Horst P. Horst - V&A Museum 24th October 2014

I went to see the Horst exhibition as I have found the history of photography extremely interesting. My delight and captivation with Paul Himmel and Lillian Bassman was just the start of it.  Since reading about them I have watched documentaries on Richard Avedon and Brian Duffy, and those, along with seeing the David Baily exhibition and reading about Diane Arbus mean I am beginning to piece together some history and development within fashion photography at least.

Horst, born in 1906 in Germany, worked at Vogue under Mr. Nast himself.  The limitations of photography then plus Conde Nast's insistence that photographers used 10x8 plate cameras meant that Horst's work  - focused on dresses - had to be shot in quite a specific way.  For instance the lights, and there were lots of them, were extremely bright and tended to make the models' skin look lined and sallow.  This explains why the faces of many of his models in the 30s (often not models at all but friends of people who worked for Vogue) were in shadow or hardly lit at all.   He says in the V&A exhibition book that he 'tried lighting it (the face) from below or from the side, or sometimes straight on with just the eye of the cheek lit up' (1) which sounds rather surreal.

In fact many of his images are quite surreal in particular one of hands, which I believe is quite famous where some real hands are placed in a pattern with the hands of a mannequin; surely influenced by Dali and his cohorts.  The fashion designer Schiaparelli worked closely with Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau interpreting 'Surrealism's shock value and translated it into headline fashions' (2) Horst photographed Shiaparelli's collections and continued the themes of Surrealism into the images.

Horst uses light to sculpt the picture he's creating.  He is known for his lighting - dramatic shadows and chiaroscuro (strong contrasts) can be seen throughout his work, and his photographs of actors all look very much like stills from the film nior productions they would have been working on.

I was particularly amazed by the colour photograph section - Horst, along with Cecil Beaton was one of the earliest and most successful colour photographers and I know that the street and art photographers I've been looking at didn't start using it very much until the late 70s and 80s .  The prints, many copies of Vogue covers from the 40s and 50s, are huge reproductions made possible by digital technology.  When they were first produced colour slide film was used so no negatives were made at all and so not many of these images have been seen until the V&A show.

What I noticed was how fresh and modern they seem, despite the intervening Baily and Duffy years and all that has occurred since. In fact I would say that fashion magazines now are influenced by all that has been before including Horst and those that followed.

Some of the images had a softness and a sense of movement too which I was surprised by, but that is hardly surprising given that the models sometimes needed to try and stay absolutely still while they held poses for seconds at a time as the exposure was made.  The movement is not like it is in Richard Avedon's work which has so much energy (very different tools available to him though); it is more subtle, hinted at.  In particular I am thinking about images Dress by Jean Desses, 1952 (plate 157) and Dress by Henri Bendell, jewellery by Harry Winston, 1948 (plate 158) (3) which show some or more than a little blur.  I liked this about these images as up to that point everything seemed incredibly still and almost statuesque in much of what I'd seen. My absolute favourite image is of Barbara 'Babe"Cushing Mortimer Paley, dress by Triana-Norell, 1946  plate 175 (4).  I am not sure why I like this image so much.  Perhaps because her face is partially obscured by her hand.  The painted nails and cigarette emphasising her extraordinary eyes.  She looks like a movie star of the era but was in fact a socialite and editor at Vogue, daughter of a rich surgeon and married to two wealthy men (not together of course!)  Her beauty was enhanced after she had an accident and had to have corrective surgery. There is something so beguiling about the photograph - the lighting, the subject and the colour all work together to make it deeply memorable and striking.

In addition to the fashion photography Horst photographed nature, male nudes and travel photography.  The photographs of men are quite abstract.  There are no faces, no sultry eyes at the viewer,  simply shape and form made with body and light, although it has to be said they are pretty homo-erotic.  They are interesting for me to see in light of the work I did on assignment 2 using my body (clothed) and fabric to create shapes, along with my growing discomfort with the female nudes that litter art history as well as current photography practice.

Horst died in 1999 in the United States.  Images of Catherine Bailey taken in 1989 are included in the book so he kept working until nearly the end of his long life.

1 Page 12 - Horst, Photographer of Style, Edited by Susannah Brown, V&A Publishing, 2014
2 Page 70 - Horst, Photographer of Style, Edited by Susannah Brown, V&A Publishing, 2014
3 & 4 Plates from Horst, Photographer of Style, Edited by Susannah Brown, V&A Publishing, 2014

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

Gallery visit: Baily's Stardust, National Portait Gallery

I went along to see David Baily’s Stardust exhibition at the National Portrait gallery earlier this week. I went because I sort of felt that I ought to.  I like photographing people; DB is one of the most, if not the most, successful British portrait photographers during the second half of last century.  Certainly, he is iconic and huge in terms of status and reputation: an almost mythological figure that grew out of the legendary 60s, and who took photographs of extraordinary characters such as the Crays, Jean Shrimpton, Twiggi, along with pretty much every single rock star spawned during that iconic decade. 

I looked forward to the exhibition but was also somewhat uneasy about the whole celebrity angle.  I’m not all that interested in fame as such, although of course, these figures are beguiling and compelling regardless.  It would probably be tricky to find a passport snap of Kate Moss uninteresting, never mind David Baily’s beautiful portraits of her.  Perhaps that’s what troubles me - the fact that we are (read I am) so easily drawn into stories and fables about people we don’t really know, people who seem so exciting, untouchable and unreal, but who are ultimately just human beings like anyone else.  And even though Baily and some of his subjects see and are aware of the ‘absurdity and poignancy of the human condition[1]’ I find the current obsession with focusing on and attempting to emulate such people irritating at best but otherwise an immensely destructive and shallow part of our collective culture.   I’m not the only one as the following description of Baily’s thoughts on his portraiture indicate he sees the work as,‘[2]a subtle mixture of subjectivity and objectivity, and (with) an understanding that images of glamorous individuals were potentially both powerful and empty”.

Contemporary criticism was a little more scathing: [3]Malcolm Muggeridge, for the Observer, said “The camera, the most characteristic and sinister innovation of our time, has ushered in – perhaps, better, crystalised – a religion of narcissism of which photographers such as Mr. Baily are high priests.”

It’s difficult not to see Mr. Muggridge’s words as reactionary, somewhat old fashioned and a little extreme especially when you compare David Baily’s extraordinarily well-crafted work with today’s tsunami of blurry and wobbly selfies, but perhaps there is something about his alarm worth considering, if only about the direction of our society.  I have just read Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbells book The Narcissism Epidemic, which focuses mainly on American culture but is relevant to all Western culture to a greater or lesser extent, and argues that today’s rampant culturally indoctrinated narcissism (my son declares “I am Awesome" under his handle on his twitter account and thinks this is normal) started in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s: [4]“The American flag of self admiration slowly began to unfurl in the 1960s.” and “By the 1970’s the communal goals of the ‘60s had dissipated and only the gaudy, empty shell of self-focus remained.”

It is of course unfair in retrospect to see David Baily as the high priest of any cultural narcissistic malaise especially as he seems to explore, question and critique the phenomena rather than merely celebrate it.  Nevertheless meandering around a room filled with enormous images of famous faces made me feel a little disconnected and empty as I wondered what I was going to talk about for this blog entry.  Even the more anthropological images didn’t grab my attention and I’m fascinated by most things ethnography related.

Happily, I learnt that David Baily is about a great deal more than celebrity and I was soon made aware of this during my visit.  My interest was sparked when I entered the room where his family portraits are displayed.  These are in the main of Catherine Baily, his wife and muse since the early 80s, but include many of his children too.  Certainly any of the photographs of pregnancy and the birth are appealing but then such scenes always make me emotional.  What was so powerful about this family’s collection was that there were so many of them, placed seemingly sporadically (unlike the uniformity of images in the other rooms), small and large and if I remember correctly mostly in black and white.  There were images of tiny newborns being held by older siblings, and his wife in the act of giving birth along with a picture of her just yelling, her hands stretched out in such an unmistakable way.  There is something about these photos that makes them incredibly intimate, touching and for me very beautiful.  They were like a window into a family.  The style is far less contrasty than the large square formats of famous faces.  I recall them being mainly low key although that may just be an impression.  There is no glare, none of the usual in your face brashness.

The other photographs I found really compelling were the ones of other photographers and artists.  I don’t remember there being a special room for these, perhaps I am wrong.  I just remember being struck by images that were striking and surprising, as they seemed to stand out from the others.  The commentary in the books talks of empathy and there certainly does seem to be much of this, especially with images of Man Ray, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Fancis Bacon, Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Jaques-Henri Lartigue, André Kertész and of course Brian Duffy, one of his cohorts from his early days.   But as well as empathy there seems to be a deep comraderie, a connection and a palpable conversation that I didn’t find in the other portraits.  I notice that these photographs are all of men and there is something very grizzly and male and separate from me, a woman, about them. Not necessarily a bad thing, just something tangible that I noticed.  In any event these images really stood out for me. 

The East End photographs also had an authenticity that struck me.  I found the Rio Club, 1968 extremely interesting and unusual.  The composition is so daring and the TV set looks like it is about to fall on the man sitting below and crush him.  He looks so innocent.  I also thought The Dragon Club, Whitechapel 1968 showed us something foreboding and dangerous, the black shadow that cuts into the image seems to be suggesting something will devour the rest of the scene soon, is already eating into it, into the black and white image of innocent children on the wall, which are captured and frozen in an earlier photograph.  Again the composition is bold and although rigorous it is not an easy composition, putting us on edge.  These photographs were part of a series of coloured photographs for the Sunday Times Magazine in 1968 for an article called East End Faces.

Finally, I was touched by the photographs of Sudanese children, taken when other famous faces from the celebrity world used their reputation and influence to raise funds and awareness for LiveAid.  [5]There has been some criticism in recent years of this well known project and some of the arguments are difficult to dismiss but when I looked at the photographs taken by Baily I was, even today after we have been inured to such images due to the frequency with which we are shown them, filled with horror and anger that we humans can allow starvation like this to occur.  In particular, the photograph of a hand next to a tiny starving infant is simply shocking and horrifying, and it was these images that contributed to the groundswell of Western abhorrence.

One of the images did trouble me.  A tiny starving child with a skull for a head and a skeleton for a body is rendered beautiful by the lighting, tones and composition.  This is a perennial question – is it right to use someone else’s suffering for the purposes of art?  Photographers in particular are ‘guilty’ if indeed one believes it is morally questionable to create artistic expression out of misery and suffering. 

Baily has always been interested in skulls, has always taken photographs of them and there are several still life images featuring skulls in the exhibition. [6]“‘We end up as art, as sculpture, in a funny sort of way.  It’s the ultimate self-art.  It’s like “destruction art”, isn’t it?’ Baily observes.”  I couldn’t help but make the connection between his fascination for skulls in one room and the photograph of an ephemeral child made to look hauntingly beautiful whom in all likelihood died from starvation soon after the photo was taken.  Did she unwittingly end up as art as she was dying.

Tim Marlow in his introduction to the book Baily’s Stardust printed by the National Portrait Gallery includes a quote that talks about Baily’s fondness of relying on ‘The accidental nature of the universe” much like the [7]Dadaists and Surrealists.  It was an accident that I read a book about our narcissistic culture which looked in some detail at the current obsession with celebrity and where this started, and then went to see one of the icons whom, it could be argued, contributed in some way, good or bad, to the beginning of this current trend.  But what I have learned whilst visiting this exhibition is that David Baily is about a great deal more than his celebrity photographs.  He has a broad and eclectic collection of work behind him and before him if he keeps working, which I believe he plans to.  Whenever I mentioned I’d been to see his work to friends, they commented on how good looking he once was.  He cannot be separated from that early image, the 60s icon, one of the very few in reality who were actually there on the King’s Road or in Carnaby Street making legends.  (I think that particular 60s only happened to a handful of people at most.) That history feeds into how we see and perceive his work and him, but I have learned that he is a hugely rounded artist and a pivotal recorder and photographic commentator of late 20^th century culture.

Incidentally, I have and continue to take photos of actors some of whom may well be famous one day if they’re not on their way already.  Not sure yet if family or actor’s headshots and publicity is the way forward for me, perhaps both, who knows?  Either way though, I make myself laugh with my slightly disdainful stance on celebrity!

 

 

 

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[1] Page 12, Baily’s Stardust, introductory essay by Tim Marlow, published by National Portrait Gallery, 2014.

[2] Page 12, Baily’s Stardust, introductory essay by Tim Marlow, published by National Portrait Gallery, 2014.

[3] Page 192, Baily’s Stardust, Box of Pin Ups section, published by National Portrait Gallery, 2014.

[4] Page 60 & 62, The Narcissism Epidemic Living in the Age of Entitlement, Jean Twenge PH. D. and W. Keith Campbell PH. D., Atria Paperback, 2009, First Paperback Edition, 2013

[5] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/24/g8.debtrelief Here one of a number of voices expressing doubt about how much good Live Aid and subsequent similar activity has actually done for Sub-Saharan Africa, which is poorer now than ever.

[6] Page 261, Baily’s Stardust, introductory essay by Tim Marlow, published by National Portrait Gallery, 2014.

[7] Dada & Surrealism, Matthew Gale, Phaidon, Page 63, about Hans Arp ‘The most revolutionary of Arp’s collages were those made “according to the laws of chance”’.