Melvin Sokolsky, a photographer whose fantastical and occasionally surreal work brought an experimental energy to it Harper’s Bazaar and fashion images in the 1960s, died on August 29 in Beverly Hills, California. He was 88 years old.
Sokolsky’s death was announced on Instagram by David Fahey, co-founder of his gallery, Fahey/Klein, in Los Angeles. A cause was not given.
In an era of cultural upheaval, Sokolsky sought to uproot fashion photography from its more classist and classist roots. His stories were ambitious, otherworldly, and often technically and logistically complicated to pull off, all in the days before digital technology simplified the process of capturing and manipulating images.
Perhaps the most famous of these was his March 1963 “bubble” series about him bazaar, which featured model Simone D’Aillencourt navigating a translucent space-age orb that begins its journey in New York before settling on the Seine in Paris. The session would become Sokolski’s calling card at a time when a variety of youth subcultures and social movements were challenging the maelstrom of old society and the European perspectives that had long dominated haute couture. bazaar itself was also in a period of transition, as many of the legendary creative forces of the magazine’s vaunted post-war golden age – editor-in-chief Carmel Snow; fashion editor Diana Vreeland; art director Alexey Brodovitch; and soon photographer Richard Avedon – had retired or were in the process of leaving.
Model Carmen dell’Orefice with Melvin Sokolsky (background), published in Harper’s BazaarNovember 1960 issue
Born in New York in 1933 and raised on the Lower East Side, Sokolsky was self-taught and trained as a photographer. He was always interested in art as a child and experimented with his father’s camera. But from a young age, Sokolsky was driven by the idea that he would have to work to help his family after his father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis while Sokolsky was still in high school.
Sokolski’s big break would come in 1959, when Brodovic’s successor in bazaar, Henry Wolf, noticed a magazine ad that Sokolsky had shot. Wolf called Sokolsky and offered him a task, which would include an attempt at a cover image. Sokolsky was nervous, but Vreeland’s assistant at the time, Ali MacGraw—who, after appearing in Love story (1970) and with her future husband Steve McQueen in flight (1972), would go on to become one of the biggest movie stars of the 1970s — alerted him to a hat Vreeland loved, which he made sure to shoot. Sokolsky didn’t get the cover, but soon became a regular contributor bazaar.
aida variant of a Sokolsky photograph that appeared Harper’s BazaarMarch 1965 issue
However, the bubble streak came at an unfortunate time for both Sokolsky and the magazine. Wolf had left in 1961, with Vreeland decamping the following year Vogue, where she would soon be appointed editor-in-chief. In December 1962, Sokolski was asked to shoot a story on the Paris collections, but Wolf’s replacement, Marvin Israel, and bazaarIts editor-in-chief, Nancy White, both had reservations about the concept he had proposed: he wanted to photograph a model in a giant bubble hovering over the city.
However, Sokolsky settled on the idea, inspired in part by the 15th-century triptych by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights, which depicted the story of creation and included small figures and animals in floating transparent bubble-like spheres. Sokolski recalled being mesmerized by that painting as a teenager, imagining himself inside one of them, chalking his way through town. He also recalled seeing a store window where shoes and bags were placed in round clear plastic containers.
When White and Israel agreed on the feasibility of the project, Sokolsky agreed to make a few test shots. He had two giant Plexiglas hemispheres fabricated and connected them with a metal ring that ran around the bubble’s circumference and was attached to a thin steel cable. He set up camp in Weehawken, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, and rented a crane, which he then used to lift the bubble into the air with D’Aillencourt inside, photographing it against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline. .
In late January 1963, Sokolsky left for Paris with D’Aillencourt and MacGraw, who had left bazaar to work for him in the hybrid role of assistant, producer and fixer, along for the ride. “Melvin asked me if I could dig out my high school French so I could contact the Paris police for day and night permission to set up our crane,” MacGraw recalled of filming last year. “They had a lot of fun and let us shoot just about anywhere.”
Bubble in the Seinealso from the set of “Bubble”, Harper’s bazaar< em
The images of an elegantly dressed D’Aillencourt suspended in the air in a plastic bubble felt extremely futuristic – and completely different from the popular language of fashion photography at the time. The women in his pictures were not ethereal creatures populating salons, lush gardens, and environments that immediately read as privileged. They were individuals with agency, trying to navigate a changing world. As he later revealed, the character D’Aillencourt embodied in the bubble series was not, in his mind, trapped in the device, but in command of it. “I secretly saw it as a Sokolsky plane that could fly anywhere with an engine built into the ring,” he said in 2019. “It wasn’t a girl trapped in a bubble. It was a woman at the helm of her spaceship.”
Sokolsky’s bubble series became the first fashion story for him bazaar in the post-Vreeland period. It also marked the beginning of a fruitful creative run for Sokolsky, a devout storyteller whose images evoked multidimensional characters and fabled stories, but were often set in realistic—and in some cases, hyper-real—settings.
For a shoot that appeared in the November 1963 issue, Sokolsky again turned to art for inspiration. Drawing on the surrealist scale in René Magritte’s 1952 painting personal values, which depicted the contents of the bedroom – a glass, a comb, a match and a brush – made large and propped up on the furniture, he shot a feature that involved models climbing and jumping off a giant chair and other furniture. “My mother’s old kitchen chair was stored in the back room of the studio – a simple kitchen chair that I grew up sitting on,” he said. bazaar in 2021. “I asked the carpenter to raise it up to 10 feet.”
Big Chair Leana variant of a photo that appeared Harper’s BazaarNovember 1963 issue
In early 1965, Sokolsky returned to Paris for another story, this one with model Dorothea McGowan, who appeared to be flying (sans bubble) around the city; McGowan was, in fact, suspended by a corset device that Sokolsky once again invented himself. “Watching Dorothea hang five stories above the street from a thin cable anchored to a steeply angled roof was disturbing,” Sokolsky said. “To this day, I can still picture him flying over the city, jumping off the end of the cable, actually enjoying the experience.”
In the early 1970s, Sokolsky had moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film. He began working as a commercial director and cinematographer, which would become his main focus over the next several decades. But a resurgence of interest in his photography in the late 1990s prompted a return to creating still images, with which he continued to experiment and push the boundaries in recent years. ABOUT bazaarDecember 2014/January 2015 issue, he even revived the bubble for a Jennifer Aniston cover.
Sokolsky saw appreciation for his work ebb and flow, but he remained fascinated by it all. Last year, he noted a color departure from the history of the great chair, which was entirely black and white. In the image, Irish model Bianchi is seen leaning against the giant chair in a red print coat, as if she’s either going to fall forward or jump out of her seat. Sokolsky said this output — more than any photograph that actually appeared in the magazine — was what galleries and museums were always asking for exhibitions. “The art department thought the image was so weird,” he said bazaar. “At the time most of the choices for publication were high-class gestures from models,” he said. “But times and tastes have changed. Going out is becoming the choice, setting a new standard.”
Sokolsky is survived by his son, Bing Sokolsky, and daughter-in-law, Yuki Sokolsky. He was predeceased by his wife and longtime associate, Button Sokolsky.
