I have dedicated the last two days to the world of photography, so it looks coherently apt to close this photographic “Easter Triduum” with a post dedicated to another fashion photographer I find fascinating, Gene Fenn.
I already mentioned him in a previous post dedicated to Stine Goya, though in that occasion I didn’t analyse in depth his work.
Fenn was born in New York in 1911, but lived in Paris, in his flat in rue Saint-Florentin, for over thirty years.
When he was 15 years old, he went to work for a New Jersey-based photographic studio and, by chance, got himself a job as Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s assistant and started working with her in New York.
Fenn returned to his job after completing his military duty, assisting this time George Hoyningen-Huene at Harpers’ Bazaar.
He began experimenting with still lives and fashion photography and Marie Faulkner, art director at Mademoiselle, offered him the chance to work for her magazine.
Prompted by a constant research for innovation on a technical and visual level, Fenn produced for Mademoiselle very different images compared to the ones he had shot for Harper’s.
The photographer began mixing black and white images with coloured pictures or superimposed one shot to the other, creating unusually modern and amazing collages.
One example of this technique was Fenn's iconic photograph entitled “The girl in a cake of ice” that produced an amazing optical illusion and gave the viewer the impression of seeing a naked woman frozen inside an ice block.
At the time many photographers worked with natural light, but Fenn’s early experiments with his father in lighting design for theatre stages and film sets, pushed him to experiment further in his studio using electronic flashes (that often produced vividly bright images of fashion shows - see fifth image in this post) and special equipment he had bought from the army after the war was over, such as a 305mm zoom used for aerial shoots.
Even when he took his images in the open air, Fenn tried to experiment further with light.
When he shot the advertising campaign for a wedding gown manufacturer on the roof of his studio, he filtered the natural light through a parachute to give the image a sort of dreamily eerie atmosphere.
The fourth image in this post is the test shoot for the advert and shows the parachute suspended above the model (the parachute didn't appear in the final advert - cue: why not trying to experiment a bit with light by filtering it through a parachute if you can get your hands on one?).
While working as a photographer, Fenn also studied painting at the experimental Cooper Union School in New York and, in 1949, he moved to Paris.
Here he studied painting under Fernand Léger and André Lhote, and met Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Kees Van Dongen, Ossip Zadkine and Man Ray.
Living in the French capital allowed him to follow twice a year the Parisian catwalk shows for Mademoiselle and collaborate at the same time with other fashion magazines and publications such as Marie Claire and Elle.
Fenn also started developing advertising campaigns for important clients such as General Motors, contributing to make the fashion and cars connection rather popular in later years (check out for example his images for the Cadillac cars - see also previous post on Automotive Fashion), while producing photographs for Newsweek and creating in the 1970s advertising campaigns for the International Herald Tribune.
Fenn never managed to choose between painting and photography, two arts he kept on practicing until his death, in 2001.
He loved both painting and photographs, though he felt that society wasn’t so open towards artists and also conceived photography as way to earn enough money that would allow him to keep on painting and producing art.
For those who love the fashion photography and film connection, Fenn appears in Jean Louis van Belle's film Forbidden Paris (Paris Interdit, 1969).
This sort of “mondo” movie is a pastiche of disturbing Parisian oddities from the '60.
I will hopefully have the time to analyse further this film, its vibrant colours and fashion connections in a future post.
Fenn appears in the film as himself, while he practices sadistic photography.
Culturally speaking, this bizarre movie may not be that important, but it's the only documentary available that will give you the chance to see Gene Fenn at work.
In a way that's a shame since it would have been very interesting to be able to explore in depth in a documentary Fenn's early experiments that integrated drawing, painting and photography - such as the pictures he shot to accompany a piece on Roland Petit's ballet Carmen, featuring Zizi Jeanmarie (last image in this post) - and discover how he created them in the pre-digital, pre-Photoshop era.
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