Most remembered for his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, Phil Stern’s subjects ranged from soldiers on the warfront to starlets of Hollywood. The year of the Dean’s premature death, Stern photographed the actor peeking out of his sweater, perhaps suggesting Dean’s enigmatic persona. Harper’s Bazaar’s November 2015 cover,
German photographer Erwin Blumenfeld’s Dada background is evident in his collage-like images and photographic manipulations. Shadows were often used to Blumenfeld’s advantage as illustrated in his c. 1945 image of an unknown model whose presence is sliced through the vertical shades cast upon her. Norwegian-born photographer Sølve Sundsbø would employ a similar lighting
“Otherworldly” best describes the aesthetic of Norwegian-born photographer Sølve Sundsbø. A regular contributor to many contemporary fashion publications, Sundsbø garnered much attention for his visual contribution to the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty catalogue. In 2008, Sundsbø photographed Danish model Freja Beha Erichsen dressed in solid-colored gowns bubbling and billowing about her for the March
Under the moniker of Horst P. Horst, German born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann would photograph the beau monde and Parisian café society of the interwar years. The year Horst would meet Gabrielle Chanel, he took the most memorable and well-known photograph of the fashion designer’s life; an image that came to typify
Transgressive German photographer Helmut Newton, established a prolific body of work in his signature voyeuristic style that changed the landscape of 20th-century fashion photography. In 1985, the photographer would capture Elizabeth Taylor’s self-professed love affair with jewelry as she bathed in a Los Angeles pool accessorized with an emerald Bulgari parure
Often looking to the surreal, Melvin Sokolsky would play with proportion, perspective and pre-photoshop trickery in his fashion photography. Known for his series of bubble girls hovering about Paris, Sokolsky drew inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch’s fantastical painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights which featured a vignette of a couple encased in a glass bubble.
For Love Magazine’s SS 2013 issue, photographer duo Mert and Marcus took to the tub when photographing Cara Delevingne, Kate Moss and Chloe Moretz. A year later, Cara appears as the face for Tom Ford’s Black Orchid fragrance campaign. In line with the brand’s ever-racy ads, the British model soaks nude
To commemorate her transition out of silent films and into talkies, Edward Steichen photographed American actress Gloria Swanson in 1924. A pioneer in the field of fashion photography, Steichen would build a prolific body of work capturing the glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age. In Swanson’s portrait, Steichen suspended a piece of black
The beach was a frequent mise-en-scène for Herb Ritts photographs, which often featured nude, sometimes gowned, statuesque women emerging from the ocean or sprawled out amongst the sand. In 1987, Herb–short for Herbert–would photograph Danish model Brigitte Nielsen on a beach in Malibu. Swathed in a fisherman’s net, she appears a
Fashion Editor turned photographer Deborah Turbeville, who recently passed this last October, is remembered for her grainy, soft-focused images that depicted and above all celebrated women. Ultra-femme with an underlying darkness, Turbeville’s work would make its way into the pages of Mademoiselle and Vogue by the 1970s. For the August 1st,