Lillian Bassman
(1917 -
Lillian Bassman was born in June 17, 1917, in Brooklyn, New York. Bassman's parents were of Russian descent. She studied at Textile High School in Manhattan, New York, in 1933. At the age of fifteen she moved in with photographer Paul Himmel; married in 1935 and had two children Eric and Lizzie.
In 1940, Himmel, and Richard Avedon, who was a close friend, encouraged Bassman to persue a career in photography. In 1944, Lillian Bassman was appointed art director of Hearst's Junior Bazaar.
In 1947, Lillian Bassman photographed her first lingerie collection which gets her her first large commercial job. Bassman is also promoted to the Art Director's Post in Harper's Bazaar, that same year. At Harper's Bazaar she promoted the careers of photographers such as: Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, and Arnold Newman. Lillian Bassman is known as one of the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century. Her most famous photographs were taken from the late 1940s to the 1960s. When working for Harper's Bazaar, Bassman introduced a more sophisticated, new aesthetic to photography, with elegant, moody and often abstract images. Bassman's experimental and romantic visions revolutionized fashion photography. Vanity Fair singled her out as one of photography's "grand masters." Lillian Bassman's unique images are elegant and graceful and achieve their effect through darkroom manipulation, specifically by blurring and bleaching areas of the photographs.
In the 1970s, Lillian Bassman closed her studio and abandoned photography. In 1990, she returned to photography, after a friend found a bag full of negatives in her storage. Bassman began to make alterations to her photographs altering the pictures and bleaching out backgrounds creating dramatic effects. Bassman, like several of the other ground breakers in photojournalism and fashion photography, claims to have encountered no obstacles from sexist attitudes. She maintains that being a woman had advantages in certain kinds of fashion work; models, for instance, often were more relaxed in front of women photographers, resulting in greater naturalism of pose and expression.
