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.

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 gallery. Lillian Bassman: Women, 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 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.

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.