LILLIAN BASSMAN, Fire Island, 1950 c, 13x7.875" Gelatin silver print, Printed c. 1950, Signed in pencil on print verso; two inventory numbers in pencil.

Lillian Bassman initially distinguished herself for artistically minded fashion and advertising photography and later in life transformed her career to that of a fine artist. Along the way, she influenced scores of other photographers and artists. Mary Ellen Mark said, "Her absolute singularity set her apart. She was like no other. You just had to look at her images and you knew it was hers. That's what great photographers like Helmut Newton, [Richard] Avedon, Irving Penn and she do. They don't look like anyone else."

Raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she'd known her future husband, Paul Himmel, since the age of six, Bassman worked as a model for Joseph Stella, Raphael and Moses Soyer, Arshile Gorky and others during the Thirties. In 1940, she showed fashion drawings she'd done during night classes at Pratt to Harper's Bazaar's legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. Impressed, he lined up a graphic design scholarship for her at the New School, where he taught. At the end of the school year, he awarded his top student with an unpaid apprenticeship and, eventually, a job as his first paid assistant.

As art director at Junior Bazaar four years later, she hired young lensmen such as Louis Faurer, Arnold Newman, Robert Frank and, most famously, Avedon in 1945. Instead of staid studio shots, as was the norm then, Avedon "had a whole fresh vision that showed great movement and an understanding of youth," Bassman said in 2005. "He was alive and spontaneous."

Their friendship endured for decades. Before they had their respective children, Bassman said she saw Avedon daily. For six summers, she and Himmel shared a house with Avedon and his first wife, Doe, on Fire Island, off of Long Island, N.Y., where the couples "lived by candlelight and kerosene." Bassman and Himmel introduced the Avedons to their habit of running through the dunes naked and skinny-dipping. "In those days, there were high dunes on Fire Island," she said. "They were a little reluctant at the beginning, but it didn't take more than two weeks for them to capitulate and join us. We were early bohemians. We introduced them to that kind of life, and they took to it very naturally."

Even after her student days, Bassman was a quick study. Just two months after trying her hand at photography, she was working on a regular basis with Carmen Snow and Bazaar's then-fashion editor Diana Vreeland. In 1949, Bassman photographed her first Paris collections for the magazine, and two years later she and Himmel opened a studio using dancers such as Patricia McBride and Tanaquil LeClerq as fashion models.

By the seventies, Bassman was working exclusively on her own projects. When her husband decided to go back to school in 1971, they made a baffling decision: They discarded many of their old negatives. "We both decided nothing is more boring than old negatives," she said later. (When, in 1992, a friend discovered bags of damaged and torn negatives thought to have been among those discarded, Bassman made prints from them.)

Credit: https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/lillian-bassman-dies-5678609/

Good. Moderate wear handling marks, corner cracked emulsion.