Unknown Halsman [Hardcover]

Oliver Halsman Rosenberg (Editor), Philippe Halsman (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2008

Unknown Halsman reveals an overlooked, playful and bizarre side of Philippe Halsman, one of the most innovative photographers of the twentieth century. Most previous publications on Halsman feature his iconic portraiture, which appeared on the cover of Life and other top American magazines from the 40s through the 70s. He is also remembered for his groundbreaking Surrealist photo collaborations with Salvador Dali. Edited by his grandson Oliver Halsman Rosenberg (who has spent the past two years organizing the archive and discovering the depth of the celebrated photographer's unpublished oeuvre), most of the images in this distinctive volume--which include private and experimental photographs, decontextualized advertisements, outtakes from famous sittings, contact sheets and family snapshots--have never been seen as a body of work in their own right. One of Philippe Halsman's many aphorisms, "The way a photographer sees is an extension of his character," is apt; these photographs not only capture his character, they bring to life the essence of his era.
Oliver Halsman Rosenberg, also an artist, has lent his graphic sense to this publication, creating a uniquely designed and sequenced monograph that is both colorful and spirited. Intermingled with 100 fine reproductions of Halsman's photographs are numerous quotes by the photographer as well as luminaries like Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Martha Graham and Alfred Hitchcock. All quotes are hand illustrated by Oliver Halsman Rosenberg in a unique brush font that is inspired by Japanese calligraphy and hand-made zines. Contributing to the well-considered and intimate feel of this publication are the use of yellow throughout the book, inspired by a wall in Halsman's former photo studio; the blue floral endpapers, which were taken from the fabric of Halsman's couch; and the use of a typewriter font that evokes the correspondence found during the archiving process. Oliver Halsman Rosenberg also contributes an illustrated essay. A major European multi-venue retrospective is in the works for 2009-2010.
Born in Riga, Latvia in 1906, Philippe Halsman discovered his passion and talent for photography as a teenager. He moved to Paris in 1930 and there began his career as a portrait photographer. Soon after, his work began appearing in magazines such as Vogue, Vuand and Voila. His career was brought to a grinding halt when Hitler's troops arrived in Paris in 1940. Halsman escaped to New York with little but his camera. Shooting for Life in the early 1940s, he quickly established himself in the New York photo scene. Halsman's disarming ability to expose the personality of his subjects without pretense quickly made him one the most sought after photographers by the nation's cultural elite, including Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Audrey Hepburn, Alfred Hitchcock, John F. Kennedy and Andy Warhol. Following a major retrospective at the International Center of Photography, he died in New York in 1979 at the age of 73.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers (October 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933045876
• ISBN-13: 978-1933045870
• Product Dimensions: 14.3 x 10.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,046,996 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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This review is from: Unknown Halsman (Hardcover)

Reconsidering an artist can be an exhausting experience, and therefore one is especially glad when a latterday artist marshals the evidence like a great defense attorney. In this case, our contemporary the young San Francisco-based artist Oliver Halsman Rosenberg spent several years working on the archives of his late grandfather, the once celebrated portrait and fashion photographer Philippe Halsman, and published this very grand and visually exciting book as a brief. I remember Halsman's photographs, the most famous of which appeared in the old LIFE magazine. There was something heavy and European about his style, even when he wore his joker mask. American photographers made less of a fuss, one felt, and Halsman was like the Roberto Benigni of his day, always living large, leaping from chair to chair, exuding geniality like a madman. His collaborations with Salvador Dali's mustache, and people like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor jumping into the air expressing careful exultation, furthered this impression of Halsman as a showman pure and simple, a man for whom statement was understatement: well, he wasn't cool like William Eggleston or whomever.

But now, through OHR's ingenuity, I've changed my mind 180 degrees. The archive has proven a bounty of unusual and sometimes stirring surprises, and most of all I see now that not all of Halsman's photographs were about being goofy (or super somber like his pictures of Einstein and the like). Dali is still all over the volume, but his effect has been relegated to the second tier, so that their collaborative work reveals a Dali influenced by Halsman; it's this new perception of Halsman as top banana that's nothing short of a wake-up call. How about that photo of Mia Farrow, her long hair frizzed in front of her face, resembling nothing so much as a board of knotty pine wood (which she happens to be holding next to her, or peeking from beyond). Visual grammars combine, assert themselves, retreat, while Rosenberg's deliberate confusion of chronology shores up the body of Halsman as a body of infinite gradations.

Rosenberg also brings forward what one might call the camp element. Cocteau in a 1949 LIFE magazine spread makes all his actual work look silly as he himself parades through a corridor of human arms, here sans candelabra but distorted into the hands of little boys pretending to be firing guns. On the flip page, Edward Albee in 1961, and over the top of his skull Halsman slaps on a smorgasbord of tiny actors playing out the most shocking scenes of all of Albee's early one acts. His work is possibly the pivot point where camp turns over and becomes true horror, or at any rate true abjection, the photos of Tippi Hedren and Alfred Hitchcock literalize the dreamy imagery of THE BIRDS into a point of no return, beyond ordinary categories of the sane and the unsane. Rosenberg reminds us of his grandfather's horrible early life, of how he was condemned to solitary confinement for the murder of his own father--a crime of which he was totally innocent, and a punishment meted out by anti-Semitic state forces afraid of the young Latvian and his Jewish convictions. Remember how Dostoevsky was hauled out before a firing squad, and saved only by something completely arbitrary? That's how Halsman lived his whole life, in a state of post-traumatic stress. No wonder he gravitated towards the impossible glamor of Martha Graham, Sharon Tate, and the international conceptualisms of Marcel Duchamp, Isamu Noguchi, Sid Caesar and Cantinflas. That mashup of Mao and Marilyn Monroe stands for me, right now, as his most emblematic work of art.