G. Hoyningen-Huene
(1900 - 1968)
George Hoyningen-Huene was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1900. Hoyningen-Huene was born to nobility; his father was a baron in charge of the czar's equestrian activities, and his mother was an American socialite. His first studies were at the Yalta in St. Petersburg, before attending an art
course at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Paris from 1919 to 1920. In the 1920s he worked as a draughtsman in his sister's fashion company, YTER. He also studied with Cubist painter Andre Lhote from 1922 to 1924. In the early 1920s, Hoyningen-Huene worked as a sketcher for many magazines, including Harper's Bazaar, Jardin Des Modes and Vogue.
In 1924, Hoyningen-Huene worked with Man Ray on a fashion portfolio. In 1925, he was hired as an illustrator for French Vogue, and also worked for other Conde Nast publications in Europe and New York, before emigrating to the United States in 1935. For the next ten years Hoyningen worked as a staff fashion photographer at Harper's Bazaar, under editor Carmel Snow and art director Alexey Brodovitch. Hoyningen-Huene's style technique was influenced by photographers Man Ray, Edward Steichen, and Baron de Meyer; his contemporaries. He became a leading fashion photographer, noted for his cool, refined style and extraordinary use of light.
Hoyningen-Huene was known for revering Greek antiquity: he posed models in flowing drapery in imitation of Hellenic reliefs and combined them with plasters of classical statues and busts. He excelled at stylish studio compostions using shadows and elaborate ethereal lighting, but also created quintessentially modernistic open-air swimwear pictures. His trademark photograph, in 1930, shows Izod bathing suits worn by a couple with only light gender differences: she has fashionable bobbed hair; he is Horst P. Hoarst, who at that time was Hoyningen's assistant. The couple photographed is gazing out to the "sea", the two resembling high divers, admired athletes in a period fascinated by Olympic sports. Hoyningen was also one of the first photographers to take pictures of models from above, arranging their skits around them like an open fan. In addition to his fashion layouts, Hoyningen-Huene gained a reputation as a celebrity portraitist, making images of people as diverse as the movie's Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, and fashion designer Coco Chanel, Cary Grant and the expatriot American dancer and performer, Josephine Baker.
A year after leaving Harper's, in 1946, Hoyningen-Huene moved to Hollywood where he taught photography at the Edward Kaminksi School of Creative Photography and at the Art Center School in Pasadena, California. Hoyningen also worked as a color consultant to films by Director George Cukor. He published books of his travel photographs from Greece, Egypt, and Mexico in the late 1940s. A retrospective of his work was shown at the International Center of Photography in 1980, and a book titled The Photographic Art of Hoyningen-Huene was published in 1986.
Hoyningen-Huene was among the 20th century's most prolific chroniclers of fashion and society. He never returned to full-time photography after he moved to Hollywood in 1946, but supplemented his film work and teaching with occasional publicity portraits of Hollywood stars . George Hoyningen-Huene died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California in 1968.
