Focus

by Michael Gross

  In fact, it wasn’t. In a perverse irony, female photographers have rarely succeeded in fashion and even the exceptions have been overshadowed, reflecting a social pathology that extends well beyond fashion. Ever since Hoyningen-Huené and Horst, the fashion in fashion photographers has swung back and forth between gay and straight men. Though there have always been significant women photographers, the curious fact is that women’s clothing is typically photographed by men. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the work of a woman who began taking action fashion photos before Munkácsi would be downplayed if not forgotten. She was also taking those photographs for Vogue—not the Bazaar.

  Antoinette Wood Frissell, better known as Toni, had been a typical hire when she first came to Vogue as a caption writer in 1930, a society girl from a family of adventurers, and a childhood playmate of Condé Nast’s daughter. After several years working as an actress, she was introduced to a neighbor, Edna Chase, who hired her with the admonition “Tomorrow you had better wear a hat to the office. No woman is really well turned out without a hat.”

  Toni’s spell in the Vogue office was brief; she wasn’t much of a copywriter and was fired, likely due to that same decline in Condé Nast’s fortunes that Carmel Snow had used to justify her leap to the Bazaar. But after Toni’s brother died in a shipwreck, and their mother fell ill, she pulled out a Rolleiflex camera her brother had given her and distracted herself by mastering it. “I thought, why not take pictures out of doors,” she would recall in an unpublished memoir.I “Why do all the fashions have to be photographed in a studio.” She learned to use the camera with “past-due worthless film,” then bought new film and asked friends—local society beauties—to pose during her summer vacation.

  “I blew a few of these pictures up to show to Vogue on my return,” she wrote. Carmel Snow, then still at Vogue, approved. “Toni, you’re an original girl,” she said. “Perhaps you should take up photography.” Agha, too, encouraged Toni. “I have a feeling in my Turkish bones that drawings of fashion pictures are on the way out and photographs in,” he said. “Bring me your pictures.” She did, but Vogue didn’t bite until she sold several to Hearst’s Town & Country. Then Vogue “immediately resummoned me and began to give me assignments to do outdoor fashion photographs.” The following year, just after Snow departed, Vogue put Toni under contract.

  Vogue was no nirvana for photographers. By the middle thirties, photographers had begun to chafe under Nast’s strict regime, which still favored formality. The introduction of cameras that had faster shutter speeds and were smaller, lighter, easier to use, such as the 35 mm Leica, first sold in 1925, led to the creation of newsmagazines such as Lucien Vogel’s Vu in France in 1928 and Life in New York in 1936. Their pictures, “instantaneous, emblematic, capturing a moment frozen in time,” in the words of Condé Nast’s biographer Caroline Seebohm, introduced photography to the mass market, and over the next five years Nast finally began edging Vogue away from its reliance on the stiff studio shot. But by then, the center of gravity of fashion photography had moved to the Bazaar.

  Its rise began with Munkácsi. By 1936, Munky claimed to be the world’s best-paid fashion photographer, making $100,000 a year—he’d soon buy a penthouse triplex in Tudor City and an estate on Long Island’s posh North Shore, in which he hung paintings by Rubens and Tintoretto. But he was divorced in 1939, a daughter died of leukemia, he suffered a heart attack in 1943, his career suffered, and in 1947, the Bazaar dropped his contract. He declared bankruptcy in 1960, showing debts of more than $30,000 against assets of merely $30, and when he died of a heart attack in 1963 at sixty-seven, his ex-wife found him in a virtually empty apartment with only a half-eaten tin of spaghetti in his refrigerator.

  In 1934, Snow visited Rockefeller Center to see an exhibition of a Russian émigré graphic designer. The day before it opened, Snow walked through, she recalled, “and I saw a fresh, new conception of layout technique that struck me like a revelation. . . . Within ten minutes I had asked Brodovitch to have cocktails with me, and that evening I signed him to a provisional contract as art director.” It was provisional not just because she needed Hearst’s approval to hire Alexey Brodovitch, but also because “I wasn’t yet the editor!” So Snow asked Brodovitch to make a “dummy,” a book of sample layouts, then traveled to one of Hearst’s castles, in Wales, to talk her extremely conservative boss into hiring her avant-garde find.

  Alexey Brodovitch was born in a hunting lodge near the Finnish border outside St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1898. His mother was an amateur painter, his Polish father a sportsman, hunter, and military psychiatrist who ran a Moscow hospital for prisoners of the Russo-Japanese War. Before he turned ten, Alexey photographed wounded Japanese prisoners under his father’s care. A child of wealthy property-holders in an aristocratic society, Alexey was sent to good schools and spent winters on the Côte d’Azur. His parents tried to shield him from the ferment in prerevolutionary Russia, but “Brodovitch was to be marked forever by the time of great sociopolitical transformation when change of one sort or another was the oxygen of public life,” wrote his biographer, Kerry William Purcell.

  The Brodovitch family wanted Alexey to enter the Imperial Art Academy, but in 1914, the sixteen-year-old ran away to fight in World War I. Dragged home by his father, he was sent to officers’ school, emerged a cavalry officer, and ultimately attained the rank of captain. During the Civil War after the Russian Revolution, Brodovitch served with the royalist White Army and was wounded in battle against the Bolsheviks, hospitalized in the Caucasus Mountains, and eventually retreated south with thousands of refugees. He met his future wife, Nina, a nurse volunteer, during that retreat.

  The couple ended up in Novorossiysk, where he reunited with his brother and father, who was captain of a ship that took them to Constantinople, where his mother appeared. They eventually reached Paris, and Alexey and Nina married and lived in a “cheap, dirty room in a brothel” in Montparnasse, a center of Russian emigrant life. Brodovitch painted backdrops—he called it “executing décor”—designed by Picasso, Derain, and Matisse for the Ballets Russes, and went on to design advertisements, textiles for designers such as Patou and Poiret, and layouts for French magazines. He also designed jewelry and china, tried his hand at architecture and decorating, and immersed himself in the great art movements of the period—constructivism, surrealism, art deco—and in 1924, after winning a poster-design competition in which he beat Pablo Picasso, among others, he focused on graphic design, synthesizing “the various modernist strands” of experimental art and design “into a unified approach” that made his studio, L’Atelier A.B., preeminent in Paris. He moved to Philadelphia in 1930 to teach advertising.

  In 1934 after Snow lured him to Harper’s Bazaar, he helped Hearst’s moribund fashion magazine catch up to Dr. Agha’s more innovative Vogue and then surpass it.II Thirty-six years old when he joined the Bazaar, Brodovitch would remain in Hearst’s employ for two dozen years, though he continued to freelance and travel widely, keeping abreast of the latest developments in art and graphic design. He also worked briefly as a photographer, shooting the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and other dance companies from 1935 to 1939 for his only book, Ballet (published in a small edition in 1945). The photographer Irving Penn would later say that Ballet “spat in the face of technique and pointed out a new way in which photographers could work.” Blurred and distorted, and likely manipulated in the darkroom, yet strictly ordered and unified, the book captured motion in a way never before seen—except perhaps in Brodovitch layouts for the Bazaar.

  Brodovitch continued to teach a series of weekly seminars called the Design Laboratory, which he’d launched in Philadelphia before joining the Bazaar and then moved to New York’s New School for Social Research. Many of the greatest photographers and graphic designers of the midcentury passed through those classes, including the fashion photographers Lillian Bassman (with her husband, Paul Himmel), Fernand Fonssagrives, William Helburn, Hiro, Tom Palumbo, Karen Radk
ai, Jerry Schatzberg, Bert Stern, Louis Faurer, Art Kane, Saul Leiter, and the student who would later be most closely associated with Brodovitch, Richard Avedon. Taking Brodovitch’s course was a way to be noticed and invited to contribute to the Bazaar.

  Those who encountered him described Brodovitch as everything from charming to tyrannical, glum and shy to elegant and noble. “It was a pleasure to watch him at work,” Frances McFadden, then the managing editor of the Bazaar, would recall. “He was so swift and sure. In emergencies, like the time the clipper bearing the report of the Paris Collections was held up in Bermuda, his speed was dazzling. A quick splash or two on the cutting board, a minute’s juggling of the photostats, a slather of art gum, and the sixteen pages were complete. . . . Just before we went to press, all the layouts were laid out in sequence on Carmel Snow’s floor and there, under his eye, rearranged until the rhythm of the magazine suited him.”

  His photographers adored him, and he reciprocated. “He loved his photographers, and with them he blossomed,” recalled Diana Vreeland, a society woman with enormous style who joined the Bazaar as a fashion editor in 1936. Richard Avedon, who would appear at the Design Laboratory eleven years after it began, called him “my only teacher,” but saw a different side of him than McFadden did: “I learned from his impatience, his arrogance, his dissatisfaction.”

  The classes (which were later held in various photography studios, including Avedon’s, and continued into the midsixties) usually followed the same pattern. Brodovitch’s students would gather around a big table and look at magazine clippings, pictures, layouts, and exhibition catalogs, or movies or performances, and discuss and critique them. Brodovitch disdained the very idea of teaching. “You got no rules or laws,” Avedon said. “He was a genius and he was difficult. Like an inherited quality, there was something of him in you for the rest of your life.”

  Brodovitch nudged his students to find their own way, rarely giving praise, instead making oracular comments in Russian-accented English such as “You have remarkable ability to click the shutter at the right time.” But he also gave assignments, though sometimes only as vague themes: jazz, or Dixie cups, or juvenile delinquency. The results of those assignments would be passed around.

  Brodovitch loved images that got “under your skin,” that irritated and intrigued. “I value shock appeal . . . not things which are obviously posed, obviously artificial.” He’d taken as his own Diaghilev’s oft-quoted admonition to Jean Cocteau, étonnez-moi, “astonish me,” and could be bluntly dismissive of work that failed to meet that standard. Avedon said Brodovitch “liked so few of my pictures that when he was enthusiastic over one, I was so elated I could go on that energy for another three months.”

  The photographers who attended the Design Laboratory likely couldn’t say no when Brodovitch asked them to shoot fashion for his magazine. “The best writers, the best photographers . . . were all published in Harper’s Bazaar,” Avedon said. “And that was my dream, that was the pantheon.”

  “It is largely due to Brodovitch that the responsibilities of an editorial art director were expanded to include almost total control of a publication’s visual contents,” the critic Andy Grundberg wrote. The first great photographer Brodovitch lured to the Bazaar, Man Ray, came not from the Design Laboratory but from Vogue. After studying art in New York, Man Ray (born Emanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia in 1890) had followed his friend Marcel Duchamp to Paris in 1921, where Man Ray would prove himself a master of painting, sculpture, and collage, but was initially most famous as a practitioner of the still-new art of photography. A friend introduced him to the designer Poiret, who hired him to photograph his couture collection in fall 1921. “I could have told him it was perhaps because I was more interested in the girl than in the clothes, but I kept my mouth shut,” the photographer later noted.

  Inevitably, in 1924, Man Ray got his first assignment from Dr. Agha at Vogue and worked with Carmel Snow. Then, after Brodovitch joined Snow at the Bazaar, Man Ray followed. He shared Brodovitch’s artistic inclinations and his desire to provoke. But the last season before Paris fell to the Nazis was also the last time Man Ray worked as a fashion photographer. Though he’d been notably successful in the field and enabled fashion’s embrace of surrealism, Man Ray worried that fashion had diminished his reputation. Richard Avedon would later credit him with breaking “the stranglehold of reality on fashion photography,” but Man Ray barely mentions his fashion work in his autobiography.

  More significant to fashion, if not to art, was Louise Dahl-Wolfe, a Californian of Norwegian descent, who joined the Bazaar in 1936. The stocky, “cantankerous, wondrously plain photographer” had studied art and design for many years, and her portraiture caught the eye of the omnivorous Frank Crowinshield, then-editor of Vanity Fair, who sent her to an interview with Dr. Agha. It went badly—she had a cold, was bundled up, and looked older than her forty years—and the art director accidentally returned her portfolio with a withering, sexist critique he’d written to Nast tucked inside (he deemed her middle-aged, and too stuck in her ways for fashion work). “Louise, who has a healthy ego to match her ability, was naturally furious,” Snow recalled, and went to see Brodovitch. Snow, who wanted more color in her magazine at a time when only black-and-white work was deemed important, was drawn to her then-rare interest in color photography. “She developed color photography to its ultimate,” Snow would recall.

  Diana Vreeland joined the Bazaar just after Dahl-Wolfe, and the complementary opposites formed a perfect partnership. Snow had known of Vreeland since the 1920s when she’d been photographed for Vogue as an ugly-duckling debutante. She’d then married a banker, T. Reed Vreeland, and moved to England, where his dashing good looks and her great style made them popular in fashionable society. Back in New York, Snow spotted Vreeland dancing in a hotel and learned that, since her husband was unable to support their tastes and lifestyle mid-Depression, Vreeland was looking for a job. She had no magazine experience, but she’d been in love with fashion since childhood, and Snow felt sure her innate style, taste, and sheer presence would make her valuable.

  A column of tongue-in-cheek fashion advice that she launched in 1936, Why Don’t You? (one famous entry: “Why don’t you rinse your blond child’s hair in a dead champagne to keep it gold as they do in France?”), would have such immediate impact it would be parodied two years later in the New Yorker by S. J. Perelman. She was also a nose-to-the-grindstone worker, and by 1939, she’d become a full-time fashion editor.

  Temper tantrums set Vreeland’s collaborator Dahl-Wolfe apart. A few years later, Toni Frissell, frustrated with fashion after America’s entry into World War II, decided to stretch her talents “to prove to myself that I could do a real reporting job” and volunteered to take photographs for the American Red Cross. At the time, she was working for Life, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as Vogue, and all but the last agreed to pay her usual fee to the Red Cross when they used photographs Frissell took under its auspices. One day in Scotland, photographing rehearsals for the invasion of Normandy, Frissell spied a former Vogue editor among the Red Cross volunteers and took her picture with an army sergeant who was flirting with her.

  When Vogue editors saw that picture, they created a ten-page spread “about the Vogue girls having gone off to war,” Frissell recalled, “photographed by THEIR photographer [capitalization hers].” On her return to the States, Frissell learned that Vogue had refused to pay the Red Cross for the pictures “in spite of [my] being on a leave of absence meaning no pay,” she wrote in her unpublished memoirs. “I was so offended that my magazine should behave in such a shabby, stingy bastard way, I resigned.” When Frissell subsequently approached Snow at the Bazaar, though, Dahl-Wolfe objected—even after getting assurances that Frissell would not be assigned fashion shoots—and threatened to quit if a single Frissell image ran in the magazine.

  The German Jewish Erwin Blumenfeld was one of the greatest photographers to slip from Snow and Brodovitch�
��s grasp. Born to an upper-middle-class family in Berlin in 1897, Blumenfeld was forced to go to work at sixteen as an apprentice at a women’s clothing firm after his father died from syphilis. “He developed a feeling for textiles and texture,” says a son, Yorick. A chance encounter at a urinal with the painter George Grosz the next year thrust him into Berlin’s avant-garde. But after fighting in World War I, and failing to find a foothold in the art world afterward, Blumenfeld opened a shop in Amsterdam selling women’s handbags.

  The discovery of a darkroom, complete with a bellows camera, hidden behind a locked door in his store changed his life. He’d always taken photographs and thought that if he started again and put pictures of beautiful women in his shop window, he could attract more customers. “I developed and printed all night long so that every morning a new and angelic face in ‘high key’ could shine forth in the shop,” he wrote in his autobiography. Blumenfeld was obsessed with beautiful women. “I started life as a sexless sexual maniac. I took refuge in the Eternal Feminine.” Some paid for their portraits; many more were convinced to pose at his invitation, some of them even agreeing to be photographed in the nude, allowing Blumenfeld to indulge his voyeuristic streak.

  Blumenfeld’s most important photographic angel, the daughter of painter Georges Rouault, spotted the pictures in his store window while in Amsterdam on her honeymoon and asked to pose for him. A dentist, she showed his pictures in her waiting room, where prominent patients such as the Vicomtesse de Noailles saw them. Following his new patron to Paris, Blumenfeld quickly met its prominent artists and personalities and photographed many of them. Though he’d come to Paris with the dream of working for Vogue, “he seemed to make no headway,” wrote his biographer.