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.
[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
Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen Hamburg
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