Lillian Bassman

Lillian Bassman (1917, Brooklyn, NY) was a famed fashion photographer renowned for her work at Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Bassman’s hallmark images are high-contrast black-and-white images of society women, actresses, and models from the 1950s and 1960s—especially of contemporary top model Barbara Mullen, who was her muse. Bassman went on to study at the Textiles High School in Manhattan where she met the photographer Alexey Brodovitch. She began to work for Harper’s Bazaar under Brodovitch in the 1940s, where she promoted the careers of Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and her husband Paul Himmel as the photo editor of the magazine. By the 1970s, Bassman abandoned commercial work but continued to practice photography for the remainder of her life.