Alexey Brodovitch

Alexey Brodovitch (1898 – 1971)
He was a Russian born photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his Art direction of Fashion Magazine Harper’ Bazaar from 1938 to 1958. He was also Irving Penn’s mentor, and Diane Arbus studied with him.
In 1918 him and some of his family made their way to France, where Alexey wanted to be a painter (the connection again with painting and photography !) He and his wife settled in Montparnasse in Paris, along with other Russian artists, including Chagall. Through this connection he started painting backdrops rather than houses, but at that time Paris was a very cosmopolitan city with lots of arts and artist’s, and he was exposed to everything from Dadism to Bauhaus Cubism and many other influences of that period.
He began to sketch designs for textiles, china and jewellery. He gained public recognition of his work in the commercial arts by winning first prize in a poster competition for an Artists’ soiree called Le Bal Banal on march 24th 1924. This poster was exhibited all over Montparnasse along with a drawing by Picasso, who took second place. He remained proud of this work and kept a copy pinned on his studio wall. The graphic, light to dark inversion of its mask shape, type and background suggest not only photography, but also represents the process of trading one’s identity for another when wearing a mask. After that he was hired to design and illustrate catalogues for the Parisian store Aux Trois Quartiers.
Brodovicth embraced technical developments from all spheres of industrial, photography and contemporary painting. Brodovitch went to America in 1930, and his task was to bring American advertising design up to the level of Europe, and taught advertising students. He would always teach with a visual aid, and were then told to make a “graphic impression” of what they had seen, whether a photographic interpretation, a drawing or an abstraction.(This for me is what I am trying to achieve,partly without realising it, and found someone who has taught like that).
Typically, Brodovitch would begin his layouts by designing the layouts as illustrations by hand. His assistant would receive these sketches to look over, but the photographers and freelance writers were often given little or no direction at all besides to come up with something new and unusual. When the photographs arrived, he would pick the most visually interesting and have a variety of sizes of reproductions made on a Photostat machine ( the old days?). Brodovitch would crop images unexpectedly or off-centre to bring a new dynamism to the layout.
Although not a photographer as such his expertise at design and use of photographs to illustrate an article or a magazine is so important. For example he would arbitrarily take a series of photographs and adopt a story line to go with them. Nowadays we work to briefs to do this. He was known to push this idea even further by adding film sprocket borders to photographs at times (popular now). He is also famous for introducing the photographic double-page spread. This side of photography is very important as it ends up as the end product.