Iconic Photos

The French court photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson took more than 400 portraits of the Countess Castiglione, considered the most beautiful woman of her time,during a 40-year collaboration. The photographs,commissioned by the countess and created under her supervision,were both self-advertisement and self-expression as well as revolutionary. They covered three distinct periods—her first entry into French society, 1856–57; her return to Parisian life, from 1861 to 1867; and toward the end of her life, from 1893 to 1895.

Virginie Oldoïni who married the Count di Castiglione was notorious for being Napoleon III’s mistress, a scandal that led her separation from her husband. During her two years relationship with the French emperor (1856-1857), she was known for her flamboyant manner and elaborate dresses at the imperial court. In July 1856, a few months after her arrival to Paris, the countess made her first visit to the studio of Mayer & Pierson, one of the most sought-after portrait studios of the Second Empire. Most of the photographs depicted the Countess in her theatrical outfits, including depictions as Beatrix, Salambo, Judith, 18th century marquise, nun, prostitute, Queen of Etruria, Queen of Hearts and Chinese woman. A number of photographs exposed her bare legs or feet–the features that she was most proud of–and were very risque for her time.(In these photos, her head has been cropped out.)

Her affair with Napoleon III ended and bankrupt, she exiled herself to Italy in 1858, where she was involved in the Italian Unification. Three years later, she returned to Paris, once again as an influential fixture and a femme fatale. After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, she lived an increasingly reclusive and eccentric life in an apartment on the Place Vendôme, venturing out only at night, shrouded in veils–her beauty slowly deteriorating. Senile and bewrinkled Countess again commissioned 70-year old Pierson to take more photos of her, replicating the poses and dresses she modeled thirty years earlier.

“The hair was thin and the teeth were gone, only the costuming was the same. The confident gaze is replaced by a deep sadness. Her Baroque grandeur has decayed into a listless parody of herself. One can almost hear a small still voice reciting, “mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all” — all to no avail…” wrote Max Henry. She dreamed of showing her oeuvre at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in a retrospective titled “The Most Beautiful Woman of the Century.” She died on November 28, 1899, at the age of sixty-two.

In the 30s and 40s, Angus McBean was arguably the best portrait photographer of his era. His photographs revealed a reverence and admiration for the subject and were the homages to Shakespearean and later the Hollywood ideals of glamour and beauty.

Many of McBean’s portraits are elaborately staged, requiring full sets, to put Peggy Ahscroft, as Portia, into a surreal landscape, Vivien Leigh, in cod-Classical goddess garb, through cotton-wool clouds, Flora Robson bursting through the dry earth, or above, Diana Churchill’s head, seemingly misplaced by the leg of a kitchen chair. Deemed ‘surreal’ by the popular press, he was denounced by the British Journal of Photography as a ‘charlatan’. McBean retorted with the portrait of Dorothy Dickson, whose head appeared among the lily pads by an overgrown bank.

In February 1940, Picture Post covered his shoot with Diana Churchill, titled “How to Photograph a Beauty.” The picture of Diana Churchill’s disembodied head aroused so much dismay that, he was imprisoned for two and a half years. It being the wartime, the Nazi Germany used this as a propaganda against the British ‘freedom of press’. Later in his career he photographed the Beatles for 1963 and 1970 album covers, and did color fashions for Vogue in the mid-1980s. His annual Christmas card creations, sent to friends since 1936, have become a valuable auction item. In 1968 Harvard University purchased all of his theater negatives—48,000 images weighing four and a half tons.

Last week, I wrote about the controversial picture of Cherid Barkaoun. Someone emailed me with another episode in the Algerian history that was intertwined with photography and here it is:

In 1987, Malek Alloula, an Algerian poet who lives in France published a book called, The Colonial Harem. The book was a collection of postcards that displayed an Africa that never was–an Africa of European imagination, an Africa of exotic dancers and nubile odalisques.

Alloula arranged the postcards in an increasing order of explicitness, ending his book with an ”anthology of breasts”: women, naked to the waist, accompanied by captions like ”Want to party, honey?” or ”Oh! Is it ever hot!” or ”The Cracked Jug.” Many postcards supposedly displaying Algeria of that time composed of women in elaborately draped trousers, embroidered vests, exorbitant beads and jewelled turbans. They posed on divans and carpets with cigarettes in their hands, shackles on their feet.

For 30 years at the beginning of this century, these cards were brought onto the European market by photographers like the Swiss Jean Geyser. They transmitted back a message of superiority, and of exotic details of the African interior to Europe. They served as surrogates for the need for political and military conquest and for further investments in the French colonial ventures in Africa. Alloula does not focus on the biographies of the models (most of them were nameless anyway) or their reasons for posing, but instead on the oppression, violence and degradation the former colonial masters brought about in Africa.

David Seymour, “Chim”, the Polish emigrant who defined an era of sympathetic humanity through his lens, was one of the founders of Magnum. An art lover, Seymour photographed famous personalities such as the art historian Bernard Berenson, musician Arturo Toscanini, and author Carlo Levi.

Arturo Toscanini was perhaps the greatest conductor of the twentieth century, and widely regarded as an authoritative interpreter of the works of Verdi, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner. Toscanini revolutionized musical interpretation by frequently insisting that his orchestras play the music exactly as written. Although the great Italian composer generally refused all requests to be photographed, Countess Castelbarco, his daughter, requested that Chim photograph him, and Toscanini agreed. The above image captures the composer at his piano with the death masks of Beethoven, Wagner, and Verdi in a case behind him. Verdi was extremely dear to Toscanini because at Verdi’s funeral in 1901, Toscanini conducted a performance of “Va, pensiero” (The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabacco), which ensured Verdi’s success when it was first performed (in “Nabucco”). In 1957, the piece was played as part of a memorial concert for Toscanini, who had just died.

Horst P. Horst, most often known as just Horst, (1906 –1999) was a German American photographer best known for his photographs of women and fashion taken while working for Vogue magazine. His work frequently reflects his interest in surrealism and his regard of the ancient Greek ideal of physical beauty. For Vogue, he created one of the great iconic photos of the Twentieth-Century, “The Mainbocher Corset”. This photograph with its erotically charged mystery appeared in the September 15, 1939 Vogue. Seen from behind, a model sits on a wooden bench, looking down through her arms. She wears a back-lacing corset by Detolle for Mainbocher. Horst treats her body like a living sculpture, and this piece is as much a figure study as an image of a quotidian bit of lingerie. To this day, designers like Donna Karan continue to use the timeless beauty of “The Mainbocher Corset” as an inspiration for their outerwear collections today.

LIFE always realized the sales value of a little sex. Seldom did an issue of Life miss the opportunity to include partially clad women, sometimes under cover of a story on Hollywood or thinly veiled as a fashion piece on the season’s swimwear. Though this practice opened the magazine to criticism from some fronts, its impact on sales was undeniable. However, in September 1966, the photo of Sophia Loren—the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt’s favorite model—wearing a negligee made the cover. It caused many Life readers to cancel their subscriptions.

During the 1960s, Loren was one of the most popular actresses in the world, in 1964, she received $1 million to act in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Despite the failure of her films to generate sales at the box office, Sophia Loren was a darling of studios, and worn some of the most lavish costumes ever created for the movies. The above photo was taken on the set for 1964 film Matrimonio all’italiana, starring Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

Alfred Eisenstaedt is known for his picture of an unknown couple kissing on the Times Square during the VJ Day. However, as he admitted, this image was not Eisenstaedt’s personal favorite. That honor goes to the above photo of a young woman in a box seat at La Scala opera on the New Year Day, 1934. Always a master of candid photography, Eisenstaedt was looking for the telling detail to place in the foreground of his image. “Suddenly,” he said, “I saw a lovely young society girl sitting next to an empty box. From that box I took another picture, with the girl in the foreground. For years and years this has been one of my prize photographs. Without the girl I would not have had a memorable picture.”

Editors at Die Dame, who had assigned Eisie to the opera, did not feel similarly. They never printed the picture.

So it was a friend who first gave me this idea: to use Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as a template to see how many of these culturally significant events that I have already covered in writing this blog. I am pretty sure that I haven’t covered much, but since I will be away from updating the site for a while, this is how I will keep all of you entertained for the time being.

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television, North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom, Brando, “The King and I”, and “The Catcher in the Rye”

Eisenhower, vaccine, England’s got a new queen, Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

CHORUS

Josef Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev, Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, dacron, Dien Bien Phu and “Rock Around the Clock”

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team, Davy Crockett, “Peter Pan”, Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev, Princess Grace, “Peyton Place”, trouble in the Suez

CHORUS

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac, Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, “Bridge on the River Kwai”

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball, Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide

Buddy Holly, “Ben-Hur”, space monkey, Mafia, hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no go

U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy, Chubby Checker, “Psycho”, Belgians in the Congo

CHORUS

Hemingway, Eichmann, “Stranger in a Strange Land”, Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs Invasion

“Lawrence of Arabia”, British Beatlemania, Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex, JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say

CHORUS

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon, back again, Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock

Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline, Ayatollolah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

“Wheel of Fortune” , Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide, Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shore, China’s under martial law, Rock and Roller Cola Wars, I can’t take it anymore

CHORUS

In above photo taken in August 1945, architect Frank Lloyd Wright shows the plan of Guggenheim Museum to Solomon Guggenheim and Hilla von Rebay. Baroness Rebay, an avid art collector and a long-time friend and confidante of Guggenheim, was the tour de force behind the creation of the museum–she chose Frank Lloyd Wright herself to design the museum, and chosen the current site for the museum’s residence.

The project occupied Wright for 16 years (1943–1959). Of the idea to build the Guggenheim in New York, Wright objected in 1949, “I can think of several more desirable places in the world to build this great museum, but we will have to try New York.” As an architect, Wright frequently criticized New York’s skyscrapers and decided instead that the museum be a “little temple in a park.” When the design was unveiled (above), the divide it caused was astounding; it was hailed by some, but denounced as a “washing machine,” a “hot cross bun,” a “marshmallow,” by others. Even Wright’s stanchest supporters “shuddered” to envision the cylindrical museum beside staid, decades-old apartment buildings.

In 1953, he submitted the plans to the Department of Housing and Building, which refused to grant a license, citing it violated building codes. With a pliancy that was uncharacteristic of his reactions to criticism, Wright complied with the request to make a few alterations. He stood firm on others, such as a plexiglass dome for the building and glass doors. The plans to start building were delayed several times but, finally, the museum was in construction in 1956. In total, it took 700 sketches, and six sets of working drawings.

By this time Guggenheim had been dead for ten years and difficult and bossy Rebay (her nickname was ‘the B’ not for the Baroness) had been expelled from the board of directors by the millionaire’s heirs. When the museum was finally opened, she was not even invited. She never set foot in the museum she essentially helped create. Embittered, she retreated from public life and retreated to her estate in Connecticut, where she continued to meet many artists.

For Frank Lloyd Wright, the museum was his swan-song too. On April 9th 1959 (six months before the museum opened), the egomaniac wunderkind of architecture died in Phoenix, Arizona. To this day, the museum is still controversial. Wright’s devoted followers complain that when the museum was completed, a number of important details of Wright’s design were ignored, including his desire for the interior to be painted off-white. The artists contend that Wright’s spiral rump continuous gallery causes the pictures to be awry. (In his day, Wright noted that the grade of the ramp was no steeper than the grade of a sidewalk from building line to curb). The museum staff was also bitter about the ramp, and found serious fault with Mr. Wright’s lack of adequate provision for art storage and restorations.

The Museum opened on October 21st 1959, so today marks the 50th year anniversary of the opening of the Guggenheim Museum. Happy Birthday!

Truman Capote’s legendary masked ball, at New York City’s Plaza Hotel on November 28, 1966, was a hyped-up media event meticulously masterminded by the self-promoting, social-climbing author of In Cold Blood. [From the moment that he styled himself as a male nymphet for his first novel's jacket photo, Capote had shown a rare talent for self-promotion]. Capote dangled the prized invitations for months, snubbing early supporters like close friend and fellow writer Carson McCullers as he determined who was “in” and who was “out.” In choosing his guest of honor, Capote eschewed his carefully cultivated society friends, the flock of wealthy, elegant, ultra-fashionable society matrons whom Capote called his “swans” (Babe Paley, C. Z. Guest, Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, and Marella Agnelli) in favor of “dowdy” Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.

The eventual guest list to so-called Party of the Century tallied 540, and included names like (newlyweds) Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, literary lions Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, and various international crowned heads, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Whitneys. Halston and Adolfo. designed  the elaborate masks and headdresses. Wanting to keep the party mix interesting and unpredictable, Capote also invited people from the town where the murders from In Cold Blood occurred, publishing types, and even the doorman from the U.N. Plaza, his apartment building, who danced the night away with a woman who didn’t know his pedigree; and Norman Mailer sounded off about Vietnam. Actress Candice Bergen was bored at the ball, and the photographer Elliot Erwitt captured her above.

[The snubbed replied their own superior-than-thou message on the cover of December 1967 Esquire issue. Under the title "We wouldn't have come even if you had invited us, Truman Capote" pictured a surly-looking group comprising Jimmy Brown, Kim Novak, Tony Curtis, Pat Brown, Ed Sullivan, Pierre Salinger, Lynn Redgrave and Casey Stengel. Inside William F. Buckley dissected the politics of the party one year on.]

Today, the above image of David Bowie which graced his album Aladdin Sane might have been produced with Photoshop. Back in the 60s, everything was a bit more manual.

It was taken by Brian Duffy who along with David Bailey and Terence Donovan, belonged to the London’s West End set, a heady mix of actors, pop stars and criminals who altogether created many iconic images, crafts and events of the 1960s.

Bowie was interested in the Elvis ring which had the letters TCB [taking care of business] as well as a lightning flash. Duffy himself drew on his face the design, using a lipstick to fill in the red. When it was decided that Bowie would have a flash on his face, Duffy drew inspiration from the mundane objects in his studio and, along with make-up artist Pierre La Roche, copied the red and blue flash off a National Panasonic rice cooker lying nearby.

Duffy hadn’t always wanted to be a photographer. In the beginning he had wanted to be a painter and had then ended up working in fashion before a chance glance at a contact sheet persuaded him to change direction. However, in 1979 Duffy decided he no longer wanted to be a photographer; he decided to set fire to his life’s work–the negatives didn’t totally burn, but the bulk of his work was lost.

A new Duffy exhibition opens at the Chris Beetles galley in London on 15 October.

Note: In May 2003, Vogue magazine paid tribute to Bowie by dressing up Kate Moss in some of his original costumes. A nod to the above Duffy photo graced its cover, which Vogue’s editor Alexandra Shulman said was his favourite cover of all time.

One of the 20th centuries’ most preeminent photoartists, Man Ray left behind a number of iconic images of the century, including Black and White, Gertrude Stein, Tears (1932) and the above, a series of portraits of Marchel Duchamp as his female alter-ego, Rrose Selavy.

Always unconformist and subversive artist, Duchamp challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and art marketing, fathering the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. His greatest performance art as Rrose Selavy appeared in 1920. Originally, the name was Rose Sélavy, which sounds like: “Rose, c’est la vie.” In 1921, she acquired the extra “r” when she added her signature to L’Oeil Cacodylate, a painting by Francis Picabia. The name cleverly re-chosen to pun ”Eros, c’est la vie”, an expression of everything Duchamp’s art is about; eros, that’s it, that’s all there is.

Through the decade, Man Ray and Duchamp collaborated on more photos of Sélavy, but Duchamp used his female pseudonym on only a few works.