I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
—THOMAS MANN
The waves broke in a soft, rolling crush and scampered to the shoreline in rapid little fingers of foam. As the tide receded, the clouds, floating like wisps of cotton in a crystal-blue sky, were mirrored in the smooth, glassy arcs that were left on the sand. Dick and Doe had no idea what they were getting into when they agreed to take a summer share with Lillian Bassman and her husband, Paul Himmel, in Cherry Grove, a community of bohemian intellectuals on Fire Island, ninety minutes from New York City. The small weekend hamlet was dotted with scruffy and, at times, ramshackle beach cottages framed by a range of white sand dunes on one side and a dense beach forest, called the Sunken Forest, on the other. Cars were never allowed in the residential enclaves of this slender barrier island, adding a layer of inaccessibility to this refuge that people from the city have always treasured. No one ever seemed to mind the cathartic forty-minute ferry ride from the mainland, and then the rickety transport of groceries and travel cases on little red wagons along the narrow boardwalks woven throughout the scrub and the brush. During the day, when the sun is out, the shimmering reflections on the ocean to the south and the glassy waters of the Great South Bay to the north create a unique and astonishing kind of light.
That summer of 1946 was a fertile one for Dick, barely twenty-three and already absorbing the enormous benefits of his new friendship with Bassman, the art director of Junior Bazaar, with whom he was now working regularly, and Himmel, a talented photographer who also had studied with Brodovitch. The two couples occupied a bare-bones cottage in full view of the ferry dock. There was no electricity and no running water. They used kerosene lamps for light and pumped water from a well to wash their dishes and flush the outhouse toilet. The services in the island community were then so primitive that, on Sunday evenings, after a weekend of revelry, they buried their garbage in the dunes before heading back to the city. And yet the absence of modern creature comforts hardly mattered.
If the circumstances of Dick’s new professional life had reconstituted his family with the echo of his father in Mr. Brodovitch and that of his mother in Mrs. Snow, then Lillian and Paul—unconventional, provocative, and culturally alert—provided more than an ample surrogate for Margie. He was now ensconced in an entirely new kind of symbiosis of work and play that challenged him with a corollary set of growing pains tantamount to a cultural repubescence. Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel would turn out to be of enormous influence on Avedon, both professionally and emotionally.
Dick and Doe would take the train out on Friday nights and have dinner with Lily and Paul at the Hotel—the only place in Cherry Grove with electricity and running water. “The stinger was a favorite drink—brandy and crème de menthe—a good, stiff, knockout drink,” Bassman said. They would eat and drink and laugh and dance barefoot until three or four o’clock in the morning—the Lindy, the tango, one-steps—and then go swimming in the ocean. “Dick was amazing,” Lillian said in a 2003 interview about that period. “He would come from work on Friday night. He took a ferry to Fire Island. He would be so hyper that he would order two dinners and go right through them. It was an extraordinary kind of hypertension, I guess, really joyful and fun, but at the same time, something else was going on inside him.” Her implication was that Dick was confronting not only the rigors of his new working life but also a host of personal issues of a darker, more complicated psychological—and sexual—tenor.
It became clear to the Bassman-Himmels soon enough that Dick’s relationship with Doe was one of romantic affection but not of physical passion, and Cherry Grove offered temptations that were exotic and deeply thrilling, yet, for Dick, ultimately dangerous and terrifying. “Paul and I were free spirits, and there were dunes,” Bassman said, explaining that she and Paul would lie around naked, sometimes alone, sometimes with other friends, and everybody would run down with abandon to the water and swim. She remembers Dick and Doe being so abashed by the whole thing, so shy, taking almost half the summer before they felt comfortable enough to shed their inhibitions and, finally, most of their clothes. “I still have pictures of them, at least in my head, of the two of them, Dick and Doe, running down the beach in their jeans looking like two boys, arms around each other. She was a beautiful girl and not masculine in any way, but they were both slim and young, and so I had this picture of the two of them looking like brother and sister more than . . .”
Cherry Grove was a summer beach community that attracted artists, writers, actors, and young theater producers, a place where the rules of polite society and mainstream convention did not apply; in fact, traditional thinking was actively—if theatrically—derided. It was a place where every stanza of the Cole Porter song “Anything Goes” would make a suitable anthem: The artist collective PaJaMa, for example, which consisted of the artist Paul Cadmus, who was the lover of Jared French, and French’s wife, Margaret Hoening (PaJaMa deriving from the first two letters of their first names), along with another ménage à trois, George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler, and Glenway Wescott, spent many summers in the nearby Fire Island community of Saltaire. Lynes, a contemporary of George Hoyningen-Huene, was for years a photographer at Vogue and thought to be the quintessential urbane homosexual of his generation: He lived in a closeted bubble of privilege protected by a traditionally stylish public veneer, surrounding himself with a group of artists, writers, and attractive dancers from the ballet. He regularly hosted parties in his Park Avenue apartment reputed to be as elegant as they were orgiastic. Lynes would make many photographs of PaJaMa at Cherry Grove, sometimes in the nude, positioned against the architectural framework of the lifeguard stands along the beach. “We walked to Cherry Grove when the sand was hard, eleven miles [both ways],” Paul Cadmus remembered. “It was a wonderful walk. We’d go to check out the gay life there.” Glenway Wescott, the poet and novelist, offered this glimpse of Cherry Grove in his journal: “Just beyond these bungalows, just over the dunes, there lies heavenly landscape, sandscape, with delights of the flesh and the weather more selfish than anything in the world. Friday night when we arrived they took me down to the beach, the harvest Moon had just risen. It seemed to have come up terribly excited, like a bull into an arena.”
Bassman described Cherry Grove as “a very gay community, but at that time also very literary, you know, a lot of producers and directors and poets—Auden—people like that.” Dick would soon photograph Auden at his house in Cherry Grove—where Auden’s good friend Christopher Isherwood, author of The Berlin Stories, would sometimes visit. The artist Pavel Tchelitchew had a house there with his lover, Charles Henri Ford; Janet Flanner summered there, as did Benjamin Britten and his lover, Peter Pears. Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, respectively, were regular visitors. Among the weekend guests who stayed with Dick and Doe and Lily and Paul were the photographer Karl Bissinger, whose romantic partner, Johnny Nicholson, would open Café Nicholson, on East Fifty-Eighth Street in the city. This popular gathering spot for the “New Bohemians” was documented most notably in a 1949 photograph by Bissinger of regulars Tanaquil Le Clercq, Donald Windham, Buffie Johnson, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal at a table in the garden, and published in Flair magazine. Leonard Gershe, a young playwright who Dick got to know while in the merchant marine, shared the house with them one summer. William Alexander MacDonald III, a decorator, would come out and stay, too. “He always made champagne eggs on the kerosene stove,” Bassman said.
Lily, who worked for Brodovitch, was technically Dick’s boss. Through their natural rapport and playful collaboration she was able to coax out of him fresh and original visual solutions to their editorial problems. Her husband, Paul, also photographed over the years for the Bazaar and Vogue and brought a different set of winning—if at times brooding—qualities to the evolution of the friendship between the two couples. Paul was both literary and political. A voracious reader, he loved good conversation and could be very witty. “I mean, my dad was killer sarcasm,” Lizzie Himmel said. “He was an amazing speaker and teller of stories.” He was handsome, too, almost dandyish, working out on a daily basis to keep his body in excellent shape. His sexuality was, say, fluid, and he seemed perfectly comfortable about it, which might have added to Dick’s conflicted feelings about the lure of homosexual attractions in that environment. “My father was way less gay-shy than Dick was,” Lizzie Himmel said. “I think that Dick was wildly in love with my mother, but I think he was very attracted to my father.”
Bassman, who was then twenty-nine, and Himmel, three years older, had both grown up in politically progressive families in which atheism and Communism, respectively, gave them an existential resolve about living life in the present and also an egalitarian sense of justice. Their families had become intertwined when Lillian’s mother married Paul’s father, turning Lily and Paul into stepsiblings after they had already been teenage lovers. Eric Himmel, their son, writes that his grandparents “were freethinkers and socialists from Russia, and all had come to America in the first decade of the twentieth century as teenagers, leaving their parents behind.” Lillian studied art at Pratt Institute and would eventually become a consequential fashion photographer; Paul’s sultry photographs of city life exploited the romance of dark shadows, watery reflections, and patterns of light in a way that was consistent with his contemporaries Saul Leiter and Louis Faurer.
Separately and together, Lillian and Paul struck an unselfconscious posture of enlightened irreverence that Dick simultaneously reveled in and shied away from. For Doe, by contrast, their uninhibited behavior seemed more compatible with her own nature. According to Lizzie, the Bassman-Himmels were, by turns, “intellectual, discriminating, political, artistic, original, and, ultimately, restless.” Her brother, Eric, corroborates: “Finally, inevitably, it was a worldview, a way of looking out at others that could seem infuriatingly smug to outsiders but had undeniable strength, valuing above all else creativity, productivity, and unconventionality.” It was the beginning of a great relationship, Bassman said about the Avedons, describing how close the four of them were during those years and how much fun the two couples had together, sitting on the beach all day, swimming nude, playing chess or charades at night while they drank, partying all the time.
Dick and Lillian also used their time in Cherry Grove as if it were an ongoing editorial meeting in which they would dream up fashion features, generating much of the content for Junior Bazaar, since, in the new postwar era, there was not yet a burgeoning fashion industry to draw ideas from. They would talk about the magazine, how they would produce features, who they would use, and what the general viewpoint would be. “One time,” she remembered, “sitting on the beach, Dick and I planned a whole issue around green: green vegetables, green nail polish, green clothing. So we sent the fashion editors out to find things that were green. We sent the beauty people out to get green nail polish made, and I made a layout with vegetables, these wonderful drawings of vegetables. Then Dick photographed all the girls and made it look like they were climbing through these fruits.”
Lily and Paul made many casual pictures of Dick and Doe during those summers in Cherry Grove. In some, Dick looks scrawny, with a gawky appearance and standing with awkward, feminized gestures. Doe had distinct and beautiful features and such a natural manner that her entire affect is one of comfort and ease in her body. Some pictures capture the two of them sweetly affectionate and happily entwined, while in others Dick looks so young and frail that it’s hard to imagine how the two of them could be a married couple. Yet in one casual portrait Paul made of Dick alone, he looks like a man in his twenties, quite handsome and virile, his features filling out the structure of his face, his eyes opened wide, his gaze deep and liquid, his lips sculptural and sensual. There is a distinct eroticism to the portrait, yet whether it derives from amorous feelings in Himmel or Dick’s honest gaze at the camera is unclear. Regardless, the connection between them is palpable. Karl Bissinger, too, another photographer who studied with Brodovitch and who visited them in Cherry Grove, made a more deliberated portrait of Dick in this period, his pose at once pensive and romantic as he gazes out from behind a leafy potted plant. In this picture, Dick seems to be actively willing the handsome good looks he is growing into and which many people throughout his life would acknowledge.
At Harper’s Bazaar, Dick still felt that he had to prove his indispensability in every single issue. He measured himself against the already impossible professional standards of excellence at the magazine and brought an acute sensitivity to everything around him. He was overly excitable in his enthusiasms, and, equally, he catastrophized the simplest slight. His ambition, though, fueled a growing restlessness about his career, and his elbow, as Brodovitch called it, could be sharpened by the whiff of competition. As he was spending weekends at the beach in Cherry Grove, for example, Truman Capote was on assignment in New Orleans with the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson for a feature called “Notes on N.O.,” which ran in October 1946.
Of course, at Cherry Grove he was also absorbing an entirely new way of being, and the stimulus was overwhelming. He was meeting people unlike any he had known before and observing behavior that came from a new set of attitudes and ideas about how to construct a life. He was forced to navigate the open physical affection of gay men toward one another in that community and, in turn, confront a profound shame about his own attraction to the naked men in his midst and perhaps, specifically, to Paul. It was a kind of desire that had no place in la façade Avedon with which he intended to earn professional respect, gain cultural standing, and establish financial security. Dick’s driving ambition propelled him to ignore these subterranean impulses, or at least to try to suppress what he feared would become professional impediments.
There was a war going on inside him: the poet’s finely tuned responsiveness to the sensate world all around him was in conflict with the censor’s rejection of perhaps the deepest source of that sensitivity. “I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide,” writes Thomas Mann in Death in Venice. Somewhere within that conflict Dick was able to locate inspiration to create a series of photographs out of his experience at the beach, a feature that ran in the August 1946 issue of Junior Bazaar. In the issue, before an editorial column called “Who’s Teaching Where,” with short profiles of Mary McCarthy at Bard College, W. H. Auden at Bennington, and Aline Bernstein at Vassar, Dick’s fashion spread is titled “The Suit Beneath Your Skirt.” College-age models stand in the sand dunes holding large red and yellow beach balls. The pictures show fall fashions in which urban skirts are worn over bloomers or leotards to create a modern bohemian style. One caption describes a full-length black leotard that is “double-breasted with silver buttons and worn under a printed green-wrapped skirt.” Photographically, the large round colored balls strike a graphic punch against the dunes and add a sense of visual play to the models holding them with both hands and laughing. And yet the beach motif is irrelevant to the autumn fashions being shown—and implausible. Still, the pictures contain the first intimations of a nascent Avedon look—women who are casually made up in natural poses, engaged in spontaneous activity, and punctuated with gestures of dance.
Dick was more aligned with himself that fall when he photographed the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor for Junior Bazaar. She was about to appear in her first “grown up part,” as the magazine describes her role in Green Mansions in the December 1946 issue, “one that will instantly make her the most envied young girl in the land—for her leading man is Van Johnson himself, none other.” In one photograph, she appears in costume with a studio light in the background to indicate that she is on the movie set. But the full-page image following of Taylor in a bare-shouldered periwinkle dress possesses pure Avedon DNA: She is walking, as if on a street, and gazing up, as if at the stars, holding half a dozen pink roses in her white-gloved hands. Avedon blurs the movie set to foreground Taylor looking every bit the gorgeous young movie star, out and about on some atmospheric European street. Her spontaneous gaiety is a performance summoned by Dick, the director of this image, who might have been drawing on the memory of his mother in a buoyant mood with lilacs in her hand. Dick elicited the luscious and photogenic Tayloresque glamour, even at fourteen, and captured it as irrepressible innocence.
AVEDON’S GRADUATION FROM JUNIOR Bazaar occurred with his first official photograph on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, in January 1947. The picture must have drawn direct inspiration from Dick’s summer in Cherry Grove, as it conjures a beach scene without hiding the fact that it was taken in the studio. Here the model Natálie Nickerson faces the camera straight on, head to toe, blond hair pulled tight behind her head, a slight impish smile on her face, a small scarf wrapped around her neck, the sleeves of her dark sweater pulled up to her elbows, hands cupped like an egg before her chest, bare legs spread apart in pastel short-shorts, and her bare feet planted firmly in second position on the sand-colored floor. Behind her is a man in a bathing suit reclining as if on the beach, his back to the camera, his elbow propping him up as he stares out at the infinite ocean. (Some people claim the model to be Avedon himself.) The model’s silhouette—a triangular stance like that of the Eiffel Tower—is cast in relief against the uncluttered white, seamless background, lit to suggest the glare of the sun against the sky. The paper drops from the ceiling and rolls under at the floor to form a horizon line that hints at the ocean’s edge. Dick’s first cover for the magazine introduces what will long become identified as the Avedon woman—slender, androgynous, natural and spontaneous, spirited, unselfconscious, a bit kooky, and utterly self-assured.
Avedon’s cover debut is a distinct nod, in deference but equally in defiance, to an earlier photograph by George Hoyningen-Huene, called The Divers, 1930, an image that would much later enter the canon of fashion photography. The Divers was shot for a feature called “Swimwear by Izod” when it appeared in Vogue in 1930. Huene posed a man and a woman, each wearing a bathing suit, seated on a diving board, staring out at the horizon. The photograph is beautifully constructed, with the two figures, one in front of the other, balanced on the board side by side. Huene accentuated the musculature of the male model and the elegance of the female model, suggesting nothing less than Olympian figures in repose. The male model is Horst Bohrmann, Huene’s studio assistant and longtime lover, who would later establish himself as Horst P. Horst, the prominent fashion photographer.
While Huene’s Divers is a classical study in symmetry and proportion, Avedon’s models are off center and appear unposed; there is no attempt to hide the fact that Avedon made his picture in the studio, unlike Huene, whose picture looks as if it were taken on the diving board of a swimming pool at the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. In a 1999 meditation on this Huene photograph, Cathy Horyn, a fashion critic for the New York Times, punctures that illusion: “The diving board the couple is sitting on is, in fact, a stack of boxes,” she writes. As for the hazy sea, “Huene simply took his subjects up to the roof of the Vogue studio in Paris and aimed his lights. The horizon line is actually the top of the building’s parapet, and on the other side, down below, is the Champs-Elysees.”
Dick’s ersatz beach scene is a narrative dreamscape in which the male figure gazes away from the central female subject. She doesn’t seem to care that his attention is elsewhere; she has plenty going for her without his acknowledgment. With this image, Dick seems to be incorporating the new set of social conditions introduced to him on Fire Island into a visual representation that is dramatically modern. In January 1947, this “fashion” picture was utterly radical for its visual simplicity, its unconventionality, and, ultimately, its depiction of a thoroughly independent woman.
There’s more than a little bit of Doe in the model standing on the (ersatz) beach with her two bare feet planted firmly on the ground—game for some new excitement. Her unaffected spontaneity is a quality that came to characterize the “Avedon woman” throughout Dick’s entire career. Later in his life, he often cited his sister, Louise, as the inspiration for the kind of models he chose, both for their physical mannerisms and their illusory affects, but Lillian Bassman disagreed: “Louise was no tremendous beauty. She was a rather pretty girl with no real presence, and he certainly didn’t create these girls in her image.” Louise, troubled spirit that she was, in no sense inspired Dick as profoundly as Margie, with her cunning imagination and her moxie. “Avedon’s real fascinations,” Bassman added carefully, “were androgyny and theatricality,” referring specifically to her impressions of him at Cherry Grove, with its population of “artists, entertainers and homosexuals”—and its annual “Cherry Grove Follies.” In fact, Dick created the Harper’s Bazaar cover less than three months after his first summer in Cherry Grove with Doe, and it is not a stretch to suggest that the narrative dreamscape it depicts is also an exacting portrait of his marriage.
IN FEBRUARY 1947, DICK was assigned to photograph Jerome Robbins, the choreographer, for a profile in the April issue of the Bazaar. Robbins had already been anointed a young nobleman of dance for his brilliant ballet Fancy Free, with music by Leonard Bernstein and inspired by a Paul Cadmus painting entitled The Fleet’s In, a “typically erotic painting of sailors having a good time.” It premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1944, and the dance critic of the New York Times, John Martin, singled out Robbins as a first-class artist: “It was only Jerome Robbins’ ‘Fancy Free’ that saved the season from being predominantly dull. This, to be sure, would have been a bright spot in any season, for it is a beautifully built little ballet, gay in spirit and genuine in substance.” If Dick had not seen Fancy Free, certainly he would have known about it, as the ballet’s run coincided with the end of his tour of service in the merchant marine, when he had been taking modern dance classes alongside Tanaquil Le Clercq (who would later marry George Balanchine) and John Butler. Dick would have recognized himself in the three sailors, and his eye would have been attuned to their graceful physical charm, which used pure gesture to articulate pride, bravado, infatuation, sexual desire, and jealousy. The dance was underscored by Bernstein’s mournful music, with its urgent rhythms and strains of melancholy in what is essentially a modern mating ritual.
While Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein were virtually unknown to the theatergoing public, on the morning of April 19, “these new kids on the block were overnight sensations, the proverbial talk of the town, stars of the brightest magnitude.” Later that year, On the Town, the Broadway production that Robbins, Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green created out of Fancy Free, opened on Broadway. Both productions would go on to become milestones in American musical theater, as well as the ballet.
Jerome Robbins, née Jerome Rabinowitz from Weehawken, New Jersey, a darling of the stage merely five years his senior, would serve as a kind of beacon for Dick’s unbounded ambition, not least because he would find surprising similarity between the circumstances of their upbringings. Robbins had an unforgiving father, too, a small businessman who did not want him to go into the arts. He had to extricate himself from the family business in order to commence his study of dance, writes Terry Teachout. “I didn’t want to be like my father, the Jew,” Robbins would later write. “I wanted to be safe, protected, assimilated, hidden in among the Goys, the majority.”
Dick also would recognize Robbins’s self-contempt, and not only about his Judaism. “Robbins’s attitude toward his ‘queerness’ (as he referred to it) was equally conflicted,” writes Teachout. Though he readily declared himself a homosexual in order to avoid serving in World War II, he also had sexual involvements with women, then and later. “Please save me from being ‘gay’ and dirty,” Robbins would write in a diary entry made in 1942, not long before his draft board classified him as 4-F. That didn’t prevent Robbins from drawing inspiration from Paul Cadmus, an open homosexual, for Fancy Free, nor from Cadmus’s real-life ménage à trois, PaJaMa, as inspiration for his 1946 ballet, Facsimile, also with music by Bernstein.
People close to Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein acknowledged that their professional relationship was like a marriage; they were very close, and their interactions could be stormy. Both were bisexual, and it’s possible that they were once, briefly, lovers. Dick would photograph Bernstein the following year, another beacon that brought the reach of his own driving ambition a little closer to the realm of the possible. All three had grown up as middle-class Jews, each one driven by an internal imperative to create something of meaning out of their own exigent talents and give it significant cultural form. Dick’s first introduction to this circle, which included Betty Comden and Adolph Green—all of whom would become Dick’s lifelong friends—began when he photographed Jerome Robbins for the Bazaar. Only later would he discover that when he was photographing Robbins, the idea for West Side Story was already germinating as Robbins was trying to conceive a role for his young lover, Montgomery Clift. West Side Story would undergo years of gestation before it saw the light of the stage on Broadway in 1957, long after Robbins’s relationship with Clift had ended.
The Bazaar featured Robbins on the occasion of his new production, High Button Shoes, with the headline “Young Man from a Sad Generation.” Dick photographed him in his black leotards and ballet slippers; in a small picture on the opening spread, Robbins is kneeling on the floor and looking up, coiled tight, as if about to leap like a wildcat, a gloomy, almost aggressive expression on his face. Brodovitch, who designed the layout, made full-page use of a second picture, which he cropped for dramatic graphic effect: Robbins’s head is in the top right corner, his arm extended, his weight on his hand on the floor in the left corner, the axis of energy crossing the page bold and dramatic. These are Avedon portraits of an early vintage, full of mood and gesture, made specifically for the Brodovitch page while incorporating so much of Dick’s own tortured identification with his subject.
“THE NEW LOOK” WAS an offhanded phrase uttered by Mrs. Snow after viewing the Dior collection for spring in 1947, words that stuck in the air and came to identify the style of an entire era. Before the war, American fashion had taken all its cues from Paris. Twice a year, buyers from the major retail emporiums such as Saks Fifth Avenue, I. Magnin, and Marshall Field’s, along with the proprietors of discriminating small boutiques in New York and San Francisco, and a trifling coterie of journalists who covered fashion, would all make ocean crossings to view the designer collections. The retail buyers and small shop owners would decide from the respective collections which outfits they thought would most appeal to their clientele and hope that their choices would be written about in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue—the ultimate arbiters of the fashion season. It was an intimate ritual then, in which each collection was shown in the privacy of the designer’s salon to the small fashion audience that gathered, as if in a private living room, to view the clothes on a handful of models. Each model would materialize from behind a curtain, stand still for a moment to present the outfit, then walk a few steps and turn around before her retreat. Those rooms were fraught with competitive tension. Choices were made clandestinely as each outfit was a limited edition—handmade—and the buyers had to place orders before the production limit was reached. Of course, the biggest rivalry was between Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Each wanted to be first to determine the look of that season. Mrs. Snow’s choices of outfits to feature, just as Edna Woolman Chase’s, of Vogue, were highly classified, as if state secrets of the entire industry.
Mrs. Snow had been attending the fashion shows in Paris annually since she was in her late teens, initially accompanying her mother, whose dress shop on West Fifty-Seventh Street had been one of the finest in New York, catering to society women in the city who wanted exact copies of haute couture. When Carmel went to work at Vogue, in the early 1920s, she would continue to attend the Paris collections and, during those years, became great friends with Coco Chanel, who introduced her to the artists and writers that composed café society in the 1920s. She long considered Paris her second home, yet World War II had eviscerated the joie de vivre so characteristic of the city that she loved. When the war ended, it was Mrs. Snow’s goal to revive the fashion industry in Paris, which, according to her thinking, would bring back the cultural vitality and sensibility of the Paris she had known and loved.
Optimism and hope were contagious in the years just following World War II; these sentiments were fueled as much by the collective sense of relief that the war was over as by an expectation that the sky was now the limit. There was such excitement in New York about a slowly reviving fashion business in Paris that, on February 1, 1947, Trans World Airlines added an additional flight to accommodate all the people traveling overseas for the spring collections. Forty American buyers and journalists made the trip, fewer than the prewar number but much more than in the war years.
Christian Dior’s debut had been the final show of the spring collections on February 12, 1947. “A huge crowd gathered outside his gray-awninged entrance. Seated on a fauteuil in the deeply, understatedly chic, gray and gold decorated salon, Vogue’s Bettina Ballard recalled being ‘conscious of an electric tension that I had never before felt in the couture.’ As always, Carmel took the place of honor, an elegant settee upholstered in gray velvet. ‘Harper’s Bazaar was the sofa,’ Dior wrote, as if describing a law as inviolate as gravity. . . . Lesser gods and goddesses perched on lesser peaks.” Such hierarchical distinctions in seating assignment could exist only in France, where the difference between a seat in an armchair versus a gilt chair was of as much importance in that small salon as it might have been in the stagecraft of international diplomacy.
Each model walked out to applause that grew only louder and never seemed to stop. At the end of the show, Dior himself was shedding tears of surprise as much as joy. “God help the buyers who bought before they saw Dior,” exclaimed Mrs. Snow, as many American buyers had already headed home. “This changes everything,” she said, and added, either then or later, “It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian. Your dresses have such a new look.”
By then Dick had been given a ten-year contract with the magazine, something that was rarely given to anyone, and later that year, in August 1947, Mrs. Snow brought him to Paris for the first time to shoot her choices from the Dior collection for the fall season. Dick quoted what Carmel Snow said to him as if verbatim: “Do you realize what we mean to the economy of France? What Harper’s Bazaar and your work mean? We have to bring to the world, revive, in a place that has no luxury left, that’s been destroyed of all of its great creative qualities, we have to give the illusion of that luxury—I don’t want pictures in the studio. I want to show Americans what Paris looks like.”
Dick was ecstatic recounting his first impressions of Paris: “The convergence of the happiness of being [twenty-four], being in love with the most beautiful girl, being sent to Paris, buying a bottle of champagne at the airport, driving into Paris in a cab whose roof was open.” Paris, of course, exuded romance at every level, a city with buildings the color of butter, its elegant architectural uniformity so intelligently considered and visually refined that the logic is soothing, and, yet, surprises appear wherever you look—wrought iron filigree on the window balustrades; vast public gardens; intimate neighborhood squares that bring nothing but pleasure to an ambulating eye. And the statuary! The gods of allegory and myth brought down to earth and yet towering above the crowds, an inspiring expression of human grandeur in the midst of daily life.
Paris was an education for the eye, a treat for all the senses. The fragrance of tea rose, the wafting aroma of baking bread, the whiff of simmering coq au vin or chocolat or fines herbes—or Gauloises—permeating the streets. To hear a hotel maid announce “le petit déjeuner” for the first time is to hear pure music. All the manners and methods of daily life that had over centuries been perfected by the French, whether the cuisine, the wine making, the rituals of service or of social behavior—and, in particular, the public comportment of the self. The French invented la façade and lived as if in service to its objective primacy. Richard Avedon, a New Yorker just arriving in Paris for the first time, was dazzled.
New York was not beautiful the way Paris was beautiful. New York was thrilling, full of exuberance and bombast and grit. The way of doing things was so expedient, immediate, and direct. New York was becoming an increasingly vertical city—masculine and erect, as if always at the ready for the next new thing. The apartment buildings where Dick had grown up were generally almost twenty stories tall, rows and rows of them along East Eighty-Sixth Street, or West End Avenue, where his grandparents lived, cutting off the horizon, blocking off the sky. Paris, by contrast, was low and horizontal, exotic and elegant and feminine. It represented le vieux monde, a sense of old Europe, an elegance and grace that characterized the most refined civilization on earth. For an aesthete like Dick, coming from New York, it also conjured a nostalgic ardor about a previous generation of artists and writers. The cultural direction of the twentieth century had taken shape in Paris in the 1920s, and Dick soaked up its lingering aura: “That was the convergence of the liberation after the war; I don’t mean just for France, I mean the spiritual liberation, the creative liberation,” Dick said in 1993. “And I was at that moment of my life when it was all beginning! You know, that’s the age when you read Proust, Colette, Sartre, Camus . . . and they were there!”
Dick’s assignment was to shoot Dior fashion, and the clothes were thrilling for him to photograph: the fluidity, the movement of the skirt, the shape and the volume, the little waist that gave a new drama to the female silhouette. He incorporated his own visceral response to Paris in fulfilling the task. “Dior, at the time, was the beginning of an enormous modernity,” he said. “Something was happening, and I seemed to be the expression of that.”
Penelope Rowlands describes the clothes first introduced in Dior’s spring show, which Dior had elaborated on for fall: “The Corolle was one line that had caused a sensation. It featured an extravagant full skirt—some measured as much as forty yards in circumference—rounded bust and hips, and an impossibly tiny waist.” The accentuated pleats in the skirt began almost a foot below the waistline, and the hem was barely a foot off the ground. Dick’s picture of this skirt opens a feature in the October 1947 issue of the Bazaar entitled “Paris: The New Fashion Is Traveling Fast.” He photographed the model Renée—her full professional name—as if she had just pirouetted in place, the skirt twirling out and the pleats extended like the ribs of an umbrella being opened. The skirt billows and undulates around the wide circumference of the hemline, as if the motion proved an empirical test of symmetry in geometry. The model, in black heels, is standing in a plaza of concrete tiles, the twirling motion accentuated by long vertical bands of sunlight and shadow. The picture is both dizzying and dazzling. It conveys the various qualities of design that make the outfit unique—the narrow waistline, the pleats, the length, the wide circumference—adding to it a quality that can only be called the Avedon je ne sais quoi.
Another spread for the Paris feature focuses on the derriere: “For some time fashion has accented the stomach,” states the copy. “Now there’s news at the back of the skirt.” Dick placed the model in the Dior fitting room and photographed her from behind. The dropped back and curved bustle at her derriere gives the dress a very sleek and slender hourglass profile. The model stands next to a naked mannequin, one on which the dress she is wearing had perhaps been made. The mirror effect of the mannequin and the model is accentuated in the line of the model’s right arm, extended out in a beautiful gesture, her elbow at the height of her head, her head tilted slightly as her hand adjusts her hair. Whether it is the line of Dior or the eye of Avedon, the contour of the model and her gesture, the Brancusi-like shape of the dress, and the mirror image of the mannequin all evoke the statuary in the gardens of Paris.
“[Avedon] started out with Junior Bazaar, which was fun, jumping, dancing, action, and he carried that kind of verve into his fashion for the Bazaar,” Bassman said. “Also, he had a sense of the storytelling, not literally, but in the photographs that he did in Paris, for instance. There was always an element of what life was like for the rich and the famous and the beautiful. He had a terrific sense of elegance for someone that young and maintained a kind of movement, the body movement, the interest in the gesture, which hardly existed anymore with the Bazaar. So it was invigorating and exciting.”
Among several other Avedon photographs in that issue, Doe is posed wearing a winter coat by Christian Dior bound all around in raccoon fur with a matching Cossack hat. She is leaning against a streetlamp at the Gare du Nord, and the caption begins: “Anna Karenina, 1947.” One picture Dick did not take, however—claiming later in his life to regret not having had his camera with him—was a moment he observed at a nightspot in Montmartre, where he and Doe had gone to see a sex show at a cabaret he remembered as the Boule Bleue. Because it was August, the place was almost empty, so they were easily seated. They ordered a bottle of champagne. All of a sudden, a large party of deaf tourists arrived, all happily signing to each other before the show. Dick described the event as a standard striptease with bare-breasted women in spangles and plumage and musclemen in gold jockstraps. He was fascinated, though, by the deaf audience members and watched them during the performance. They couldn’t hear the music, but they could feel it through vibration. When it was over, the group was ushered out to their tour bus. “All but one,” Dick wrote. “He stayed behind, looking lost, even trapped, and wandered over to the deserted orchestra pit, picked up a horn, and blew a sound on it—a strange, raucous, terrible sound that resembled his expression. For some reason, this scene reminds me of who I really was in Paris, with Carmel Snow. Taking these pictures of clothes.”
The odd dissonant sound made by the lone deaf individual blowing the horn was equal to the awkwardness Dick had felt as an uneducated New York Jew who didn’t speak French dropped into the center of cultivated Paris. “I was really painfully shy,” Avedon recalled toward the end of his life. “I never graduated high school, and I would wake up in my late twenties with nightmares that everyone would find out.” (Of course, the other reason for his sense of alienation had to do with being in the Boule Bleue, if that was the actual name, with his wife to begin with, when his interest in watching a striptease might have had more to do with theater and performance than sexual stimulation.)
DOE, WHO PROJECTED A wholesome glamour in fashion photographs, was dissatisfied with modeling. She was more interested in the stage, and over the next year found her way not only to summer stock on Cape Cod but also to Broadway in the small role of “Drucilla Eldridge” in The Young and Fair, directed by Harold Clurman, which opened at the Fulton Theatre in November 1948. During the run, Doe became friendly with Rita Gam, another actress in the cast. Rita was then married to Sidney Lumet, a young teacher at the new High School of Music and Art, who had spent his childhood in the Yiddish theater and on the Broadway stage. “Rita described going to the Avedons’ apartment and her shock that they would walk around shoeless or barefoot,” said Maura Spiegel, Lumet’s biographer. This would be the beginning of another lifelong friendship for Dick, with the director Sidney Lumet.
A full-page picture of “Doe Avedon,” taken by Dick, appears in Theatre Arts magazine with a short introduction of the young actress: “Doe Avedon, briefly seen in the recent The Young and Fair, thrilled theater goers as much by her beauty as her striking performance. Of the latter, Brooks Atkinson wrote that she managed to dominate every scene in which she figured; and the usually reserved Richard Watts called her ‘vivid and exciting,’ lamenting the desertion to Hollywood inherent in the David O. Selznick contract, which she has held for two-and-a-half years. It was a chance meeting with Irene Selznick which led to the movie contract and her role in The Young and Fair—her first, remarkably enough.”
Leonard Gershe, a friend of Dick’s from the merchant marine who had shared the house with them in Cherry Grove, was a lyricist in the theater and, during this period, spent time with Dick and Doe in the city. As the Avedons had gone overseas to Paris in 1947, Gershe had made a crossing to London on the Queen Mary and stayed with Richard Addinsell, a British composer for the theater. The cables Gershe received on that crossing indicate that he and Addinsell were also romantically involved. On that trip Gershe and Addinsell wrote the lyrics for Tuppence Coloured for the London stage. While there, Gershe met Clemence Dane, the novelist and playwright who was collaborating with Addinsell on Alice in Wonderland, and told her about his friend Dick, an up-and-coming fashion photographer who was just then in Paris trying to turn his wife into an international fashion model—against her will. “That should be a play,” Dane said. Gershe would soon begin writing “Wedding Day,” which will have greater relevance to our story about Avedon in the coming years. So while Dick was beginning his international adventures in Paris with Carmel Snow, his friend Leonard Gershe was in London becoming something of the toast of the town. On his return crossing, Gershe received a cable from Dick and Doe: “Cannot wait to see you and all the wonderful presents you brought us Love Kisses Doe and Dick.”
By the summer of 1948, Dick and Doe’s relationship was in a slow spiral toward its ultimate demise. He was trying to make her into something she was not, and she was increasingly unfulfilled in the marriage. This was made clear in the reminiscences of the Bassman-Himmels late in their lives. They had hired a studio assistant, Stephen Lipuma, to help them organize their archive, and Lipuma worked with them side by side while going through all their photographs of fifty years. Periodically, the Avedons would come up in the context of the Cherry Grove years, and Lipuma recalled Paul Himmel telling him about an episode, perhaps in that summer of 1948, in which Dick had had a sexual moment with a man. He came back and told Paul, who had recounted this to Lipuma, adding, “Dick was in such distress about the sexual relation with this guy that he was vomiting over it.”
From the way Lillian and Paul spoke about that period and their own experimentation, it was Lipuma’s impression that there might have been a sexual relationship between Dick and Paul as well. “I think Lillian had suspected it,” Lipuma said, referring specifically to conversations while poring over Paul’s unprinted negatives of himself and Dick on the beach together. Lizzie Himmel also suspected some kind of relationship between them and had asked her father about it on several occasions. “I think that Dick and Dad fooled around,” she said. “I think that Dick was very scared, but very attracted to the gay lifestyle.”
“We were all having a little bit of a problem that summer,” Bassman said in a video interview. “Doe was becoming an actress and had a job in Cape Cod, where she met [Dan Matthews]. But I think there were problems before that.”
Dan Matthews was a handsome, all-American young actor in summer stock with Doe, and when the two met, they fell instantly in love. Nowell Siegel, Doe’s son, spoke about the breakup of his mother’s marriage to Dick: “The reason they got divorced is that my mother fell in love with someone else—Dan Matthews,” he said. “It was a love-at-first-sight type of thing.” While their marriage did not end immediately, Dick and Doe proceeded to make their separation as amicable as was possible. There was no doubt that Dick was crestfallen; he often said about the dissolution of their marriage: “I would have crawled to the Bronx on my knees to bring Doe back to me.”
At the same time, Dick was wholly preoccupied with—and single minded about—constructing himself in the role of Richard Avedon. Before the collections of 1948, Dick approached Mrs. Snow: “Take me to Paris again or I’ll go to Vogue,” he said, a cheeky demand bearing all the audacity of a confidence man. He had been emboldened not only by the positive reaction to his pictures in the October 1947 issue of the magazine but also because of her evident affection for him. In fact, Mrs. Snow, who might easily have sent him on his way, thought it could be a good idea. Her loyalty and regard for Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who had been shooting the collections for the Bazaar for years, posed the biggest obstacle. Of course, she had no intention of replacing Dahl-Wolfe, her star photographer, but, like any good editor, she was attuned to the postwar shift in cultural temperament and recognized in Dick the potential to reflect the gestalt of a new generation for the magazine. Ever full of mischief, Mrs. Snow turned her decision to bring Dick to Paris into a secret mission—a caper, of sorts.
In late July 1948, after Dahl-Wolfe had flown over a week early, Avedon accompanied Mrs. Snow on their flight to Paris. She threw her coat over her lap and told Dick, “I don’t button my seatbelt,” and then added slyly, “Neither does General Eisenhower.” That set the tone for the entire trip, in which Mrs. Snow was by turns coconspiratorial and demanding, deliberating yet generous, warm, instructive, antic, playful, and, for such a dignified woman of standing, somewhat zany and irreverent. They stayed at the San Regis, where she always stayed, a chic and very discreet hotel on the Right Bank not far from the Grand Palais. The Harper’s Bazaar studio was across the street. Mrs. Snow’s suite was where the Führer had stayed when he was in Paris, a detail she would be sure to tell people, but only in terms of her shock and horror.
This was the first time Dick had spent an extended period of time with Mrs. Snow outside the office, and for the next few weeks, he attended the couturier shows seated umbilically beside her on the sofa or the settee, along with Marie-Louise Bousquet, the Paris editor of the Bazaar. Avedon described Bousquet as “wacky looking with her red-dyed wig” and others described her as naughty, witty, and tiny. Bousquet was a fixture of Paris, her salons drawing an entire international artistic community, from the Vicomtesse de Noailles to Ned Rorem, Thornton Wilder, and Truman Capote, who once had been spotted there sitting blissfully on the lap of Janet Flanner. Bousquet’s role as Paris editor of the Bazaar was loosely defined as ambassadorial. She paved the way for introductions; sought out talent; soothed egos; but ultimately, she dined and drank—and even prayed in church—with Mrs. Snow during her sojourns in Paris. A picture of the three of them sitting on the settee, taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who was now in Mrs. Snow’s editorial circle, shows Mrs. Snow in the center talking to Marie-Louise Bousquet while gesturing to Dick, who is seated to her right in a suit and tie, his hair combed back, looking pensive and intent. It might have been that very day that Dahl-Wolfe showed up at Dior, prompting Carmel and Dick to scramble for cover, hiding in the dressing room until the coast was clear.
“Carmel Snow taught me everything I know,” Dick would say in later years, and it started in those discreet little showrooms in Paris: “She was extremely—this is not a good word—human. She had an enormous warmth and wit and she was funny. She taught through gossip. We would be sitting there with boring dress after boring dress, and she would be telling me the gossip about everyone in the room. She’d talk about the ménage à trois of Mme Alix of Gres. It was all about what was going on—very Irish. She was completely Irish in her wit. And the joy, she liked to laugh.”
It wasn’t all frivolity, however. It turned out to be a most enviable kind of cultural education. She communicated her vision of what Harper’s Bazaar ought to be by asking Dick if he had read this novel or that short story, or if he had met this author yet or that artist, and then she would proceed to explain why the novel had meaning or the author was of importance. “It was never academic,” Dick said. “She brought me to meet Colette, that’s how I read Colette,” he told Calvin Tomkins, emphasizing his lack of education and his delight at the time about meeting such a mythical literary figure. Colette talked to Dick about Proust, and that’s how he came to read Proust—a lifelong literary touchstone for him. “In other words, one would think what a drag to have to take this kid around who doesn’t even speak French, who doesn’t know anything. But, she loved it. She wanted me to be exposed to everything.”
The schedule in Paris was rigorous. Ginette Spanier had just been appointed as the director of the House of Balmain and was first introduced to Dick on that trip in 1948. In her autobiography, she describes him then as “small, dark and electric with his own sort of vitality. Crackling. Sparks seem to fly out of him. He flashes his fingers like tiny rapid moths.” She described the discordant experience of presenting the collections in the months ahead of the season the clothes were designed for and shooting winter clothes in the summer. “We are all wrapped to the chin in mink and tweed when our friends dart off in sweltering heat to St. Tropez.”
When they weren’t viewing the collections, Dick was shooting in the studio throughout the night or on locations he had selected throughout the city during the day. “I never went about trying to revolutionize anything. I was developing my own instincts—what I’d call following my enthusiasm,” Dick said about his early fashion work. “We all send out messages to one another. By what we say, by how we look at each other, by how we dress, by how we move. The static fashion photography of Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Huene, it didn’t apply to my life.”
Mrs. Snow’s schedule was filled with lunches and dinners and private visits to the designers, and Dick was always running in and out of the hotel with layouts or pictures or contact sheets for her to look at. He described a typical meeting with Mrs. Snow in her suite in the morning before she left for the collections of the day. She would motion him in while sitting in bed and look at the pictures in her bathrobe. Then her maid would come in, and Carmel would stand up and let her bathrobe drop to the floor. “No embarrassment,” Dick recalled. “She stood there in her slip, and barefoot, and would continue talking as the skirt went up, click. The jacket went on, click. The hat got plunked on, like that. And into one shoe, and into the other shoe, and she’s talking to me the whole time. She reaches into her handbag for a pair of perfect white gloves, and she puts them on, and walks out as this vision. It was like someone going onstage with the speed of a theatrical change. No time is wasted. I’d be working with her right up to the elevator.”
DORIAN LEIGH, A THIRTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD model, was new to the business. She looked ten years younger than her age and radiated a lustrous sophistication that seemed at once American and European. An intelligent woman who had studied mechanical engineering at New York University, she was also an adventurous one who thought nothing of leaving her young children behind to be raised by her parents while she nurtured, for better or worse, a curiosity of another stripe. She had modeled only a short time when Dick hired her for the fall collections in 1948. “Europe!” she wrote about that first trip in her memoir. “The very word was excitement. And Paris, to anyone in the fashion world, was delirium.”
Dick greeted Dorian, along with a second backup model, Thea, at the airport, his arms filled with flowers. He came in a taxi rented by Harper’s Bazaar and repeated all over again the introduction to Paris he had had with Doe the previous year. They stood up through the open roof of the taxi all the way in from the airport as he poured glasses of champagne and cut fresh peaches to drop into them, the Eiffel Tower eventually coming into view. It was his intention to establish a rapport of shared delight for the city with Dorian that he hoped he could bring to the pictures.
It was a complicated endeavor to shoot the collections, incorporating all the secrecy and calculation of military hijinks on a time-sensitive schedule, all of which required an enormous amount of cunning and stamina. During the day, Dick, along with the buyers, magazine editors, and photographers, attended the collections at the couturier houses. Once he received the list of outfits Carmel had selected from the collections on view that day, a whirl of activity commenced to obtain the clothes that needed to be photographed overnight and into the early hours of the following morning. The selection was not only based on what Carmel might have wanted for the magazine, but also coordinated with the outfits that would be available in the United States, either as originals or copies. Carmel would engage in some very clever sleuthing to find out what the buyers had chosen. She had to cajole it out of them—or the designer—with champagne lunches and other enticements. And then she had to rely on her largesse with each designer to borrow the fashions during the night when they were not in use—and before Vogue could get to them.
Dick Avedon relied on the entire visual banquet of Paris for his photographic canvas, creating scenes in the streets and plazas all over the city, which meant that he ran the risk of exposing the designs to enemy eyes—spies from Vogue—in the middle of the night. “To protect the designers, we were wrapped in sheets wherever we went until we were in front of the camera,” Leigh writes in her memoir.
Dick established a fine working relationship with Dorian Leigh, who acknowledged that it was hard work to appear utterly natural before the camera, acting like a woman wearing her own clothes, and allowing herself to relax into actual expressions and genuine reactions to the world around her. Leigh described how Dick was able to coax such spontaneity out of his models:
Instead of using the “still life” approach, which meant asking a model to strike a pose and freeze, he kept moving, sometimes moving around her himself with the camera in his hands, keeping up the conversation, explaining what he wanted her to feel and portray, always telling her how well she was doing, making her feel she was the most beautiful creature on earth. Dick has such a pleasant disposition and such a good sense of humor that working with him was always fun. Yet underneath the laughter and good times was a seriously creative man.
The fall collections appeared in the October 1948 issue of the Bazaar, and Avedon’s pictures dominate the magazine: There is Dorian Leigh standing in the middle of a courtyard in a fine Balenciaga pencil suit and a dark, wide-brimmed hat; she is leaning on the table of a street acrobat with one hand, her other on her hip in a rather exaggerated gesture. Behind her is an acrobat balanced upside down in the air on the hand of another while Leigh is fully absorbed by a muscleman holding up a barbell with one arm; a crowd of people watches in the background, one of them holding a bouquet of flowers. It is a playful tableau vivant meant to accentuate the silhouette of the suit, but, equally, it illustrates the over-the-moon exuberance that Dick felt about being in Paris. In a more believable street scene, Leigh stands on the sidewalk trying to read a copy of Le Figaro as it billows between her two hands, spread open in front of her face; she is wearing another sculpturally tailored Balenciaga suit, this one checked wool. In a third scene, she disembarks from a train in a Dior coat, fitted and belted to look like a suit with a wide skirt, looking over her shoulder for a place to put the several round hatboxes in her hand.
In a series called “The Gay Little Hat,” Avedon photographed both Dorian and Thea, respectively, against the graphics on the signage plastered along the walls of Paris. He placed the model wearing one fanciful Dior turban against a larger-than-life drawing of Filochard, and another, with its feather at its crest, against the other two characters from the French comic series, Ribouldingue and Croquignol. In a spread called “The Chic Little Shape,” he placed the model in silhouette within a silhouette shape on the wall in an advertisement for Les intellectuels por la paix—the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace. Dick was not without a social conscience and, from time to time, it would filter through in subliminal messages like this one splashed across a fashion spread.
The October 1948 issue of the Bazaar is a testament to Avedon’s rigor, creativity, and abiding infatuation with Paris, which, in his photographs, does not reflect documentation of the city so much as his reach for an idea. “‘My Paris’ never existed,” Dick told Christian Lacroix in the 1980s. “I fabricated it—not out of whole cloth, exactly, but out of swatches of Lubitsch, René Clair, Rogers and Astaire movies, and Cole Porter songs, and out of the stories that my mentor, Alexey Brodovitch, told me of the Paris he knew before the war. It was my own elation that I was photographing, and it got whipped up to the point where I was able to give an emotional dimension to the couture itself.”
However, the singular picture to define the Avedon je ne sais quoi, taken during that trip in August 1948, appears in a Paris preview feature that made it just in time for the September issue. The preview focused on “The Turban,” and among several of Dick’s pictures of women in this variation of the modern hat is one of his most beautiful early fashion photographs. Elise Daniels is seated at a table in a glittery nightspot, a wineglass in the foreground, her makeup lean and tack sharp, a frothy turban made of tulle situated toward the back of her head, diamond drop earrings, bare-shouldered dress, her left hand molded against her left shoulder as if holding on to a wrap, her fingers fanned out just so. Something has caught her attention out of the corner of her eye, and she is looking beyond the picture frame, utterly entranced. Her male companion is leaning in beside her, equally captivated, as he seems to be breathing in her very essence—an eau de parfum de Paris. She resides in clear, crystal focus while suffused in a gauzy incandescence, the subtle blur of a string of lights above the bustle of activity behind her suggesting the excitement of a lively restaurant. We, the viewer, catch sight of her as if we were walking by her table on the way to our seats.
While Dick often said he was not capable of expressing in poetic verse what he may have instinctively understood about human experience, he expressed the poetics of his own enchantment with Paris in this image. In Avedon’s entire body of work there is no better example of his poetic impulse to conjure genuine emotion out of lifelike description than this picture of Elise Daniels manifesting a fleeting moment of wonder. And what is it that caught her eye? For all intents and purposes, she is looking at the future.