Melvin
Sokolskys Affinities
By
Martin Harrison
From the
outset, Sokolskys fashion photography was distinguished
by the rapid progression of its themes. Indeed he later believed
that the obligation he felt to invent new ideas each month (a
pressure that was partly of his own motivation) might have been
excessive, and that to have explored certain concepts for longer
periods would have been more productive for his own development.
For some of the earliest Harpers Bazaar sittings he eschewed
any props beyond an unusually textured backdrop: "I was not
interested in a clothes-horseI was celebrating the beauty
of the woman." Shortly afterward he began to explore his
atavistic fascination with spatial dislocation in series in which
he arranged the models limbs to accommodate claustrophobic
box-frames (page 137), or peered from an elevated viewpoint into
a maze-like structure constructed in the studio (page 23).
The ideas
flowed incessantly. From the genres most extreme experiments
with scale (pages 24-25), through fashion photographys most
overtly surrealist examples (pages 48-51), to highly unconventional
multi-figure compositions (pages 160-161). Perhaps the most celebrated
of all was the acclaimed "Bubble" series for the Spring
1963 Paris Collections (opening pages). These remarkable photographs
constitute a kind of finale to the fantasy era of Paris fashion,
a warm-humored tribute to inexplicable excess. Salvador Dali,
whom he met at this time, became convinced that Sokolsky could
actually make him fly. The logical outcome of the epic "Bubble"
pictures for Sokolsky was to investigate further the simulation
of flight, of weightlessness, which he did in some compelling
sequences that continue to influence fashion photographers today
(pages 21, 40-41, 115-116, 188).
Following
these magical performances, Sokolsky felt the only route open
to him was a return to simplicity. Photographed on a plain seamless
studio backdrop, movement and lighting were the key factors in
the appeal of images such as (pages 141,145). Sokolsky believed
that lighting was an excessive obsession at that time, but, inspired
by Josef von Sternbergs cinema lighting, he achieved some
subtle and innovative lighting schemes of his own. In the later
1960s he began to photograph fashion outside the studio environment,
a direction that might have been developed further, had his career
not taken a different turn. For the New York Times Magazine in
1969, he photographed (on a Polaroid camera) an extended story
with three models in which he demonstrated an increasing concern
with narrative that presaged his transition from stills to movies.
It was a timely storyin one photograph the model smokes
a jointbut it would be one of his last important contributions
to fashion photography.
After about
ten years at the top of his profession, Sokolsky found that art
directors began to ask if he was able to translate the look of
his stills into film. An experiment with a model in a tub full
of bubbles was a great success, and soon he was in great demand:
commercials, almost imperceptibly at first, began to dominate
his output. He admits to being seduced by the movie camera and
the challenge of exploring the grammar of film, and, with his
reputation in this field escalating, in 1975 moved his studio
to Los Angeles. The change did not signify the end of his involvement
in stills, but commissions thinned as he was not only increasingly
associated with film, but also removed from the main East Coast
locus of assignments. The decade of his most intense involvement
with stills was perhaps only a prelude to film, but it can also
be viewed as a period of passionate involvement, the cumulative
document of a creative spirit in a fascinating period of photographic
history.
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