and abstracts made from pavement cracks. The Birdlady for German Vogue 2000 taken when she was 80 is one of the most striking images I have ever seen.  It’s extraordinary and I think all Lillian Bassman’s long experience as a photographer, art director and a human being is evident in the photograph.

One of the things I enjoy so much about both photographers is their flair.  They both experimented with blur and motion as well light, exposure, aperture and pushing dark room techniques beyond the norm.  Paul Himmel, like Brodovitch, produced a book about ballet exploring the dancers’ movements by slowing down shutter speed and abstracting the images.  Himmel and Bassman produced work that was highly original and artistic and ultimately very beautiful. 

They were absolutely committed to experimenting with form and process.  Their solarized images, for instance, “look(s) half-negative, half-positive; black and white photographs that are embellished with colour, or colour photographs that look as though they are taken with false colours.  What’s more the contours in the image are outlined as if drawn by hand’[2]. 

I was amazed to read about how they used bleach to lighten and change images.  One of the things that struck me about this aspect of their work is that, although Photoshop is sometimes frowned upon for some reason, it really is a only a modern version, albeit one that is far more powerful, of what photographers have done for a long time manually in the dark room.  True, modern methods are quicker, offer far greater possibilities and are perhaps simpler to learn.  But I believe all photographers who worked before digital came along will have learned even the basics of pushing an image, or developing it in a way that produced unusual or unexpected results and have heard David Baily say as much in an interview he did on Monday 10 2014 with Mark Lawson for the BBC.  Bassman and Himmel, however, experimented with greater alacrity and creativity than most and the results are at times extraordinary.

Bassman, unusually, learnt her darkroom techniques before she learned how to use a camera.  Consequently she was extremely adept and both photographers spent hours getting processes right.  Despite their age and as digital manipulation developed they learnt about that too. 

Lillian Bassman, as I mentioned, worked for Brodovitch, the Art Director of Harpers Bazaar before becoming a photographer and eventually as Art Director of Junior Bazaar, the youth orientated sister magazine of the famous publication where so many of Bassman’s contemporaries also worked such as Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Man Ray and Robert Frank amongst others. 

Her experience as Art Director gives her images a very clear sense of design, which is one of the things that I find so appealing in them.  But her work was not confined to fashion and she ‘continually reinvented herself as an artist – particularly in the way she experimentally sounds out new worlds of imagery well beyond the fashion cosmos”[3]

Paul Himmel grew restless with fashion and eventually stopped working as a photographer although he continued to work personally.  At a time when many would be looking towards retirement he retrained and then worked for decades as psychotherapist.

They grew old together working the whole time and staying very much alive from what I have read and understood until the end.   They both died in their mid-90s and I think they are inspirational.

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[1] Ballet - 1945 Publisher: J. J. Augustin, New York

[2]Page 276

[3] Page 30

References from the book produced to accompany the retrospective at
Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen Hamburg