It’s a Cinch: Carmen, New York for Harper’s Bazaar, 1951
Fashion photographer Lillian Bassman chose to end her career in the early 1970s due to disillusionment with the industry, despite the fact that Vanity Fair had deemed her a “grand master” of the medium throughout the 1940s and ’50s. Negatives of her black-and-white images celebrating shadow play and the feminine form were abandoned to a rubbish bag in a dark corner of her home on New York’s Upper East Side, only to be rescued and rediscovered years later by an unassuming assistant. It was then that Bassman confronted herself with a life’s work, started to retouch her old images digitally and photograph anew.
Though a female pioneer in the field, her style seemed outdated after the ’50s, when the times and look of fashion changed dramatically. In the ’90s she began using bleaching and blurring techniques to transform her images into works of art, whereby they acquired new meaning. As a result, her relationship with Harper’s Bazaar was rekindled and commissions for German Vogue and Chanel ensued. Currently, thirty-two of her pieces are on display at London’s Wapping Bankside Gallery, curated by the Wapping Project’s founder Jules Wright, who believed that the photographer’s groundbreaking work deserved to be recognized internationally and brought to a new audience.
The dark and sensual expressionistic style of the images makes it hard to decipher their era. Portrait of a Woman, 2008 is a close-up of a woman’s features with dark, longing eyes reminiscent of Dr. Caligari fused with a signature feminine touch—only the date informs the viewer of the image’s recency. Similarly, In Full Swing: Shalom Harlow in Jean Paul Gaultier feels transported from another time, but dates only to 1998.
Early on, Bassman’s individual photographic style singled her out from her contemporaries (and supporters) Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. Nowhere is this more apparent than in It’s a Cinch: Carmen, New York for Harper’s Bazaar, 1951, where she presents the viewer with an intimate moment of a woman in lingerie, the model’s face turned away to guard her identity, yet posed in a natural, non-invasive atmosphere. Through image manipulation, Bassman’s romantic visions are injected with a further dramatic layer and—above all—a modernity that make her photographs stand out as timelessly beautiful works of art encompassing over half a century of stylistic imagery, glamor and myth.
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In Full Swing: Shalom Harlow in Jean Paul Gaultier, 1998
Portrait of a Woman, 2008/>