January, 6th, 2013

Tunisia | Natalie in Hammamet, 1950 | Louise Dahl-Wolfe

“I believe that the camera is a medium of light, that one actually paints with light. In using the spotlights with reflecting lights, I could control the quality of the forms revealed to build a composition. Pho tography, to my mind, is not a fine art. It is splendid for recording a period of time, but it has definite limitations, and the pho tographer certainly hasn’t the free dom of the painter. One can work with taste and emotion and create an exciting arrangement of significant form, a meaningful pho tograph, but a painter has the advantage of putting something in the picture that isn’t there or taking something out that is there. I think this makes painting a more creative medium.”, 1984.

In 1928, Louise met the sculp tor Meyer Wolfe in Tunisia and married him in San Francisco. She wanted to take the last name Wolfe, but later, lest she be mistaken for a particular commercial pho tographer by the same name, she a dopted the hyphenated “Dahl-Wolfe.”

From 1936 to 1958 Dahl-Wolfe was a staff fashion pho tographer at Harper’s Bazaar. During that tenure, Dahl-Wolfe’s pho tographs featured in the magazine included 86 covers, another 600 published in color, and thous ands in black- and-white. A cover image of Betty Bacall sent the model for a Hollywood screen test where she soon changed her name to Lauren. While working for Harper’s Dahl-Wolfe pioneered the use of natural lighting in fashion pho tography and shooting on location. She pho tographed in locations all over the northern hemisphere: from Laguna Beach, California (Rubber bathingsuit, January 1940), to the winter quarters of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota Florida (Two models with elephants, May 1947) to Granada, Spain (Jean Patchett, 1953). Her innovations and modernist touches kept her widely celebrated in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and she is remembered as an influence on a generation of pho tographers including Horst, Richard Ave don, and Irving Penn.

Dahl-Wolfe preferred portraiture to fashion work, and while at Harper’s she pho tographed cultural icons and celebrities including film-maker Orson Wells (1938), writer Carson McCullers (1940) designer Christian Dior (1946), pho tographer Cecil Bea ton (1950), writer Colette (1951), and broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow (1953). In addition to her Harper’s responsibilities, Dahl-Wolfe was able to pursue her own vision in the studio and sometimes even while on assignment. For example, she asked a model to pose for the unpublished Nude in the Desert while on location in California’s Mojave Desert shooting swimsuits that would appear in the May 1948 edition of Harper’s.