Clifford Coffin: Photographs from Vogue, 1945 to 1955

American photographer Clifford Coffin (1913-1972) is considered by many who knew him as the greatest of Vogue's "lost" photographers - an artist far ahead of his time. His innovative and intriguing fashion photographs of the 1940s and 1950s for such renowned magazines as Glamour, Vogue and Jardin des Modes in New York, London and Paris challenged the standards of the day. Now, published to coincide with a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London, comes the first extensive monograph of this artist's ingenious photographic work. Clifford Coffin: Photographs from Vogue 1945 to 1955 features a rare collection of over 100 full-color and duotone plates - including many images that were locked away in the library annex of British Vogue for over forty years. Comprehensive in its coverage, this book chronicles Coffin's incredible range of style, from his early romanticism and surrealism to the cool, contrived elegance that eventually characterized fashion photography in the 1950s. Also present are Coffin's magnificent portraits of leading figures in the literary, artistic and theatrical circles of the era, including a youthful Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Lucian Freud, Vivien Leigh, Richard Attenborough and Laurence Olivier, as well as his celebrated portraits of Christian Dior taken on the eve of the couturier's first collection, and Henri Matisse, shown late in life, working in bed on his paper cut-outs. Many of his portraits feature famous people actually wearing the clothes of designers like Jean Despres, Schiaparelli, Fath, Dior, Balenciaga, Cartier, Lanvin and Molyneux. In addition to Coffin's photographs, editor Robin Muir's meticulous research finally reveals the story of this fascinating man, whose life up until now has remained a mystery.

Editorial Reviews

Photography is a medium alive with masters who pushed the envelope beyond the raw elements of light, paper, and chemicals to make images first conceived and then assembled within the camera. Fashion photography, in particular, has long been served by artists who stretch the idea of costume, form, situation, and emotion. Both Bassman and Coffin used those elements with striking results, achieving enormous fame in their overlapping eras, Bassman in the 1940s through the 1960s and Coffin in the 1940s and 1950s. Both were capable of bringing a nearly kinetic choreography to their still photographs, both made fabric a stage and the human form within it a blending of gymnastics and drama, yet both offer a very different legacy. As seen here, Bassman worked exclusively in black and white, producing images highly dependent on light and shadow in which something is missing but is remembered by the viewer. Coffin built sculptural forms from models, clothes, and places united in enduring photographs. He often worked in color, making the products he photographed slow down long enough to be seen and critiqued. These books are ideal for our time. By offering the excitement of discovery in an avant-garde almost half a century old, they offer stirring evidence of the merger of the commercial and the aesthetic while gathering, as if by accident, beautiful clothes for our eclectic tastes. In so doing, they convert the old to the timeless. Recommended for general collections.David Bryant, New Canaan P.L., Ct.