Russian-born art director, typographic designer, teacher and photographer who moved to the USA in 1930. He was an immensely influential designer and was the artistic editor for ‘Harper‘s Bazaar‘ - a position that he held for twenty five years. This position allowed him to encourage and hire many influential photographers including Man Ray, Herbert Bayer and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Through his teaching, he created a generation of designers sympathetic to his belief in the primacy of visual freshness and immediacy. He was fascinated with photography, he made it the backbone of modern magazine design, and he fostered the development of an expressionistic, almost primal style of picture-taking that became the dominant style of photographic practice in the 1950s. Between 1935 and 1937, Brodovitch photographed several ballet companies, including the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo during their visits to New York on world tours. Although at the time he claimed the photos were only meant to be souvenirs, they evolved into something greater. The style in which Brodovitch photographed deviated from the sharp, straight photography popular at the time. According to one colleague, which sounded kind of obnoxious was, his images "spat in the face of technique and pointed out a new way in which photographers could work. I enjoy how graphic his images were and how the lines of fashion, theatrics, graphic design & photography all come together to produce such visually engaging images.
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