Born in 1906 in Riga (then Russian Empire, now Latvia), Philippe Halsman was mainly a portrait photographer and in that condition took pictures of such people as Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill and Richard Nixon. In some of them, he asked the subject to jump in order to make them look more genuine.
In 1941, Halsman met Salvador Dalí. They started working together by the end of the decade and in 1954 "Dalí's Mustache" was published, a book with 36 photographs of the painter famous facial hair. Another renowned colaboration was "In Voluptas Mors" (1951), an image that shows Dalí next to a skull composed of seven nude female bodies and became part of popular culture without nearly anyone noticing it when it was included in the poster of 1991's The Silence Of The Lambs. That took three hours to satisfy the artist, but Dali Atomicus took six, 28 attempts and several assistants throwing water and increasingly annoyed cats around. And then some more post-production to get the strings and extra hands out. It was an homage to the Atomic Age (physics of the day had said that matter is in a constant state of suspension) and features the still incomplete "Leda Atomica" (1949).
No comments:
Post a Comment