"Lauren Bacall", silver gelatin print.
"Lauren Bacall", silver gelatin print.
by Mario Cutajar
(G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, Santa Monica) In The Book of the Courtier, an influential Renaissance text
that lays out the qualities that define the ideal gentleman, Baldesar Castiglione
has one of his loquacious mouthpieces declare that ultimately it all comes
down to one thing: nonchalance. Four centuries later, "stay cool,"
according to Brian Ferry, was "still the main rule," but style
rather than lineage provided the basis for aristocratic pretension and the
ascension of the new style-elite was aided in no small measure by photography's
inherent ability to make coolness iconic. The association between glamour
and photography is so fundamental that it is impossible to conceive of glamour,
in its modern sense, outside of it.
Louise Dahl-Wolfe's contributions to the genre of glamour photography include
the pioneering use of natural lighting and a masterful use of both value
relationships and color contrasts that reflected her training as a painter.
Born in San Francisco in 1895, she attended the California School of Design
(later to become the San Francisco Insitute of Design) hoping to become
a painter. When one of her teachers criticized her still lifes as superficial
she decided to turn a fault into an asset and become a decorator. She also
took up photography but her work was not published until a decade later,
in 193 3, when a series of pictures of the mountain people living in the
Great Smokey Mountains of Tennessee appeared in Vanity Fair. She
was picked up by Harper's Bazaar in 1936, after Carmel Snow had assumed
editorship and brought in Diana Vreeland to be her fashion editor.
Formal European elegance was in vogue at this time, but the crew at the
magazine struck out in a new direction and Dahl-Wolfe, a versatile professional
who could supply whatever was demanded of her, became by editorial fiat
a pioneer of the "wholesome" American look whose recent revival
we associate with the name of Calvin Klein. The hallmark of this new style
was an understated, blase elegance, almost neo-classical in tone yet, at
the same time, both modern and unmistakably American.
A photograph of Lauren Bacall sitting on the edge of a bathtub and arching
forward recalls any number of 18th century images of Diana at her bath.
But like Shakespeare done in modern garb, it highlights not only the agelessness
of the theme but also the incontrovertible contemporaneity of the sitter.
Night Bathers, in which a swimsuited woman stands in the background
by the edge of a pool like the living mirror image of the stone nymph in
the foreground, goes even further in exploiting the ironic potential of
this device.
Dahl-Wolfe's assignments at Harper's Bazaar extended beyond fashion
photography. She also photographed the likes of W.H. Auden, Christopher
Isherwood, Orson Welles, Edward Hopper and Collette. Richard Avedon would
later credit her with paving the way for the supremacy of American fashion
photography. More importantly, she played a major role in defining an era,
stretching from the late thirties to the early sixties, whose casual grace
and sophistication we can only envy.
