The Fashion Photographer Who Hates Fashion Magazines

Richard Avedon, Irving Penn—you don’t have to be a fashion person or magazine person to recognize the photographers’ names or their iconic images. But hear the name Lillian Bassman and you’ll probably scrunch up your face and shrug (or feign recognition and then Google her later). Lillian Bassman? What is so great about Lillian Bassman?

Bassman’s images date from the Mad Men-era and depict mostly women models—not celebrities—captured in moments of psychological intensity or withdrawal, and rendered in a high contrast black-and-white expressionistic style. Bassman describes her work as “a woman’s eye for a woman’s intimate feelings.”

View a gallery of Lillian Bassman's photography here. [2]

Whereas Avedon and Penn had long careers pumping out commercial and gallery work from the ’40s until their deaths 60 years later, Bassman dumped the glitz of high fashion in 1965, threw out portions of her archive, and turned her lens to cracks in the pavement, male bodybuilders, and vegetables. She returned to fashion in the 1990s, first reinterpreting her postwar archive (many vintage negatives had been misplaced for 20 years), and taking a few new assignments.

A vast section of Bassman’s work is on view this fall. The 92-year-old installed her latest work (reinterpretations and entirely new material) in New York’s Staley-Wise [3] gallery. Lillian Bassman: Women [4], a hefty tritone-printed monograph, was just published. And a dual retrospective of Bassman and her late husband Paul Himmel’s photographs will open at the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg, Germany, this Thanksgiving. (The children of Russian émigrés met at Coney Island in 1932 when she was 15 and he 18—they were a couple until Himmel’s death this year. On the 77-year partnership, Bassman told The New Yorker in 2006: “We’re either very boring or very well-mated.”)

I recently spoke to Bassman on the phone about her work, her methods, and her aversion to skinny young models.

I’m starting with a confession: I adore your photographs—and my favorite magazine of all time is Junior Bazaar, which you co-art-directed with Alexey Brodovitch [5] from 1945 to 1948. There’s a certain stripped-down, witty, make-do minimalism. Did the war impose restrictions that trickled down to the pages?

Lillian Bassman: Yes. The advertisers didn’t have material for us to work with—many didn’t have anything new to sell. They just wanted their names remembered. As for clothes: Advertisers didn’t have much clothing for ads; they didn’t have the fabric to produce much. So they gave us more leeway than we would have had otherwise. The limitations helped us.

So that’s one secret to the concept of Junior Bazaar—advertisers didn’t have much to sell. Do you read fashion magazines today?

I don’t like to read them! First of all, I hate the clothing. It’s all overdone—I don’t see any people wearing the stuff. The images are done for advertisers, and it’s about how much stuff you can put on a model. That has no allure for me. I don’t see the ease. Also, I hate the use of very young models, women who look like they’re 15, 17, even 20. They can be beautiful, but they are wearing clothing that costs thousands of dollars, clothing they couldn’t possibly afford. They don’t move properly in the garments and jewels. It doesn’t fit with me.

Well, right now people are expressing a yearning to see more authenticity in advertising and magazine pictorials—everything from limiting Photoshop to using more mature or heavier models, like in the current issue of Glamour [6].

I’m tired of the look of skin today—it’s forced. The eyes are forced too. Everyone looks tainted and deprived of life. The bones and whatever goes in inside is erased.

Keep going! It’s great hearing your take on this. I hope art directors are listening!

The look today is an over-glossed look. There’s no bone, no sunken cheek, no feeling of the human being. I don’t think that magazines should show skin that’s broken out or pimply—but they should show that there is a human being. It’s the Photoshop: People are using it to erase everything that has real contours.

OK, just to be contrarian here: You also alter your images. Frequently the women are bleached to translucence. You’re an expressionist, but there’s the opposite, too: gritty realism.

I use Photoshop the same way that I used to print in the darkroom, which was using bleaches and swabs and paintbrushes. My aim isn’t to erase “imperfections,” it’s to be painterly and to create a mood.

Your best-known photographs are darkroom “reinventions” of your mid-century Bazaar editorial and lingerie advertising work. To what degree did Carmel Snow [the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar] direct you in the making of the original raw material, the Bazaar images, though?

The only time that I ever took direction was from Carmel Snow. She was very determined and committed to Paris fashion. She was keen on me photographing the clothes. “I didn’t bring you to make art, Lillian,” she once said to me in Paris. “I brought you to photograph the buttons and the bows!”

Snow coined the term “New Look” and was Dior’s fiercest champion in America, but not so gung-ho on American sportswear or ready-to-wear clothing. I’ve read that she used to send you her “problems”—i.e., mass-produced dresses—because with you, the most pedestrian, Seventh Avenue typist’s frock could be rendered with as much delicacy and grace as a haute couture confection.

She’d hand me an American dress and say, “Do anything you want to do.” Carmel couldn’t care less about American fashion; she wasn’t that committed to the American designer. One time in Paris I was photographing a chiffon dress without having gone to the runway show. I just saw a cloud of chiffon in the room, and I took a girl to the Bois [7] and had her wear it and run in the snow. Carmel said “My dear, you didn’t go to the show—that wasn’t ‘a dress,’ that was ‘a column of chiffon!’ ” To me, it was just chiffon, a dress. Carmel never once criticized a photograph of mine, though.

How do you relate to clothes? A few years ago you told  The New Yorker [8] your relatives made you “lefty bohemian” clothes that you wore with a “sexy magpie swagger.” And in the fantastic 1951 profile of you in Popular Photography [9], you don’t appear glammed-up or New Look-ing at all.

Nine-tenths of my day is spent in the studio working. I’ve always worn blue jeans or trousers and a shirt. I think when I was younger I wore dirndl skirts with tight belts and shirts. I used to buy shirts at Army and Navy stores. In the ’60s, I had quite a few problems during workdays when I’d be invited to lunch with a director. I’d come in my work clothes, and they wouldn’t accept me in the restaurant.

By 1965, you had abdicated fashion work, and then in 1971 you discarded and lost track of some negatives from your archive—decades of work. Why did you turn away from fashion?

I abandoned the fashion business when the models became younger and younger and younger. I had a very difficult time imagining the 15-, 16-year-old girls wearing such extraordinarily expensive and exaggerated fashions. Also, until that point I was doing a lot of advertising and used models who had also worked for the Bazaar. They didn’t get extraordinary salaries and they gave a lot of their time. I could talk to them, dress them, work with their hair myself; I could talk to a model about her children and really get us into a mood. Then, in the ’60s, I could have a model for two or three hours max—no time. And other people were on the set: hairdressers, makeup. Also, because the models thought they were fabulous stars they had their own poses: pose No. 1, pose No. 2, pose No. 3. That’s not how I worked.

I’ve got Verushka in Blow-Up going in my head now. Tell me about your other work, the stuff you did when you weren’t doing Bazaar or commercial work.

I have a house at the shore. I became very aware of young men who were really into bodybuilding at the beach. And I suddenly thought all these muscles look like breasts. And so I started to do a project in which I photographed a whole group of musclemen who had huge pectorals. I had an exhibition, but people came to the exhibition and said “Oh, but they aren’t fashion.” People associate me so strongly with fashion that they couldn’t make the transition to another kind of work. But throughout the years I’ve had exhibitions in which I show vegetables, cracks in sidewalks ... I spent many a day walking in the middle of the street, my assistant getting hysterical. The cars were coming down the middle right at me. But the cracks had a story for me.

For the record, what exactly happened that day in 1971 when you tossed some of your negatives? The accounts differ. One version is that you trashed “30 years’ worth of negatives,” the pretext being you were literally fed up with fashion, condemning it to the trash heap. Version two is that you inadvertently misplaced part of your archive while culling it, as artists often do.

My husband Paul and I were moving our studio from the first floor to the second. Paul was going back to school. So we were cleaning out, and I looked at the negatives. I thought, I’m never going to use these advertisements again, so I’ll clear the deck and get rid of everything. My assistant inadvertently picked up a bag, put it away, and those are the ones that were later salvaged.

And it was painter Helen Frankenthaler, who leased the downstairs studio, who discovered them, correct? And then years later Martin Harrison, the photo historian, looked at them and urged you to revisit these images?

Yes. The negatives were from my earliest work, Bazaar and commercial, and they were all stained and mildewed and torn, and so I got intrigued and took old sections of them into the darkroom. That was the basis for new work.

As a 92-year-old woman artist, what advice do you have?

Age-related things, physically and mentally, are very important. There are artists who have worked on into their 80s and 90s, and there are those that produce their best in 60s. All of this has to do with one’s ability to live in the world. To function and keep up with it.