(May, 2, 1906, Latvia, Riga – June, 25, 1979, NYC, USA)

Philippe Halsman He was an American Latvian photographer well known for his portraits of famous people. Looking at his photos of Dalí, I think he had an extraordinary creativity.

He was born on May 2, 1906 in Riga to a Jewish family and studied engineering in Dresden. In 1928 he was publicly accused of parricide; His father, who was called Morduch, fell and died during a country excursion in the Austrian Alps, but the surrounding people did not hesitate to accuse him of having committed murder, influenced by his Jewish origin and existing anti-Semitism and for lack of other evidence. He would be put on trial and sentenced to four years in prison, and had it not been for the pressure of an outstanding group of intellectuals, including Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, he would have spent more time in prison than the two years in itself was. Later he settled in Paris where he worked as a freelance fashion photographer and collaborated with Vogue magazine. In 1940, the Second World War began and before the imminent arrival of the German army, he marched to the United States with the help of Albert Einstein, where he would achieve world fame, reaching more than one hundred covers for Life magazine. In 1947 he obtained American citizenship.

If Halsman was characterized by anything, it was his ingenuity, materialized above all through the technique of “jumping style” or “jumpology”, which he gave rise to. It was about portraying the person jumping, in order to get an image of it much more real, truer, without any artifice, without the brain being able to control the expression of the face. «In a jump, the mask falls off. The real person becomes visible, “explained Halsman.3 The result was an image of the person quite different from how it used to appear, and therefore with great appeal to the public, these” images of jumps “were published in 1949 achieving great success . Not everything was jumps, but his photographs always showed funny situations, and some, somewhat provocative.

Works

From his camera they went from thinkers, such as Albert Einstein, to politicians, such as Richard Nixon, passing by artists such as Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Sinatra or Cary Grant. And of course his beloved friend Salvador Dalí, with whom he worked together for many years in compositions of a fantastic and surreal nature. The photographs he took in 1952 of Marilyn Monroe in a pose in which she was “cornered in a corner” became widely known.

In addition to his series of jumps, among his most original works is a “photographic interview” with the French comedian Fernandel. Since Halsman did not speak French and neither did Fernandel English, it occurred to Halsman that the comedian would answer a battery of questions about the United States through facial expression. The result of the experiment was a hilarious book titled The Frenchman.