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Sex, Notes, and Miscellany

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/Lillian Bassman

Lingerie in the Mad Men Era

Lillian Bassman was one of the most influential fashion photographers from the 40's to the 60's, working primarily for Harper's Bazaar. In the 1970's, she became disillusioned with fashion, and decided to destroy her negatives. Fortunately, for us, she later relented, retrieving old negatives from the trash.

From the New York Times,

In most of the lingerie pictures [...] the faces are averted or obscured, the result of the Ford agency’s insistence that its models not be identifiable in such provocative advertising. The effect of this constraint is not cold anonymity but an unusual intimacy that leaves the images feeling almost entirely divorced from commodity, as if they were the visual entries in the personal journals of the women photographed.

Now in her nineties, she favors digital photography.

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Lillian Bassman

/Daily Fix

Sex, Notes, and Miscellany

/Lillian Bassman

Lingerie in the Mad Men Era

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