Philippe Halsman

In 1934, he met Yvonne Moser, a young photographer, in Paris who started working as his apprentice. The two fell in love and married in 1937. The couple had two daughters - Irene (1939) and Jane (1941).

He died on June 25, 1979, in New York City, aged 73.

He was accused of murdering his father and it was brought on the silver screen in the 2008 British-Austrian drama film ‘Jump!’, featuring Ben Silverstone as Philippe Halsman.

Philippe Halsman was born on May 2, 1906 in Riga, Russian Empire (now Latvia) into a Jewish family to dentist Morduch (Mark) Halsman and grammar school principal Ita Grintuch.

He finished school by 1924 and went to Dresden, Germany, to study electrical engineering.

He was fascinated by photography at the age of 15 when he found his father’s old-view camera in a store. He bought himself a book to get familiar with the art and shot numerous photos of his only sister, Liouba.

In 1928, he was arrested and convicted for his father’s murder while holidaying in the Austrian Alps. Though he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, he was freed in 1930 on the condition of leaving Austria for good and never return back.

In 1930, he went to France and started working for fashion magazines, like Vogue. Eventually, he grew famous as one of the best portrait photographers in town for capturing sharp, cropped images rather than the old soft focused ones.

He started his own portrait studio in Montparnasse in 1934 and designed a twin-lens reflex camera, using which he captured images of various artists and writers, including Andre Malraux, Andre Gide, Le Corbusier and Marc Chagall.

He escaped to Marseilles during the German invasion of France and migrated to the United States after successfully getting an emergency American visa with the help of his friend Albert Einstein.

His photo of model Constance Ford which was used by the cosmetics tycoon, Elizabeth Arden, in an ad campaign for the lipstick, Victory Red, became his major breakthrough in America and opened more doors to success soon after.

His meeting with Spanish surreal artist Salvador Dali in 1941 led to a series of unusual photographs together during their 37-year partnership, due to their similar views on paintings.

In 1947, he created one of his most popular photographs of a mourning Albert Einstein, while he was recollecting his regrets on his role in America planning the atomic bomb.

He collaborated with Salvador Dali to produce the famous 1948 ‘Dali Atomicus’, capturing Dali in a playful mood with three cats flying and a bucket of thrown water, inspired by Dali’s own work, ‘Leda Atomica’.

In 1951, the two worked together to create the most distinguished and iconic work ‘In Voluptas Mors’, depicting Dali next to a large skull which, in fact, is a tableau vivant comprising of seven nude females in extremely beautiful poses.

While on an assignment commissioned by NBC in 1951, he photographed popular comedians, such as Groucho Marx, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, and Bob Hope, in mid-air, thus developing a type of photography called jumpology.