KARL BISSINGER (1914–2008)

Karl Bissinger, whose lustrous black-and-white portraits created a memorable gallery of the leading figures on the postwar American arts scene, died Wednesday at his home in Manhattan, reports the New York Times. He was ninety-four. As a photographer for magazines like Flair, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Town & Country, Bissinger created indelible images of the new generation of writers, actors, dancers, and free spirits who were reshaping American culture after World War II. Bissinger studied art at the Cincinnati Art Museum while in high school. He then moved to Manhattan and enrolled in the Art Students League, where he studied painting. After decorating windows for Lord & Taylor in the 1940s, he found work as a stylist for the Condé Nast photographic studios, where he worked with, and befriended, several of the staff photographers, including Irving Penn, George Hoyningen-Huene, John Rawlings, and Cecil Beaton. Richard Avedon, one of several friends with whom Bissinger shared a cottage on Fire Island, encouraged him to take his own pictures, lending him cameras and his studio for his first test photographs. His first subjects were Avedon’s wife, Doe, and the writer James Baldwin. Bissinger went on to photograph an absurdly youthful Truman Capote on the set of a Jean Cocteau film in Paris, a skinny Marlon Brando leaning languidly in front of a round window in a Manhattan sublet, and Paul Bowles sitting cross-legged against the tiled walls of a cafe in Marrakesh. “These were true environmental portraits,” said Catherine Johnson, editor of a collection of Bissinger’s work, titled The Luminous Years: Portraits at Midcentury. “These people did not have publicists or handlers. They came in their own clothes, without makeup. He often said that environment is a psychological mirror.”