If any artist’s life could be said to have been a work of art, it would be that of Paul Himmel. Born a true Bohemian, he rose from the humble origins of his Eastern European émigré parents to the ranks of New York’s elite fashion photographers in the 1950s. Married to Lillian Bassman, one of the era’s most stylized and captivating figures of fashion photography, he enjoyed a remarkable career as a commercial photographer, but he never abandoned his aesthetic researches, ever striving to capture the essence of movement on film, a theme that pervades his work from his earliest pictures.

From 1931 until 1969 (when, entirely disillusioned with the photographic world, he closed his studio for good and became a psychotherapist), he photographed subjects and scenes as varied as the wondrous range of his life experiences. Born in 1914 to Ukrainian émigrés and leftist intellectuals in New Haven, Connecticut, he moved with his parents to Coney Island in 1922 where they ran a vegetarian restaurant. It was there that he began photographing the freak shows of Coney Island and the streets of New York City. In 1939 he would travel across the United States producing his first major body of work to meet critical success, “Along the Pan-American Highway,” exhibited for the first time in 1940 at the West Side YMCA on 63rd St.

Together with other young budding photographers like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, Himmel attended the “Design Laboratory” lectures on “Graphic Journalism” delivered by Alexey Brodovitch, who would say that of all his protégés, Himmel “was the one who best understood what I meant about movement.”

By 1954 when he published his now classic book of photographs, Ballet in Action, famed choreographer and founder of the New York City Ballet, George Balanchine, would write of Himmel’s photographs in the introduction that he had achieved the “almost impossible” task of creating “stills that look like movement….” In Himmel’s photographs of the New York City Ballet, he wrote, “the sense and the sequence of movement are present.”

The following year, Himmel’s photographs were included in the groundbreaking exhibition, “The Family of Man,” organized by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art. So taken was Steichen with Himmel’s portrait of a Botticellian young woman that it was used on the invitation to the immense and now historic show.

Reflecting on his decision to give up photography in 1969, Paul Himmel told an interviewer for New York that “no one would publish the ‘art stuff’… I was interested,” Himmel said, “in beauty, not fashion.”

“Life in Motion” features photographs reflecting the wide range of subjects and techniques embraced by Himmel in the course of his career.

His circus pictures pay homage to his earliest work as a young artist: “I was fascinated by the freak shows on Coney Island,” said Himmel in 1999. “I remember there was an elephant boy and an act with half-man, half-woman performer that was one of the first things I photographed.”

Images of street life in New York City are a document of the city as only Paul Himmel could see it. A New Yorker through and through, he was an artistic documentarian and member of that generation who witnessed the epochal events of the twentieth-century. At once gritty and ethereal, these pictures capture both the urbane and humane sides of life in New York during the 1950s.

The ballet photographs included in the show represent perhaps a culmination of his most intense and sophisticated work: inspired by Brodovitch’s book on ballet published nine years earlier, these pictures are a “distillation of the very essence of dance,” as one critic put it.

The nudes are the crowning gem of the show: his sublime approach to the human body through his innovative printing techniques produced otherworldly figures, some of the most moving images created by any photographer of his generation.