Lillian Bassman
Encyclopedia
Life
Her parents were Jewish intellectuals who emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1905 and settled in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at the Textile High School, with Alexey BrodovitchAlexey Brodovitch
Alexey Brodovitch was a Russian-born photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his art direction of fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar from 1938 to 1958.- Early life in Russia :...
, in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
and graduated in 1933. While there, she met the photographer Paul Himmel
Paul Himmel
Paul Himmel was a fashion and documentary photographer in the United States.Himmel was the son of immigrant Bohemian intellectuals. He took up photography as a teenager and studied graphic journalism under art director Alexey Brodovitch...
and they married in 1935.
From the 1940s until the 1960s, Bassman worked as a fashion photographer for Junior Bazaar and later at Harper's Bazaar
Harper's Bazaar
Harper’s Bazaar is an American fashion magazine, first published in 1867. Harper’s Bazaar is published by Hearst and, as a magazine, considers itself to be the style resource for “women who are the first to buy the best, from casual to couture.”...
, where she promoted the careers of photographers such as Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon was an American photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century."-Photography career:Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish Russian...
, Robert Frank
Robert Frank
Robert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American...
, Louis Faurer
Louis Faurer
Louis Faurer was an American fashion photographer and a master of candid or street photography. A quiet artist who never achieved the broad public recognition of his best-known contemporaries, the significance and caliber of his work were lauded by insiders, among them Robert Frank, William...
and Arnold Newman
Arnold Newman
Arnold Abner Newman was an American photographer, noted for his "environmental portraits" of artists and politicians...
. Under the guidance of the Russian emigrant Alexey Brodovitch
Alexey Brodovitch
Alexey Brodovitch was a Russian-born photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his art direction of fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar from 1938 to 1958.- Early life in Russia :...
, she began to photograph her model subjects primarily in black and white. Her work was published for the most part in Harper’s Bazaar, between 1950-1965.
By the 1970s, Bassman’s interest in pure form in her fashion photography was out of vogue. She turned to her own photo projects and abandoned fashion photography. In doing so, she tossed out 40 years of negatives and prints - her life’s work. Over 20 years later, a forgotten bag filled with hundreds of images was discovered. Bassman’s fashion photographic work began to be re-appreciated in the 1990s.
Presently in her 90s, she is now working with digital technology and abstract color photography to create a new series of work. She now uses Photoshop for her image manipulation.
The most notable qualities about her photographic work are the high contrasts between light and dark, the graininess of the finished photos and the geometric placement and camera angles of the subjects. Bassman is now one of the last great woman photographers in the world of fashion.
Exhibitions (selection)
- 1974: Stämpfli Gallery, New York
- 1993: Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
- 1993: "Vanité", Palais de Tokyo
- 1994: Jackson Fine Art Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
- 1994: "Homage to Lillian Bassman," Caroussel du Louvre, Paris
- 1997: Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
- 1997: Peter Fetterman Gallery, Los Angeles
- 2002: Garden Prado, Madrid
- 2003: Galerie f5, 6 in Munich, Germany
- 2004: Staley Wise Gallery, New York
- 2005: Farmani Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
- 2005: A touch of mystery - Triennale der Photographie Hamburg 2005, Photography Monika Mohr Galerie, Hamburg
- 2006: Selektion # 1 - Arbeiten in Schwarz/Weiß, Galerie f 5,6, München
- 2006: Retrospective, Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica, USA
- 2010: Retrospective, The Wapping Project, London, UK
Reviews
In the early 1970s Lillian Bassman, among the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century, made the decision to dispose of her career, quite literally. Artists do this all the time without the intent — giving themselves over to excess, retreating to ashrams — but Ms. Bassman’s approach was aggressive and determined. Disillusioned by the costuming of the late 1960s, she had had enough of fashion and expressed her disdain by destroying decades’ worth of negatives and placing others in a trash bag in the coal room of her Upper East Side carriage house. Her era of furtive eroticism was over, and there was no point in scrapbooking it.