Keith de Lellis Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s vintage black and white fashion photographs from her early years (1938-1942) at Harper’s Bazaar Magazine.

In 1936, Louise Dahl-Wolfe began a career in fashion and portrait photography and for three decades was one of the leading and most influential photographers in her field.  As staff photographer at Harper’s Bazaar, she worked alongside such creative geniuses as Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland and art director Alexey Brodovitch, producing a magazine that was vibrant and exciting for its literary and fashion content, as well as its photography and design.

She arrived on the scene at a crucial moment when the fashion shoot was being liberated from the confines of the studio to “on location” work and the role of women was shifting from homemaker to independent career woman.  Fashion photography, before Dahl-Wolfe, had been primarily the domain of men.  She brought a fresh new vision to the pages of Harper’s Bazaar—informal, intimate and undeniably American.

Dahl-Wolfe’s pictures expressed the ideals of the modern woman:free spirited, confident, on the move and both comfortably and fashionably dressed. ‘An “ERAer” from way back’ admitted Dahl-Wolfe, she was telling a personal story, as well as that of many American women working during the war years.

Dahl-Wolfe took the fashion photograph out of the studio—she pioneered the natural look—using natural light.  She traveled to Cuba, Miami, Santa Fe, Bermuda and other exciting places to photograph her models, elegantly and casually dressed, against authentic backgrounds.  Her photographs made women look beautiful and chic whether they were “on the town” or relaxing at the beach.

Her glamorous portraits of Hollywood actresses, whose stars were on the rise, were featured often in Harper’s Bazaar.  Bette Davis, Carole Lombard and Lana Turner, to name a few, modeled clothing and promoted their careers.  Lauren Bacall was famously discovered by film director Howard Hawks from a Louise Dahl-Wolfe photograph on the cover of the magazine.

Born Louise Dahl in San Francisco in 1895, the daughter of an engineer, she aspired to be an artist at an early age.  She credits her education at The San Francisco Institute of Art—where she studied anatomy, figure composition and life drawing—as important elements in her training as a fashion photographer. In 1933 her powerful portraits of Tennessee mountain women published in Vanity Fair attracted considerable attention. Beaumont Newhall, Museum of Modern Art Curator, included her photographs in his 1937 “History of Photography” exhibition.

The following is a quote from the catalog of the 1987 Louise Dahl-Wolfe retrospective at the National Museum of Women’s Art in Washington: “…more than any other fashion photographer of the 1940’s, she replaced the glamorous goddess in the gilded cage with an approachable, active woman with a sense of self…the woman coping so capably with wartime exigencies, participating in sports or traveling to foreign locations always elegantly attired and comfortably well-off…she was both forthright and feminine, like Dahl-Wolfe herself.”