breaking rules at harper’s bazaar

In 1930 Alexey moved to the U.S. and headed the Advertising Design Department at the Pennsylvania Museum. Four years later, Carmel Snow—the editor of Harper's Bazaar—foresaw the genius of Brodovitch and asked him to head the magazine’s design team. Alexey accepted the offer and introduced a variety of innovations: reiteration, dynamic pagination, scale contrasts, captions, and typography. Marvin Israel, a painter and designer who was an associate of Brodovitch at Bazaar, called him a man “obsessed with change.”

 

he [brodovitch] taught me to be intolerant of mediocrity. he taught me to worship the unknown.

—art kane, fashion and music photographer

Alexey Brodovitch smoking a cigarette, looking into camera

Alexey Brodovitch, 1964. Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Gelatin silver print, printed 1968. © 2019 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.

 

ethereal ballet

A talented photographer, from 1935 to 1937 Brodovitch captured several ballet companies on a 35mm camera with slow exposure. This resulted in blurred images and high-contrast, grainy negatives exhibiting burnt-out areas of flare from the stage lighting. This sharply violated the then accepted conventions of good photography. The images were published in the 1945 photobook Ballet. Only a few hundred copies were ever printed, and most of them were gifted to the artist’s friends.

A page spread from Ballet photobook
A page spread from Ballet photobook
A page spread from Ballet photobook
A page spread from Ballet photobook
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