Since it’s establishment in 1989, Peter Fetterman Gallery has been committed to promoting the awareness and appreciation of the photographic medium as fine art. Specializing in humanist, fashion and documentary work, the gallery has developed one of the largest inventories of blue-chip classic photography in the United States while continually hosting exhibitions of works by the most acclaimed 20th Century and Contemporary artists.
Peter Fetterman Gallery presents a significant collection of signed silver gelatin prints by American artist and photographer Lillian Bassman (1917-2012). Bassman’s glamorous and uniquely graphic style of fashion photography captured a time of elegant design and feminine mystique in a wholly original way.
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1917, Lillian Bassman entered the fashion trade through the design class of famed art director Alexey Brodovitch along with Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Noticing her astute visual talents, Brodovitch appointed Bassman as his Co-Art Director in the founding of Junior Bazaar magazine in 1945. Here she helped launch the careers of many notable photographers of the century including giving early assignments to Avedon, Robert Frank, Leslie Gill, Arnold Newman, Paul Himmel and many more. After the publication was absorbed by Harper’s Bazaar and at the urging of her colleagues, Bassman began to photograph the models she worked with and quickly developed a body of work that was unlike any other fashion images of the period.
As Fashion photography began to evolve into a more objective and direct visual approach, Bassman continually experimented in the darkroom using various bleaching, filtering, and softening techniques, painting with light to achieve her mysterious aesthetic. Along with her now heavily active contemporaries Penn and Avedon, Bassman’s creative efforts elevated the genre of fashion photography out of the art world shadows. Bassman achieved distinctly feminine imagery by exclusively working with her models either solo, or with female assistants only in the studio. This allowed her models such as Barbara Mullen, Carmen Dell’Orefice, Dovima, and Jean Shrimpton to be photographed as a pure study of intimate fashion devoid of male-viewpoint eroticism, while her atmospheric and impressionist prints symbolized the mystery and inner grace of her subjects.
In the 1970’s, frustrated with the formulaic trends of fashion photography, Bassman destroyed nearly her entire archive save for a bag full of negatives stowed away in a closet. After the work was re-discovered two decades later by photo-historian Martin Harrison, she was encouraged to re-interpret her classic works again using her original darkroom techniques to create a comprehensive body of work in limited editions. Richard Avedon stated of her work, “It’s magical what she does. No one else in the history of photography has made visible that heartbreaking invisible place between the appearance and disappearance of things.” Influenced by Bassman’s graceful style and career longevity, esteemed French artist Sarah Moon produced the short ” Something about Lillian ” about fashion photography and fine art.
In 1996 Bassman went back to work as a fashion photographer and printmaker and in 2004 received the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fashion Photography, following an innovative career spanning five decades. Today her prints continue to awe viewers with their bold, almost charcoal appearance and nostalgic elegance. Her work has been exhibited internationally since the 1970’s including recent shows at the Chanel Nexus Hall, Tokyo (2014) and Haus der Photographie Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2009).
FAIR
Paris Photo 2015
From 12 to 15 November, 2015
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill
75008 Paris
France
