Lillian Bassman

Though Lillian Bassman is known for her innovative fashion photography, she began by studying fabric design at a vocational high school before becoming a painter and, later, a photographer. The influence of artists such as El Greco pervaded her work as a painter, as well as her photography. "I spent my life in the museums studying old masters from different periods," Bassman said. "Elegance goes back to the earliest paintings. Long necks. The thrust of the head in a certain position. The way the fingers work—fabrics work. It's all part of my painting background." Bassman started practicing photography while working as an assistant to the art director of Harper's Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch. At the beginning, she primarily promoted the careers of celebrated artists such as Richard Avedon and Robert Frank. However, later she would give up artistic direction to focus on her own photography.

She is best known for her poetic portraits of slender, long-necked models in lingerie and couture. However, discouraged by the "rise of the supermodel" in the 1970s, which popularized a provocative, glamorous style of fashion photography, Bassman left the world of fashion for twenty years, discarding most of her negatives and focusing instead on photographs of nature and the urban environment. However, in 1991, noted photo historian and curator Martin Harrison discovered her old negatives while visiting her house and encouraged her to revisit them. Bassman began reprinting images from the negatives, experimenting with various darkroom techniques to create what she described as "reinterpretations" of her older photographs. Bassman's work was the subject of a retrospective at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2009.