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Своим блестящим взлетом в конце 30-х годов журнал Harper's Bazaar обязан трем женщинам, одной из которых была фотограф Луиза Даль-Вульф.

 

 

Она училась живописи в институте изящных искусств Сан-Франциско, когда друг случайно привел ее в фотостудию Энни Бригман. Увидев снимки обнаженных фигур на пляжах и в пещерах Сьерра-Невада - смесь чистого искусства и абсолютной свободы, Даль-Вульф, не раздумывая, потратила все свои сбережения на покупку фотокамеры и с тех пор не выпускала ее из рук. В 1932 году в Теннесси Луиза делала портреты местных жителей. Год спустя один из этих снимков появился в Vanity Fair. Это была ее первая публикация. В то время в Нью-Йорке не было ни одного модельного агенства, и модной фотографии как самостоятельной профессии не существовало. На редких снимках в журналах модели застывали в театральных позах на фоне рисованных задников, подражая немому кино. Для начинающего модного фотографа поле деятельности было необъятным. Луиза начала с того, что вытащила своих моделей из студии на улицу под естественный солнечный свет...

В 1936 году Кармел Сноу, решившая превратить Harper's Bazaar в лучший в мире модный журнал, пригласила Луизу Даль-Вульф. Это было золотое время в истории журнала: арт-директором был Алексей Бродович, а редактором моды - Диана Вриланд. Даль-Вульф снимала для Bazaar в африканской пустыне и Помпеях, декорациями для ее съемок служили классические здания и пустынные пляжи. Она заставила моделей выглядеть на фотографиях естественно и в то же время роскошно, добавив в постановки легкий жест, иронию, намек на движение. Занятия живописью не прошли даром. Её цветные снимки стали классикой фотографии. За двадцать два года работы в Harper's Bazaar  Луиза Даль-Вульф сделала 86 обложек и более 600 цветных фотографий, не считая черно-белых. Именно она сняла обложку с никому не известной Бетти Джоан Перске, которую мир скоре узнал под именем Лорен Бэколл. Когда в 1958 году новый арт-директор попытался заглянуть в глазок её фотокамеры, чтобы проконтролировать кадр, Луиза поняла, что её время в моде закончилось...

California Desert, 1948

Model in Rubber Bathing Suit, California, 1940

  

Mary Jane Russell in Dior Dress, Paris, 1950

Mary Sykes, Puerto Rico, 1938

Luki in Balenciaga Cape Coat, 1953

Japanese Bath, 1954

Model in Dior Ball Gown, 1950

  

Two Models on Beach, 1949

Rear View (Two Models with Elephants), 1947

  

Isamu Noguchi, 1955

Луиза Даль-Вульф

 

DIANA VREELAND

ED MONDSO

Carson McCullers, 1940

KATHARINE CORNELL

COCO CHANEL

  

Marlene Dietrich in "Destry Rides Again", 1938

Orson Welles, 1938

Louise Dahl-Wolfe

(American, 1895-1989)
"I believe that the camera is a medium of light, that one actually paints with light. In using the spotlights with reflecting lights, I could control the quality of the forms revealed to build a composition. Photography, to my mind, is not a fine art. It is splendid for recording a period of time, but it has definite limitations, and the photographer certainly hasn’t the freedom of the painter. One can work with taste and emotion and create an exciting arrangement of significant form, a meaningful photograph, but a painter has the advantage of putting something in the picture that isn’t there or taking something out that is there. I think this makes painting a more creative medium."

— Louise Dahl-Wolf, 1984

Louise Emma Augusta Dahl was born to Norwegian parents in San Francisco, California on November 19, 1895. In 1914 she began her studies at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) where she stayed for six years, studying design with Rudolph Schaeffer. She became interested in photography in 1921 upon meeting and seeing the pictorial work of Anne Brigman. Dahl worked as a sign designer for the Federal Electric Co., San Francisco from 1920 to 1922. She studied design and decoration, and architecture at Columbia University, New York in 1923. In 1924 she was employed as an assistant to decorator Beth Armstrong in San Francisco, and from 1925 to 1927 she worked for Armstrong, Carter and Kenyon, a fashion wholesale company. In 1928 she met the sculptor Meyer Wolfe in Tunisia and married him in San Francisco. She wanted to take the last name Wolfe, but later, lest she be mistaken for a particular commercial photographer by the same name, she adopted the hyphenated “Dahl-Wolfe.”

Dahl-Wolfe began to concentrate on making photographs while in San Francisco and Tennessee in the early 1930s. She spent the summer of 1932 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee photographing the people of the Smoky Mountains. One of those portraits became her first published work, appearing in Vanity Fair in 1933, and Edward Steichen included her Tennessee pictures in a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1937. From 1933 to 1960, Dahl-Wolfe operated a New York photographic studio that at first was home to the freelance advertising and fashion work she made for stores including Bonwit Teller and Saks Fifth Avenue, but soon was in use for Harper’s Bazaar projects (including such photographs as the carefully staged Japanese Bath from 1954 and Isamu Noguchi, New York, the 1955 portrait of a designer and his lamps).

From 1936 to 1958 Dahl-Wolfe was a staff fashion photographer at Harper’s Bazaar. During that tenure, Dahl-Wolfe’s photographs featured in the magazine included 86 covers, another 600 published in color, and thousands in black-and-white. A cover image of Betty Bacall sent the model for a Hollywood screen test where she soon changed her name to Lauren. While working for Harper’s Dahl-Wolfe pioneered the use of natural lighting in fashion photography and shooting on location. She photographed in locations all over the northern hemisphere: from Laguna Beach, California (Rubber bathingsuit, January 1940), to the winter quarters of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota Florida (Two models with elephants, May 1947) to Granada, Spain (Jean Patchett, 1953). Her innovations and modernist touches kept her widely celebrated in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and she is remembered as an influence on a generation of photographers including Horst, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn.

Dahl-Wolfe preferred portraiture to fashion work, and while at Harper’s she photographed cultural icons and celebrities including film-maker Orson Wells (1938), writer Carson McCullers (1940) designer Christian Dior (1946), photographer Cecil Beaton (1950), writer Colette (1951), and broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow (1953). In addition to her Harper’s responsibilities, Dahl-Wolfe was able to pursue her own vision in the studio and sometimes even while on assignment. For example, she asked a model to pose for the unpublished Nude in the Desert while on location in California’s Mojave Desert shooting swimsuits that would appear in the May 1948 edition of Harper’s.

From 1958 until her retirement in 1960, Dahl-Wolfe worked as a freelance photographer for Vogue, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals. Major exhibitions of her work include Women of Photography: An Historical Survey at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1975); The History of Fashion Photography (1977) and Recollections: Ten Women of Photography (1979) at International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and Portraits at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson (1986). Retrospectives include shows at Grey Art Gallery, New York University (1983); Cheekwood Fine Arts Center, Nashville, Tennessee (1984); and Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Ninetieth Birthday Salute at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (1985). Louise Dalh-Wolfe lived many of her later years in Nashville, Tennessee, though she died in New Jersey of pneumonia in 1989.

— Kendra Greene

National Museum of Women in the Arts - some small pictures