Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet

Alexey Brodovitch, Astonish Me, Yale University Press, 2024

Alexey Brodovitch: Astonish Me! assesses the career of the hugely influential Harper’s Bazaar art director, who changed the course of twentieth-century American photography and graphic design

This lavishly illustrated volume explores the influence and significance of the Russian-born photographer, designer, and instructor Alexey Brodovitch (1898–1971), best known for his art directorship of the American fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar between 1934 and 1958, as well as his tutelage of many celebrated documentary and fashion photographers, including Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, and Lillian Bassman. Though disparate in their aesthetic approaches, these figures are unified by their responses to Brodovitch’s dictum to “astonish me.” The authors address Brodovitch’s impact on photography as an artistic medium in the mid-twentieth century and explore how European art and design became the foundation of a new American print culture. Brodovitch’s own work will be illuminated through his personal projects—such as the magazine Portfolio and the photographic project Ballet, which depicted performances of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in the United States (whose evolution echoed Brodovitch’s own émigré condition). Case studies of his transformative collaborations with photographers such as Arnold, Avedon, Penn, Lisette Model, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hans Namuth, and André Kertész reveal pivotal encounters that may surprise even the most ardent photography aficionado. An illustrated chronology offers an important tool for scholars on this influential but often overlooked figure.

David Campany contributes an essay about Brodovitch’s 1945 photobook, Ballet. 

Exhibition: Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
(March 3–May 26, 2024)

Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet: A Complete Work of Art

David Campany

Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet (1945), his only book of photographs, is as innovative and influential as it is rare. Although only a small number of copies were printed, none of which appear to have been distributed commercially, it has come to be regarded as one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century, ground-breaking in its form and complete in its vision.[i]

Brodovitch’s connection to the world of ballet ran deep and was very personal. Shortly after coming to Paris from Russia in 1920, he met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who offered him work painting backdrops for the Ballet Russe, the visionary touring company established in the city in 1909.[ii] Brodovitch had wanted to be a fine art painter, but his experience with Ballet Russe opened his eyes to commercial art and the endlessly rich possibilities of collaboration. In 1935, a year after becoming art director at Harper’s Bazaar in New York, he began to frequent rehearsals and performances of various world-touring ballet companies when they visited the city. These included the Ballet Russe (now renamed the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, after the death of Diaghilev in 1929). Photographing the intensity and exuberance of such occasions allowed Brodovitch to reconnect with that formative time in his creative life.

In the 1920s and 30s photography was being pushed hard towards a precisionist capture of action. Sports and dance, in particular, were to be frozen by the camera, crisp and sharp. Fast shutter speeds, sensitive film, bright light, and use of a tripod could eliminate motion blur and camera shake, maximizing detail. Brodovitch chose to ignore all that. Instead, he used a handheld 35mm Contax camera, slow film, and shutter speeds as long as one fifth of a second in the available stage light. Rather than requesting performers to pose for his camera, he preferred to slip incognito through the delirious action, catching whatever came his way, uncontrolled and uncontrived. Few of his photographs have much sharpness and most are either under- or overexposed. He then exaggerated these qualities in the darkroom through heavy printing of shadows and bleaching of highlights. He welcomed scratches and dust on the negatives, from which he often took just small sections to enlarge, indistinct and grainy. In the swirl, faces were rendered vague and everywhere documentary fact was sacrificed for poetic feeling. Brodovitch was reimagining photography’s catalogue of “mistakes” as artistic possibility. While clarity and instantaneity were thought to be the ideals to which photography should aspire, Brodovitch saw that the medium was much more expansive. If it is to be explored fully, nothing should be ruled out.

His prints accumulated but it remains unclear whether at that point he saw the work as a personal experiment or something with a more public appeal. What is clear is that there was little else remotely like these images, even within photography’s avant garde circles. What would become of them?  With the outbreak of the Second World War, they were put aside.

The images were only half the originality. It is what Brodovitch eventually came to do with them on the page that really makes his book remarkable. Here too, all conventions were cast aside. The format of Ballet is horizontal and the 104 photos flow laterally, each bleeding to the edge of its page. There are no white borders to isolate or stabilize the visual experience. The viewer cannot engage with the book without physically touching the images, connecting with the atmosphere they conjure. Ballet is not an album of individual pictures to be contemplated; it is a total and immersive work. Across many of the double-spreads, Brodovitch places two photos of the same scene, giving the impression of snatched movie frames separated by a brief moment. Occasionally a pairing feels like continuous panoramic space, the join between the two images lost in the book’s central gutter. There is a sequence for each of the eleven ballets: Les Noces, Les Cent Baisers, Symphonie Fantastique, Le Tricorne, Boutique Fantasque, Cotillion, Choreartium, Septième Symphonie, Le Lac des Cygnes, Les Sylphides, and Concurrence. Each begins with a page bearing the ballet’s title, typeset in its own decorative, pre-modern font. The sequences work on their own but they also unfold one after the other, across the entire book. First, there are several spreads of backstage preparation – dressing rooms, make-up and scenes behind the curtain. These are interspersed with writing by Edward Denby, the renowned novelist, poet, and ballet critic. Then, as each subsequent ballet is introduced, the images become increasingly energetic, lighter in their tonal range, and hazier. By the end the book the feeling is of gauzy recollection, the photos almost fading to white.

A ballet is an event in time, and all that remains once it is over are fragmentary impressions. Brodovitch evokes the slippage from event to memory. In his text, Denby refers to the book’s evocation of “the elusive stage atmosphere that only ballet has,” and to the “unemphatic moments, the ones the audience does not applaud but which establish the spell of the evening.” Perhaps the book was also Brodovitch’s attempt to re-envision those swirling memories of ballet back in Paris.

Every design aspect of the book is carefully controlled. The matte paper dustjacket, folded around stiff boards, is filled edge-to-edge with the word BALLET, repeated smaller on an understated card slipcase. Printed in inky gravure to emphasise the rich tones, it was published by J.J. Augustin, for whom Brodovitch also designed the cover and worked on the layout of photographer André Kertész’s Day of Paris (1945). Originally from Hungary, Kertész was working in New York, but in the late 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most widely published photographers in the many Paris-based illustrated magazines, and had also produced a number of photographic books there. Of course, the double appeal of books is that they do not need to be made under such tight deadlines as magazines, and they last. Even the very best photographers and art directors working for magazines see their work casually discarded every week or month. Such disheartening experience can make the prospect of publishing a book for posterity all the more alluring.

Brodovitch’s layout for Kertész is sensitive yet much more conventional than his own book. Considered together however, Ballet and Day of Paris show how versatile Brodovitch could be in his handling of photographs. He was not an artist with a signature style to be imposed on material. His role was to understand that material and shape the best presentation for it.  In the making of Ballet, it was probably an advantage that the photographs were already several years old. Brodovitch would have been able to see their graphic potential more objectively, and thus shape book more radically. At the same time, they were his images and he could do anything he wished with them.

Since it was not primarily for sale, there were no reviews of Ballet. It did receive the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ prestigious Book of the Year Award, but that was an insider’s accolade. It is an open question as to how the book might have fared with the public. Nevertheless, with his finger of the pulse of popular taste, Brodovitch would have known Ballet was extreme, and quite at odds with the conservative values dominating serious art photography. So, what is the source of this book’s extraordinary reputation and influence?

Brodovitch gifted copies to design colleagues and photographers in his circle at Harper’s Bazaar, and beyond. Among the notable recipients was Richard Avedon, a junior photographer who in 1944 had come to study with Brodovitch at the New School of Social Research. Avedon’s early work evolved in tandem with Brodovitch’s photo/graphic sensibility. In 1949 the two collaborated on the Ninth Ballet Theatre Annual, a publication now even rarer than Ballet itself.[iii] Neither the photography nor the design was quite as graphically daring (because the dancers all had to be recognizable and credited) but it is still a remarkable achievement, especially for the young Avedon. Several of his portraits from this assignment, particularly of the dancer Hugh Lang, remain among his best-loved.

Other photographers in Brodovitch’s orbit developed approaches that seemed to pick up where Ballet left off. Lillian Bassman and Deborah Turbeville, who both worked at Harper’s Bazaar, came to understand the photographic print as physical material to be manipulated by hand into finely crafted and overtly subjective expression far removed from the documentary impulse. We can also see echoes of Brodovitch in the use of blur made by Ernst Haas in his color work, and in Paul Himmel’s book Ballet in Action (1954). Robert Frank, the Swiss photographer hired by Brodovitch in 1947, had arrived with a portfolio of technically polished images. Almost immediately he was exploring the missed focus, non-standard exposure and off-kilter framing that came to define his landmark book, The Americans (1958/59).

In debates about the most influential photographic publications of the twentieth century, Frank’s book regularly vies for top spot with a publication that is arguably even more indebted to Brodovitch’s Ballet. William Klein, a New Yorker who had been living Paris, returned home in 1954 at the invitation of Alexander Liberman, art director of Vogue (USA). Like Brodovitch, Liberman was a Russian émigré saturated in the arts. Klein was an ambitious abstract artist, moving between canvas and the darkroom, but Liberman was excited by his graphic energy and was convinced it would suit Vogue. Klein accepted on the proviso that the magazine paid for the materials he needed to shoot on the streets of New York in his spare time. While he had enormous respect for Liberman, Klein was impressed by Brodovitch’s constant reinvention of the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, and managed to get hold of a copy of Ballet.[iv] It confirmed his own photographic approach, which was similarly experimental, unpredictable, and indifferent to established good taste. Moreover, from the start Klein envisioned a book, and like Brodovitch he wanted to do it all himself, from the gritty photography and full-bleed layouts, to the writing, design and cover. Like Ballet, Klein’s Life Is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels missed out initially on a US audience, since no publisher there would issue a book so wild and uncompromising. It appeared in Europe in 1956, the same year a tragic house fire destroyed Brodovitch’s remaining copies of Ballet, along with most of his original negatives from the project.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, the significance of printed matter of all kinds began to be reappraised by scholars and critics. New histories of photography recognized the centrality of the book form to the graphic and artistic development of the medium. In this context, the reputation of Ballet began to soar, and the scarce copies of the book that were on the open market found their way into the hands of collectors and institutions. Nobody knows for sure how many copies were printed in 1945, although the consensus seems to be that it was less than five hundred.[v]

In 2001, Ballet was included in The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, an early anthology that attempted to establish a canon.[vi] The following year, there was much excitement when Kerry William Purcell’s monographic study of Brodovitch featured reproductions of all Ballet’s page spreads, albeit at reduced scale.[vii]Then in 2011, Ballet appeared in the innovative Books on Books series published by Errata Editions, again reproducing every spread.[viii] Although it is still talked about far more than seen, Ballet is now recognized as a landmark, and a beacon of what a photographic publication can be when all elements come together to produce a unified whole. Far ahead of its time, it was a boundary-pushing experiment that took nothing for granted.

[i] Alexey Brodovitch, Ballet, New York: J.J. Augustin, 1945

[ii] Brodovitch and Diaghilev were part of the Union of Russian Artists in Paris.

[iii] Ninth Ballet Theatre Annual. New York: Charles Payne, 1949. Design by Alexey Brodovitch, photographs by Richard Avedon.

[iv] In my discussions with William Klein, conducted between 2012 and 2022, Brodovitch came up often. See David Campany ‘Insider/Outsider’ in William Klein: YES, London: Thames & Hudson, 2022.

[v] As I write, the German publisher Steidl is embarking on a facsimile edition.

[vi] Andrew Roth, ed., The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. New York: PPP Editions in association with Roth Horowitz LCC, 2001. The entry on Brodovitch’s Ballet was written by Vince Aletti.

[vii] Kerry William Purcell, Alexey Brodovitch, London: Phaidon, 2002.

[viii] Alexey Brodovitch, Ballet, New York: Errata Editions, 2011.