Remembering Louise Dahl-Wolfe on her birthday 🎂
📷 Margaretta Mitchell, Recollections: Ten Women of Photography
"From the moment I saw her first color photographs I knew that Bazaar was at last going to look the way I had instinctively wanted my magazine to look."
- Carmel Snow
Robert Doisneau
Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow works on a fashion shoot with photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe & model Suzy Parker, 1953
This shot is one of the very first taken by Louise Dahl-Wolfe. When it was published in the November 1, 1933 issue of Vanity Fair, it helped her decide on photography as a career.
"Although Louise planned every picture meticulously, her photographs look like she just serendipitously chose the perfect moment to snap the girl with her scarf blowing in the wind. They were more like stories than portraits."
~Valerie Steele
Liz Gibbons by Dahl-Wolfe, Cuba, 1941
Louise Dahl-Wolfe's photos helped to create the "New Woman" of the 1940s. Her models - Liz Benn in this 1949 shot - were strong & independent, & were often shown as having fun. They were always individuals, not just mannequins.
Occasionally her feminism was a bit more overt.
Cecil Beaton by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, 1950
A superb portrait of the young Orson Welles by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, from 1938
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
Looking at Matisse, Museum of Modern Art, 1939
Let's all look at Matisse, shall we?
La danse, 1909
@MuseumModernArt
Gloria Vanderbilt's first portrait by a great photographer was with Louise Dahl-Wolfe in 1939, when she was 15.
"It was so wonderful because Louise Dahl-Wolfe put pancake makeup on me, and I just opened up in a whole other way. I thought, 'Oh, yes, this is what I want.'"
One of my favourite Louise Dahl-Wolfe photographs:
Suzy Parker in a Dior Hat, Tuileries, Paris, 1950
Life magazine photographer Yale Joel took this picture of Louise Dahl-Wolfe in the midst of a Harper's Bazaar photoshoot, from 1947.
Carson McCullers by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, 1940
Louise Dahl-Wolfe: Model Amid Ruins, c. 1950
Ken Russell: A Window on High Fashion, 1955
Kurt Weill & Lotte Lenya
An early portrait by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, from 1935
Mary Jane Russell by Louise Dahl-Wolfe
Harper's Bazaar, August 1949
Dahl-Wolfe's portraits are greater because of her fashion work, & vice versa.
Louise Dahl-Wolfe & Richard Avedon, side-by-side
Dahl-Wolfe: shot of models with elephants in Sarasota, Florida, 1947.
Avedon: Dovima with elephants at a Paris circus, 1955.
Both shots for Harper's Bazaar
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
Twins at the Beach, 1955
Dahl-Wolfe worked at Harper's Bazaar from 1936, & was a major influence on both Irving Penn & Richard Avedon.
Louise Dahl-Wolfe took amazing colour shots, & took pains to make sure her prints were faithful reproductions of her original shots.
Vogue, 1959
A fabulous self-portrait of Louise Dahl-Wolfe, with her fellow photographer John Rawlings of Vogue, 1940s
What a portrait of Henry Fonda by Louise Dahl-Wolfe!
This is from 1939.
Mary-Jane Russell by Louise Dahl-Wolfe
#Caturday
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