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Lillian Bassman, a legendary fashion photographer who got her start at Harpers Bazaar in the 1940s, is still creating extraordinary images at age 92 – for herself and her legion of admirers.
A new book from Abrams, Lillian Bassman: Women, and an exhibition at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in L.A. celebrate the singularity and audacity of an ageless artist. In the 1950s and 1960s, she created fashion photographs that stand out from those of her adventurous contemporaries, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, and have lost none of their seductive power. Now she is reworking the few negatives that survived from that era, using them as points of departure for the works of art that always existed in her head.
The new prints were manipulated in the darkroom, and more recently with Photoshop, to become almost abstract compositions of sooty black and chalky white. They and the originals are time capsules of a vanished era of elegance—and of the pre-feminist dark ages “when women had to squeeze their flesh into girdles and their identities into similarly girded boundaries.” That sharp phrase comes from Deborah Solomon’s perceptive introduction to Lillian Bassman: Women.
The illustrations in this splendid portfolio show how far her photographs strayed from literal representation. “Their cardinal subject is not dresses, or hats, or belts,” observes Solomon, “but romantic images that turn the blur into a surprisingly focused expression of female feelings.” Models responded to a sisterly figure (a great rarity in the 1950s), dropping their guard and chatting to her about boyfriends and babies. Though much of Bassman’s work is as stylised as a Watteau painting, some of the most arresting images mark a revolution in fashion photography, taking the models out of the studio and having them dance in a piazza, order a meal on a train, or take the wheel of a sports car.
In 1971, Bassman grew disenchanted with fashion photography and ditched her archive. Twenty years later, a friend—painter Helen Frankenthaler—found a discarded bag of damaged negatives, and a curator persuaded Bassman to return to her first love. “During my years at Bazaar and in advertising, I made compromises to give clients what they wanted but then made personal prints,” Bassman explains. “Alexey Brodovich wanted a two-page spread of a swimmer and, at the end, I did a vertical shot to please myself.” That image of a nude diver sending up a shimmering spiral of light is titled Wonders of Water, and it has become one of her most-admired pictures.
A short documentary made by Sarah Moon in 2000 shows Bassman shooting surreal hats—a leitmotif of her early work—peering into the Hasselblad viewfinder through oversized horn-rimmed glasses, and directing the models to raise heads or hands an inch in pursuit of the perfect composition. Her subjects have a wraith-like presence and they melt into the shadows, leaving a fleeting impression of a dress or a hat. The original image of a woman in a boucle wool suit ordering lunch in the dining car of La Fleche d’Or, becomes, in the new print, what fashion designer John Galliano described as “painterly strokes of light.”
Looking through these photos, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish those that were taken in the 1940s from those in the 1990s. She has telescoped those eras and the model wearing a long white dress on a white horse in Times Square in 1996 (for a New York Times assignment) could as easily be at the Pigalle in 1949, when she was first sent to photograph the Paris collections. Still more is that true of a fantastically draped ball gown by John Galliano in which the model arches her back with the grace of a prima ballerina.
The exhibition of new Bassman prints at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, CA is a revelation of what was nearly lost. On display from October 10, 2009 until March 7, 2010.
www.peterfetterman.com
Buy the Book, Lillian Bassman
http://www.amazon.com/Lillian-Bassman/dp/0821223763