Alexey Brodovitch - Harper's Bazaar

Alexey Brodovitch (also Brodovich; Russian: Алексей Бродович; 1898 –April 15, 1971) was a Russian-born photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his art direction of fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar from 1938 to 1958.
During the Russian Civil War, Brodovitch served with the White Army. In Odessa, he was badly wounded and was hospitalized for a time in Kislovodsk, in the Caucasus. In 1918, the town was surrounded by the Bolsheviks, forcing Brodovitch into exile.
He then had to flee the country when the communists took over.
Upon arriving in Paris, Brodovitch wanted to be a painter. A Russian émigré in Paris, Brodovitch found himself poor and having to work for the first time in his life. He took a job painting houses, while his wife Nina worked as a seamstress. They lived in a cheap, small apartment in the area of Montparnasse, among other Russian artists who had settled in Paris at the end of the 19th Century. This group of artists, including Archipenko, Chagall, and Nathan Altman, would meet at the inexpensive Académie Vassilieff, which offered painting and sculpting classes without an instructor. His connections with these young Russian artists led to more artistic work as a painter of backdrops for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
On nights and weekends away from the Ballets Russes, Brodovitch began sketching designs for textiles, china, and jewelry. By the time his work for the ballet had finished, he had already compiled an extensive portfolio of these side projects and was selling his designs to fashionable shops. He worked part-time doing layouts for Cahiers d'Art, an important art journal, and Arts et Métiers Graphiques, an influential design magazine. While working on layouts, Brodovitch was responsible for fitting together type, photographs, and illustrations on the pages of the magazines. He had the rare opportunity of having influence over the look of the magazine as there was no art director.

He gained public recognition for his work in the commercial arts by winning first prize in a poster competition for an artists' soiree called Le Bal Banal on March 24, 1924. The poster was exhibited on walls all over Montparnasse along with a drawing by Picasso, who took second place.
By the age of 32, Brodovitch had dabbled in producing posters, china, jewelry, textiles, advertisements, and paintings.
In September 1930, Brodovitch moved to Philadelphia.
Brodovitch's task was to bring American advertising design up to the level of Europe's, which was thought to have a far more modern spirit. Before his arrival, advertising students were simply copying the magazine styles of N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle. While still living in Paris, Brodovitch was offered a job by John Story Jenks, the father of a young girl Brodovitch had shown around the arts scene in Paris. Jenks, a trustee of the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (currently the University of the Arts), was overwhelmed by Brodovitch's talents and asked him to head the school's Advertising Design Department. When not in the classroom, Brodovitch would take the class on outings around Philadelphia to see factories, laboratories, shopping centers, housing projects, dumps, and the zoo.
Among the photographers who attended his classes were Diane Arbus, Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Lisette Model, and Gary Winogrand.

In spring of 1934, the Art Directors Club of New York asked Brodovitch to design their 13th Annual Art Directors Exhibition at the Rockefeller Center, New York. It was there that Carmel Snow, the recently appointed editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar, saw Brodovitch's work for the first time. She knew right away that Brodovitch would be the one to transform the magazine into a real revival of Vogue, where she had started her career.
In terms of photography, Brodovitch had a distinct feel for what the magazine needed. He favored on-location fashion photography as opposed to the studio shots normally used in other fashion publications. He urged his photographers to look for jarring juxtapositions in their images. One such spread features a woman in a full-length Dior gown posed between two circus elephants.

Pure photography refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, renouncing the use of manipulation.