Dovima with the Elephants The Story of the Most Famous Fashion Photograph Ever

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So let's consider some of the background...

When Carmel Snow became editor-in-chief at Harper's Bazaar she made a number of very important appointments. When she saw an exhibition of graphic design by Alexey Brodovitch from his years in Paris, she appointed him as art director. She also appointed Martin Munkácsi as staff photographer with staggering contract of $100,000.

Munkácsi had started as sports photographer before working for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ) and Die Dame before being forced to flee to the USA after the Nazi take over in Germany. Carmel Snow had grasped that movement would be key to the future of women's fashion.

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In 1933 Carmel Snow had persuaded Munkácsi to photograph the Harper's Bazaar December edition's 'Palm Beach' bathing suit issue. For this issue, he had the model Lucille Brokaw run toward the camera while he photographed her, which was the first instance of a fashion model being photographed in motion.

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Throughout his career, Avedon acknowledged the inspiration of Munkácsi, and said of him: "He brought a taste for happiness and honesty and a love of women to what was, before him, a joyless, loveless, lying art."

Despite working as one of the richest and best-paid photographers, during his period at Harper's Bazaar Munkácsi died in abject poverty in 1963.

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In 1933 Alexey Brodovitch, while teaching in Philadelphia, added the Design Laboratory to the classes he offered. It was meant to be a workshop for his advanced students who wanted to experiment with all aspects of design. Brodovitch shared the Bauhaus belief that you needed to educate the whole individual by directing his or her attention to a variety of modern solutions in their graphic projects. From 1941 to 1966, Alexey Brodovitch hosted a series of Design Laboratory classes as evening sessions in New York City.

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Avedon joined the Design Laboratory and began a long association with Brodovitch. His first photos were published in the Junior Bazaar but soon Avedon was established as one of the most successful photographers at Harper's.

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Avedon joined the armed forces in 1942 during World War II, serving as Photographer’s Mate Second Class in the U.S. Merchant Marine. After two years of service, he left the Merchant Marine to work as a professional photographer, creating fashion images and studying at the Design Laboratory of the New School for Social Research. Avedon began working as a freelance photographer, primarily for Harper’s Bazaar aged just 22.

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When Avedon approached Brodovitch with a portfolio of photos, Brodovitch was dismissive of the many fashion photos but was struck by a stark portrait Avedon had taken of two twins while in the navy. The years Avedon spent taking hundreds and hundreds of identity photos in the navy was later reflected in the spare direct portrait style he favoured using a plain white background.

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Dovima was reputed to be the highest-paid model of her time, demanding $60 per hour when most of the top models were receiving only around $25 per hour. She became known as the "Dollar-a-Minute Girl."

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According to Richard Avedon, "She was the last of the great elegant, aristocratic beauties...the most remarkable and unconventional beauty of her time…The ideal of beauty then was the opposite of what it is now. It stood for an extension of the aristocratic view of women as ideals, of women as dreams, of women as almost surreal objects. Dovima fit that in her proportions."

Dovima said on working with Avedon, “We became like mental Siamese twins, with me knowing what he wanted before he explained it. He asked me to do extraordinary things, but I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.”

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Richard Avedon began tap dancing lessons when he was nine and he kept them up. Not surprisingly Fred Astaire was one of his heros. In Funny Face Fred Astaire plays "Dick Avery", clearly modelled on Richard ("Dick") Avedon.

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Richared Avedon was hired by the film makers as a 'consultant' and taught Fred Astaire how to handle a camera, darkroom and a fashion shoot with models. Many of his fashion photographs were incorporated into important stills sequences within the movie, including the titles.

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Perhaps Avedon was too insistent on technical details but the movie makers came to regard him as a bit of a problem. And Avedon came to have serious reservations about the movie. Perhaps not surprising, given how many plot points, etc. were taken directly from Avedon's experience of shooting in Paris.

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Dance is incredibly important to this musical. One of the most exciting sequences has 'Dick Avery', the older man, American photographer ending up in a café where Existentialism, jazz and dance are the order of the day. Audrey Hepburn sets the place alight with a dance, which in reality must have been choreographed by Astaire.

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Many of the characters in the film were based on the real people involved in Avedon's various trips to photograph Paris fashions. 'Maggie Prescot' draws on the personalities of Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland. Dovima plays a model obsessed with comics (as opposed to the very serious minded Audrey Hepburn ('Jo') who runs a second-hand bookshop with an interest in philosophy.

When she had contracted rheumatic fever at ten, Dovima was confined to bed rest for one year. Her mother kept her home for 7 years to recuperate, which greatly limited her contact with others. In her solitude, Dovima began studying painting, and read comics.

Dovima never gave up her obsession with comics. When she arrived for a photoshoot in Egypt with two huge suitcases, Avedon was surprised that she needed to bring such a large wardrobe -- but the trunks were full of her supply of comics.

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One year before Funny Face was released, Avedon shot Hepburn’s first cover of Harper’s Bazaar in April 1956. He photographed her again for the October 1956 cover.

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Avedon and Hepburn became close friends and she was photographed by him many, many times over the next decades.

In 1967, Avedon was teaching at the Famous Photographer’s School in Westport, Connecticut, a correspondence school for photography and created the collage below as an example of composite photography for an assignment.

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Avedon’s composite photograph leaves viewers wondering if his representation of fashion and movie icon Hepburn subtly critiques the very beauty standards that fashion photography celebrated (or does he further encourage them)?

“Trapeze"

In Paris, at the famous Cirque d’Hiver, film director Carol Reed was shooting the film Trapeze, starring Gina Lollibrigida, Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster (who had been an acrobat in the circus before becoming a film star). Avedon was invited onto the set.

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Seeing the elephants of the circus, Avedon immediately chose the location to take an image, later saying, “I saw the elephants under an enormous skylight and in a second I knew that I then had to find the right dress, and I knew that there was the potential here for a kind of dream image.”

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Many of Avedon's best fashion photos were taken on the streets of Paris.

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The black evening dress with a white sash, from the first Christian Dior collection to feature evening wear. It was also one of the first designs by Yves Saint Laurent to feature in a Dior collection. Saint Laurent was 19 at the time. Two years later (in August 1957) Dior appointed him as his successor to run his fashion house. A few months later (October 1957) Dior died of a massive heart attack. He was 52.

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In 1957, Saint Laurent found himself at age 21 the head designer of the House of Dior. His spring 1958 collection almost certainly saved the enterprise from financial ruin. The simple, flaring lines of his first collection for Dior, called the Trapeze line, a variation of Dior's 1955 A-Line catapulted him to international stardom.

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In 1960, Saint Laurent found himself conscripted to serve in the French Army during the Algerian War. There he was so badly bullied that he was admitted to a military hospital, where he received news that he had been fired from Dior, to be replaced by Marc Bohan. This exacerbated his condition, and he was transferred to Val-de-Grâce military hospital, where he was given large doses of sedatives and psychoactive drugs and subjected to electroshock therapy. Saint Laurent himself traced the origin of both his mental problems and his drug addictions to this time in hospital.

He successfully sued the house of Dior for breach of contract before setting up on his own.

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Dovima with Elephants was ultimately given full-page treatment and featured alongside 14 additional images from the assignment included with “Carmel Snow’s Paris Report” printed in the magazine’s September 1955 issue.

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After guest-editing the April 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon quit the magazine after facing a storm of criticism over his collaboration with models of colour. He joined Vogue, where he worked for over twenty years. In 1992, Avedon became the first staff photographer at The New Yorker. During this period, his fashion photography appeared almost exclusively in the French magazine Egoïste.

In 1955, the Vreelands moved to a new apartment, which Diana had Billy Baldwin decorate entirely in red. She said, "I want this place to look like a garden, but a garden in hell". She worked with Avedon for almost forty years and at the time of her death Avedon said of her that "she was and remains the only genius fashion editor".