A black & white portrait photo of a young white woman, three-quarter view, with an impossibly long graceful neck. She wears a large flowery hat. Excerpts from her obituary in The Guardian, written by Veronica Horwell, 16 Feb 2012: ‘Lillian Bassman wandered into fashion photography in pursuit of the happiness of constant creation. Her absorption in her work showed in every picture she took, or rather in every image she printed, for Bassman… was an exuberant experimenter in the darkroom. "In there, I felt a sense of being able to say something I wanted to say," she remarked. Her pictures are closer to those of the illustrators who shared the glossy pages of fashion magazines with photographers until the 1950s than to contemporaries such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Avedon knew what Bassman was up to though, saying that she made "visible that heartbreaking invisible place between the appearance and the disappearance of things". Bassman was a bohemian from her childhood in Brooklyn and Greenwich Village, New York, onwards. She was the daughter of Ukrainian emigres who had courted in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum. Bassman admired the old masters, too, and was inspired by El Greco's near-monochrome, elongated portraits. Her early intention was to be a dancer, and she kept her eye for the grace in female movement that, she said, "usually passes unnoticed in everyday life".’
By fashion photographer Lillian Bassman (1917-2012), “Night Bloom, Olga Pantushenkova, hat by Christian Lacroix Haute Couture, Paris,” gelatin silver print, published in The New York Times Magazine, 31 March 1996. #fashionphotography #darkroom #womanphotographer #womenphotographers
