News/Events

Lillian Bassman at Staley-Wise

At ninety-two, this great American fashion photographer is making the biggest and most challenging work of her career.

Whether the extravagant scale of some of the pictures in her new show is suited to images characterized by a hushed, dreamy intimacy is debatable. But as Bassman continues to reinterpret pictures made as far back as 1950, the best of these photographs convey all the energy and excitement she put into them. Many of the largest images are head shots of dark-eyed women—haughty goddesses whose ethereal glamour is exaggerated by prints that dissolve detail into powdery passages.

Read the complete review in The New Yorker.