Suzy Parker Funny Face Shower Scene

The glance in the double mirror

by Thomas Wagner | Oct thirteen, 2009

All photos © Dimitrios Tsatsas, Stylepark

Sometimes a shoe with fur trimming and a narrow female talocrural joint within is seduction enough. Sometimes there is material in ample supply, sometimes none at all; and sometimes hat and pose simply follow a whim. Then Veronica Compton appears with a scarf wound elegantly effectually her caput, together with Bruno, an enormous Danish mastiff, to yawn or sing a duet together. Dovina sits wonderfully dressed past Balenciaga à la japonaise in the Café des Deux Magots, one time once again adjacent to a magnificently clean-cut dog; or she poses amazingly calmly between two clumsily dancing elephants in a slim white evening clothes with a black sash beyond her breasts. An elated Suzy Parker sporting a fantastic tulle dress with an enormous Cul de Paris plays pinball in some or other café while her partner looks on admiringly. And Veruschka both relaxed and elegant charges well-nigh playfully pursued by Avedon through the studio and swinging a brocade braid in front of a neutral background.

Richard Avedon (1923 to 2004) has long been deemed 1 of the most famous fashion photographers of the 20th century. When he first arrived in Paris in the belatedly 1940s, the "American in Paris" (as Philippe Garner called him alluding to Gene Kelly) quickly recognized, albeit perchance not voluntarily, what options the special flair of the world'due south fashion uppercase offered when it came to presenting beautiful women in exclusive dresses. Subsequently all, the young, ambitious lensman, who had already extended fashion photography'due south repertoire through the add-on of playful poses (because motility and cheerfulness were to his listen part and packet of life) was on a secret mission. Officially, Louise Dahl-Wolfe is the one who in 1947 who set to photograph the latest haute-couture creations for Harper's Bazaar. That said, Avedon had received permission to travel to Paris with his wife Doe equally model, but had been told to avoid being seen past Dahl-Wolfe. And then he took photos everywhere in the city where the state of affairs arose, and his photos captured a great deal of his own enthusiasm for the fact that these epoch-making creations (in a higher place all those of Dior's "New Wait") were suddenly cropping upwardly in the heart of life. Even so, in those post-State of war years shortages still abounded in Paris, and most people at times lapsed into hopelessness and apathy.

During World War Ii and the Occupation, glamour and creativity in the fashion manufacture lay idle - slumbering, as it were, on both sides of the Atlantic, meaning in Paris, besides. There, the revival in fashion brought with it a revival of cultural life. And past bringing the glamour of the pre-War years back to Paris Harper's sought to promote haute-couture which did a lot back then to assist kick start the economy. Avedon, who long enjoyed the reputation of existence a wunderkind of fashion photography, immersed himself in the fray. Shaped by a fresh, elementary, American zeitgeist inspired past a immature and carefree leisure way, which has its romantic analogue in Dior'due south "New Look", he bandage an objective and innocent glance at contemporary fashion. And it was above all with his outdoor shots that he proceeded to create a new and vibrant idiom for fashion photography. Be it by mean solar day or by night, his expeditions through Paris were inevitably romantic and playful, only never melancholy.

The inventiveness and telescopic of Avedon's photographs from this menses are enormous. Whether he photographed Elise Daniels in a fitted jacket past Dior, in a circumvolve of laughing firefighters, or in Marais in an elegant twin-set up by Balenciaga together with weightlifters and circus performers, he hardly ever cut his model offer from the surroundings, never isolated them from the everyday in a fascinating metropolis full of reawakened joie de vivre. Looking at the elated and vivid scenes today we tin only surmise how startlingly dissimilar and positive Avedon'south shots must accept seemed at the time.

Not only in these early photos does he always draw a picture of the elegant, glamorously dressed woman - merely very rarely did the models seem lost in reverie let solitary elegiac or fifty-fifty arrogant. Avedon's goddesses sit in cafés, smoke, drink and joke. They move among normal people, and they show that you tin can be dressed stylishly everywhere and be seductive. Even though information technology did not always meet with the blessing of Carmel Snow, the legendary editor of Harper'southward, Avedon as well found it appealing to show women in moments when they do not realize someone is observing them; doubtless this attribute contributes to the lively touch of his images. Yet kickoff and foremost his photographs celebrate women who possess a unique, individual beauty that often does not run into the norm, women, who motion quite naturally in an age full of events that were never there before, who are both cocky-confident and free of a conventional thought of perfection. Avedon once said that "information technology is difficult to describe what for me is a woman'south beauty. None of the women I find beautiful has a perfect face up. On the reverse, I am repeatedly taken past something unforeseen appearing in a face or in the proportions. The most beautiful woman who always sate earlier my photographic camera was Signora Gianni Agnelli." The portrait photograph he took of her in 1953, and in which nothing distracts from her sublime presence, was to become one of his trademarks.

That said, in his attempts to trace types of dazzler in keeping with the twenty-four hours Avedon non only benefited from his own unprejudiced heart and the natural charm of the situations in which he often places his models. Be it in his manner shots or his portraits (including the images of "In the American Due west", which he was to have from 1979 to 1984) Avedon fulfilled the beholder'due south expectations and however dashed them, too. And in addition to torso, color and light he repeatedly employed movement in all its facets every bit an creative instrument - he often worked with something and then difficult to command, namely blurred motion, the renowned "Avedon Blur".

Avedon conspicuously had an affinity to motion-picture show, to which he paid homage in his images merely as he did to Paris as a identify where the new lifestyle sought new forms. "Avedon'due south brilliance," writes Philippe Garner, "consisted in using Paris as a readymade, as it were, in his compositions, and thus instilling the genre of mode photography with new significant by appropriating the narrative approach of the filmmaker and introducing a choreographed element into his photography." Just how strong this affinity in the early years to film was - and Avedon primarily loved intelligent comedies such equally Ernst Lubitsch "Trouble in Paradise" - became abundantly clear in 1957 when the flick "Funny Face" starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire hit the theaters. It tells the story of a fashion photographer, who persuades a beautiful, immature simply indecisive adult female to become a fashion model. Fred Astaire plays photographer Dick Avery, a figure based on Avedon, who also acted as adviser for the film.

Avedon did not but tap the film equally if information technology were just 1 more than context. What interested him was firstly the inner logic of a scene, its "wait", not to mention the fact that a film image always refers to the one that follows, in other words is open up to the continuity and continuation of an activity. Many of his narrative photos have a like bear on; look at them and you lot observe yourself continuing before your mind'south eye what y'all first seem in them and what thus begins in them.

Then there is Avedon's game with glances. During his first trip to Paris when he was to photo a brown woolen suit with a fitted jacket sporting Persian lamb trim and a wide, swinging skirt in the classic Dior way he went with his model, Renée, to the Identify de la Concorde in the first morning time calorie-free. The boyfriend rushing by with his friends could hardly believe what he saw. His skeptical gaze moves across the model as she turns in a lively mode to face up the three passers-by and across to the lensman who was standing in an elevated position. As a result, the gaze of the camera not only extracts a piece of reality just also contains an respond in the gaze of the passers-by. What also makes this shot interesting is that Avedon employs the girl's plough to highlight the lavish wealth of cloth with which Dior bids farewell to wartime rationing, and because Avedon merely selected the image that nosotros meet afterwards in the day. It did not appear in Harper's, partly out of concern the human's directly gaze might distract from the model and accommodate.

Avedon relished playing with gazes and does so ofttimes. In winter 1950, his mentor Alexey Brodovitch from Harper's Boutique published a feature on him and his competitor Irving Penn from Faddy, and asked the photographer to say something about what motivated him. "Photography," Avedon declared, "has ever been a kind of double-sided mirror for me. On the i side I run across my motif and on the other I see myself." In other words, at least two gazes meet in the mirror of photography, that of the lensman and that of the beholder of the image. But sometimes the subject also looks back; and sometimes the lensman recognizes himself in this response.

Another shot taken in 1956 (again on Place de la Concorde) depicts Suzy Parker and Robin Tattersall - he in a dark suit, she in a bong-shaped salt-and-pepper tweed coat by Dior with wide three-quarter length sleeves and necktie - engaged in pair skating on roller skates. Once once again we are struck by the lightness and carefree manner with which Avedon presents a heavy glaze worked from abundant material and also sketches the paradigm of a adult female who might exist clad in highly exclusive garments merely is all the same prepared to do the craziest things. Even though the settings change over the course of the years, Avedon had soon made stars out of models and Cape Canaveral stands instead of Place de la Concorde, Avedon's feel for the narrative and his power to phase his settings coincide constantly with his immense sense for portraiture.

All this and much more can be perused in the magnificent publication "Avedon Fashion" - through a large number of beautifully printed photographs and in texts that provide information on what it was similar back then in the editing offices of Harper'south and Faddy, how Avedon's style adult and altered and how the i or other shot came about.

The publication not simply contains a selection of Avedon's best-known and best fashion photographs; information technology is a truthful delight to leaf through. Together with the essays by Philippe Garner, Carol Squiers and Vince Aletti it is as well proves to be a contribution to the history of fashion, order and culture in the second half of the 20th century, followed from an equally unique and fascinating perspective. Namely that of a master of fashion photography. What y'all do wish is that to make the panorama complete the collection would also include several of Avedon'south portraits of artists and actors, and possibly the ane or other photo series in one case published in Bazaar or in Vogue for which Avedon worked from 1966 onwards. Merely, as if to compensate for this, the model on the cover (like that featured in Apr 1965 in Harper'south Boutique) can wink virtually beautifully.

Richard Avedon, Way 1944 - 2000, 372 pages, 303 color and duotone plates, with essays past Philippe Garner, Carol Squiers and Vince Aletti, Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, Munich 2009, hard cover, EUR 78

schirmer-mosel.germanartbooks.de