If there was any photographer who has envisioned the final image from framing all through printing, then she has to be Lillian Bassman. While at Harpers, she learnt the art of printing, and then with the help from her mentor Alexey Brodovitch, she went on to create fashion portraits of women that were impossibly elegant & created a darkly sensuous dream world & remains as an inspiration to photographers of all ages.
Her incredible courage to leave a prosperous fashion photography career in Harper’s Bazaar is one thing, but throwing away almost 40 years work work in negatives because she did not agree with the fact that the fashion photography industry was miles away from its purity & creative form, is an extremely inspiring to numerous other creative photographers who wish to retain the religiosity of the art.
Lillian Bassman & her mentor Alexey Brodovitch had some amazing visions of cropping & framing. One of the reasons Lillian’s images cut though the clutter of thousands of fine arts fashion photographers is the way these images are cropped & the perspective presented.
Although she spent a lot of her professional career at the Harper’s Bazaar, she later started working on her own fine arts projects outside of fashion photography & produced some remarkable books like:
- Women – more than 140 of her best images reproduced in stunning tritone
- Lingerie (along with Eric Himmel) – modern feminine image of women in their lingerie
- Lillian Bassman – more than a complete set of works by the photographer including numerous pictures reproduced from negatives that she discarded when she moved away from stereotyped fashion photography
Lillian’s pictures are an inspiration especially to creative black & white fine arts photographers. Her creative process brought together perspective, exposure & printing all together. The geometric placement and camera angles of the subjects created dramatic perspective, creative exposure created photographs with high contrasts between light and dark, the printing process delivered graininess of the finished photos along with further enhancing the exposure scale.