George Hoyningen-Huene took this well-known image, Divers, not on the French riviera, because it appears, however on the roof of the Vogue studio on the Champs-Élysées. The picture initially appeared in {a magazine} unfold headlined “Fashionable Mariners Put Out to Sea”. Its grand make-believe was attribute of Hoyningen-Huene, good friend and confidant to Coco Chanel, and a fixture within the French avant garde between the wars.
There was hypothesis in regards to the identification of the 2 fashions within the shot. It was lengthy thought that the person on the “diving board” was Horst P Horst, the mannequin who grew to become Hoyningen-Huene’s lover and finally supplanted him because the star photographer of French Vogue’s golden age. Current analysis has proven, nonetheless, that the image was taken a few months earlier than the pair met. There’s extra certainty in regards to the girl beside him, considered Lee Miller, one other protege of Hoyningen-Huene, then simply embarking on her profession as an artist.
As a result of he was principally a industrial photographer, Hoyningen-Huene’s work has tended to be neglected beside these of his contemporaries and buddies Man Ray, Berenice Abbott and André Kertész, with whom he exhibited on the Premier Salon Indépendant de la Photographie Moderne in 1928. Greater than half a century after his demise in 1968, nonetheless, there may be rising curiosity not solely in his photographs but additionally in his life in Paris, and subsequently in Hollywood, the place he befriended Ava Gardner and Greta Garbo (he preferred the thought of being trusted to take Garbo’s passport pictures). Divers options in a brand new retrospective ebook of his photographs, which additionally recounts his childhood because the son of an Estonian nobleman who fled the Russian revolution, to develop into a sergeant within the British military within the first world conflict. Reportedly, inevitably, a Netflix drama in regards to the photographer’s life is within the works.
