1. Baron Adolf De Meyer - Photography

BARON ADOLF DE MEYER (Paris 1868 – Los Angeles 1949)

Born in Paris in 1868, to a German father and a Scottish mother. Educated in Dresden, Saxony. In 1885 he was in London, where he came into contact with the circle of the Prince of Wales, Edward, who would become King Edward VII. He met the beautiful and elegant Olga Alberta Caracciolo dei Duchi di Castelluccio, a highly cultured and refined woman, fencing champion and muse to many painters, including Boldini and Sargent, and probably Edward’s illegitimate daughter. In 1899 he married her, despite being homosexual and Olga bisexual. Olga provided him with access to high society and pushed him to pursue photography professionally.

De Meyer entered an important Jewish cultural circle and became a Baron thanks to Edward VII. In 1898 he joined the Linked Ring Brotherhood (a club of Pictorialist photographers in the UK that also included Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Clarence White), which aimed to affirm photography’s artistic status in connection with Impressionist painting. They gave rise to the Photo-Secession, also known as Pictorialism.

De Meyer’s characteristics—like those of all Pictorialists—include soft focus and the use of blur (“flou”), achieved by placing silk gauze over the lens to diffuse the light, or even by spitting on the lenses, or moving the tripod. Pictorialist photography almost looks like painting. Many of De Meyer’s photographs were also made with a poetic backlight to highlight the profiles of the women and their garments. The aim was to counter the idea of photography as a cold mirror of reality and to emphasize its expressive possibilities as in art.

Among his tricks: he would wet the floor with water to create reflections, and he would place a very soft light inside the model’s dress to illuminate her face.

He had an obsessive attention to detail—clothes, interiors, furnishings. Everything had to be perfect, resulting in images of ethereal, unreachable women in a dreamy atmosphere, reflecting a world of luxury and comfort, in a Pictorialist key, as fashion photography demanded at the time. His behavior was marked by excesses and originality. His photos were no longer simple documentation of what a garment looked like, but a tool capable of creating an atmosphere, a mood.

He was invited to New York by Alfred Stieglitz (photographer and promoter of European art in the USA), who had created an “American Secession.” In the small 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York, he exhibited his work from 1908 to 1912, later published in the art-and-photography magazine Camera Work.

In 1910 Edward VII died, who had supported the family financially. But the Baron’s lifestyle did not change. He traveled constantly between Paris, Constantinople, and Venice, where he met Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario who organized the Ballets Russes in Paris—modern and sensual dance performances involving many of the most interesting artists in Paris. Diaghilev asked him to photograph in 1912 the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky for the performance L’après-midi d’un faune, a very erotic show. The work was financed by Paul Iribe, a French designer, costume designer, set designer, illustrator, and journalist who had designed models for Paul Poiret and later became Coco Chanel’s partner.

In 1913 (on the eve of World War I) he was expelled from France because of his German origins and moved to New York, where he met the young Condé Montrose Nast, an entrepreneur who had bought Vogue in 1909, then a weekly gazette read by well-off New Yorkers, with a circulation of only 14,000 copies. Nast radically changed its content to create a biweekly magazine aimed at American women attentive to fashion, who took inspiration for their style from Parisian couture houses.

Four years later he bought two other magazines: Dress and the British Vanity Fair, combining them and launching the new Vanity Fair in January 1914, devoted to “parties, art, sport, theater, humor, and so on.” (In 1936 the group was acquired by the Newhouse family, which still owns it today.)

For Vogue, the goal was to create a magazine that not only showed clothes but would become a reference point for American snobbery—and the two Europeans, with their elegance and social sophistication, were perfect. De Meyer was hired on a contract of $110 a week. The two also opened an exotic-themed venue, the Persian Garden, where they gave beauty lessons. The Baron also worked as an interior designer, decorator, and stylist.

He worked at Vogue until 1922, then, attracted by high pay, moved to Harper’s Bazaar in Paris, which had been purchased in 1904 by William Randolph Hearst, another entrepreneur (who later inspired Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane).

In 1927 he began working for Elizabeth Arden advertising, which used his photos for many years. But in 1934 his contract with Hearst ended because his photographs began to look dated—perhaps due to the opinion of Carmel Snow, the powerful Bazaar editor.

In 1925 Paul Strand and Edward Weston launched a new, more purist approach to photography: sharp, in-focus, unmanipulated images, with crisp light. This was Modernism, Straight Photography.

De Meyer tried to return to Condé Nast, but was not accepted and ended up making portraits of millionaires in Hollywood. Stieglitz, now dedicated to modernist photography, encouraged him and showed him great esteem.