After a brief fling with architecture and an apprenticeship in Le Corbusier’s Paris studio, Horst P. Horst first approached photography with his friend George Hoyningen-Huene, the famous Vogue photographer.
A reporter for the New Yorker, Janet Flanner, discovered his work in a little gallery in Paris and Condé Nast, which owned Vogue, called him in New York where Horst was just beginning to work as a fashion photographer. For more than sixty years after this, Horst P. Horst dedicated his life to photography.
Fashion and still lives, portraits and nudes: seventy-five photographs, most of them vintage prints, on exhibition to represent the rigorous, legendary work of one of the most famous fashion photographers of all time.
Horst was the first photographer to experiment with new light on his models and the people who sat for him in the ’30s, adding something mysterious and surreal to his elegant, sophisticated atmospheres. In his photographs everything seems to be magically transformed: simple wooden boards become elegant pieces of furniture, rolls of paper become ancient columns, plaster figures become marble statues.
His women are Olympian goddesses, beyond reach, in the poses of Greek sculpture and classical painting: every little detail, from the position of the hands to the use of trompe l’oeil, helps create a parallel universe of beauty, elegance and style.
After a brief fling with architecture and an apprenticeship in Le Corbusier’s Paris studio, Horst P. Horst first approached photography with his friend George Hoyningen-Huene, the famous Vogue photographer.
A reporter for the New Yorker, Janet Flanner, discovered his work in a little gallery in Paris and Condé Nast, which owned Vogue, called him in New York where Horst was just beginning to work as a fashion photographer. For more than sixty years after this, Horst P. Horst dedicated his life to photography.
Fashion and still lives, portraits and nudes: seventy-five photographs, most of them vintage prints, on exhibition to represent the rigorous, legendary work of one of the most famous fashion photographers of all time.
Horst was the first photographer to experiment with new light on his models and the people who sat for him in the ’30s, adding something mysterious and surreal to his elegant, sophisticated atmospheres. In his photographs everything seems to be magically transformed: simple wooden boards become elegant pieces of furniture, rolls of paper become ancient columns, plaster figures become marble statues.
His women are Olympian goddesses, beyond reach, in the poses of Greek sculpture and classical painting: every little detail, from the position of the hands to the use of trompe l’oeil, helps create a parallel universe of beauty, elegance and style.