Philippe Halsman (1906–1979)

Philippe Halsman was born to a Jewish family in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents were Ita (Grintuch), a grammar school principal, and Morduch (Maks) Halsman, a dentist. He studied electrical engineering in Dresden, Germany. In 1928, he endured the painful ordeal of being accused of murdering his father while they were on a hike together in the Austrian Tyrol. After a trial based only on circumstantial evidence, Halsman was found guilty. His family, friends, and lawyers worked for his release, getting international publicity and support from Thomas Mann and various important European Jewish intellectuals including Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Halsman spent two years in prison, where he contracted tuberculosis, before being pardoned in 1930. He moved to Paris, where he opened his own photography studio, and soon gained a reputation as one of the best portrait photographers in France. When Nazi Germany invaded in World War II, Halsman fled to Marseille and eventually managed to reach the USA, settling in New York City. Halsman had his earliest success in America when the cosmetics firm Elizabeth Arden used one of his photos in an ad campaign for "Victory Red" lipstick. In 1941, Halsman met the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and they began to work together in the late 1940s. Halsman's famous 1948 photo entitled "Dalí Atomicus" explored the idea of suspension, depicting three cats flying, a bucket of thrown water, and Dalí in mid-air. Halsman and Dalí eventually released a compendium of their collaborations in the 1954 book Dali's Mustache. In 1947, Halsman photographed a mournful Albert Einstein, which became one of his most famous images. It was later used on a 1996 U.S. postage stamp and on the cover of Time magazine in 1999, when it called Einstein the "Person of the Century." In 1951 Halsman was commissioned by NBC to photograph various popular comedians of the time including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Groucho Marx, and Bob Hope. He captured many of them jumping, in mid-air, which went on to inspire many later jump pictures of celebrities. His 1961 book Halsman on the Creation of Photographic Ideas discussed ways for photographers to produce unusual pieces of work. Other celebrities Halsman photographed included Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Martin and Lewis, Judy Garland, Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Dandridge, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau. Many of those photographs appeared on the cover of Life Magazine. In 1952, John F. Kennedy sat twice for photographs by Halsman; a photo from the first sitting appeared on the jacket of the original edition of Profiles in Courage. In 1975, Halsman received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers (now the American Society of Media Photographers), for which he was elected the first president in 1945. He also held many large exhibitions of his work worldwide. Today, Halsman's works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others.