Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Alexey Brodovitch - Ballet










This post is for my Dear Friend Nicole, who endlessly fills me with inspiration.

Alexey Brodovitch (1898-1971) was a Russian-born photographer, designer and teacher. He was famous for his art direction of fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar from 1938 to 1958. Many credit Alexy for introduching Modern graphic design in to the United States. Ballet was a book of Alexey's photos published in 1945.

"When you first glance at them, Alexey Brodovitch's phogographs look strangely unconventional. Brodovitch, who knows as well as any of us the standardized Fifth Ave kind of flawless prints, offers us, as his own, some that are blurred, distorted, too black and spectral, or too light and faded looking, and he has even intensified these qualities in souvenirs, and he first took them to have a souvenir of ballet to keep. From the wings of from standing room, watching the performance, absorbed by a sentiment it awakened, he snapped, one may imagine, almost at random. But as you look at his results you come to see that he was steadily after a very interesting and novel subject. He was trying to catch the elusive stage atmosphere that only ballet has, as the dancers in action created it." Edwin Denly