Busy again, and I will be away for a week, so it’ll be sleepy here, but I wanted to leave you with some pictures by a photographer that a wonderful stylist, Deborah Afshani, just turned me on to. The photographer’s name is Lillian Bassman (here too). You’ll know right away her taste is straight up my alley.

photo: ©Lillian Bassman. Mary Jane Russell, Harpers Bazarr, New York, 1950.

photo: ©Lillian Bassman. Anneliese Seubert, Paris, NY Times Magazine, 1996.

On a side note, looking at Bassman’s work makes me think of women photographers’ work in general, and that there is a honesty of emotion that comes through clearly in their aesthetics (think Sarah Moon and Sally Mann also for instance). Whereas mens’ work often has a technicalism to it that affects the images in a different way. For example, take the picture directly above, it could almost be a Penn photo but somehow is still very far from being a Penn photo. It lacks a certain technical refinement I think Penn would have consciously employed, but in it’s place it has an etherealism and fiction to it that would not exist had Bassman not approached it in this, how should I say, impressionistic manner. Just a generalization that crossed my mind.

Of course, there are always exceptions to such ideas, and maybe in this case we don’t have to look any further than Bassman’s husband, Paul Himmel…

photo: ©Paul Himmel. Ballet Sylvia “Pas de Deux“