"Melvin Sokolsky Seeing Fashion" 2000 HARRISON, Martin [text by]

HARRISON, Martin [text by]

[191] pp.

Arena Editions

2000

12 1/4" x 9 3/4"

Fine/ Fine

Melvin Sokolsky (1933-2022) was an American photographer and film director.

Though he was best known for his editorial fashion photographs for publications such as Harper's Bazaar (for which he produced, in 1963, the "Bubble" series of photographs depicting fashion models "floating" in giant clear plastic bubbles suspended in midair above the River Seine in Paris)

At the age of twenty-one, photographer Melvin Sokolsky joined the prestigious staff of Harper's Bazaar, whose art department was then led by legendary art director Henry Wolf.

Sokolsky's unique take on fashion was quite different from fellow photographers like Hiro, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon.

His work took the mundane and transformed it into the marvelous, in a style that today seems ethereal and otherworldly.

Women in bubbles floating across the Seine or flying uncontrollably through the air, rooms constructed as to appear upside down, household objects magnified to colossal proportions-these are all elements of the bizarre universe of Sokolsky's memorable fashion photographs.

Covering the years 1959-1971, these images have a distinctly 60's "look," but they also point to the work of current photography stars like David LaChapelle and Bruce Weber.

Among the fashion and screen personalities included are Mia Farrow, Ali McGraw, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Dustin Hoffman, Chet Baker, Lena Horne, Natalie Wood, Shere Hite, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Suzie Parker, Julie Christie, Lee Remick, and numerous others.

This book, bound in simulated pink fine grain leather, is the first retrospective of Sokolsky's fashion photography, and represents another major rediscovery of one of America's finest image-makers.