A Latvian-born American portrait photographer, Philippe Halsman is best known for his sharp, dark images that shunned the old soft focus look of that time. Born to a Jewish family, Halsman left Latvia for the U.S after false persecution of his father's death on a hiking tour.
Halsman began contributing to fashion magazines such as Vogue, where his portraits of famous celebrities drew praise and renowned respect. In 1951 Halsman was commissioned by NBC to photograph various popular comedians of the time including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Groucho Marx, and Bob Hope. While photographing the comedians doing their acts, he captured many of the comedians in mid air, which went on to inspire many later jump pictures of celebrities including the Ford family, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon.
Halsman commented, "When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears." The photographer developed a philosophy of jump photography, which he called jumpology. He published Philippe Halsman's Jump Book in 1959, which contained a tongue-in-cheek discussion of jumpology and 178 photographs of celebrity jumpers.
His 1961 book Halsman on the Creation of Photographic Ideas, discussed ways for photographers to produce unusual pieces of work, by following three rules: "the rule of the unusual technique", "the rule of the added unusual feature" and "the rule of the missing feature".
No comments:
Post a Comment