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obitoftheday:

Obit of the Day: How Bazaar

Lillian Bassman’s career as a photographer first began with a love of art. Wandering the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York she fell in love with the elegance of the Old Masters. She found her way to a vocational school and began her professional career as painter and graphic designer. Discovered by legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch while in his prestigious lab school, Bassman began working for Harper’s Bazaar and then Junior Bazaar.

While at Junior Bazaar she hired the best photographers she could find including an unknown Richard Avedon. Her work with the magazine led her to give up art direction and take up photography. And she transformed what people thought fashion photography could be. Not satisfied with simply posing and shooting models, Bassman attempted to replicate the style of her beloved Old Masters. She succeed as John Galliano described her work as “painterly strokes of light.”

Bassman retired from photography in the 1970s and burned most of her commercial negatives. Luckily she kept some stored in a trash bag and a friend rediscovered them in 1991 and convinced Bassman to publish her work and return to photography.

She died at the age of 94.

Romantic note: Bassman and her husband Paul Himmel met when they were 6 and 9, respectively. They moved in together when Bassman was 15 and Himmel 18. They married three years later, in 1935, and remained together for 74 years until Himmel died in 2009.

(Images are all copyright of Lillian Bassman. Because of lack of citations on various websites I don’t know which magazines, if any, the photographs appeared. Here are the courtesies:top - Frou Frou Fashionista; middle left - Life Via Pictures; middle right - Through the Looking Glass; bottom - Pacific Standard)