David Attie

David Attie was an American commercial and fine art photographer, who was widely published in magazines and books from the late 1950s until his passing in the 1980s, and whose work has been rediscovered and revived with the 2015 publication of his Truman Capote collaboration "Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With The Lost Photographs of David Attie."[1] While he worked in a wide range of styles, creating perhaps the best-known portraits of playwright Lorraine Hansberry[2] and illustrating everything from novels to album covers to the work of Capote, Attie was best known for multiple imagery—photo montages made by sandwiching negatives together—and also for a style of portraiture in which the subjects themselves controlled the exposure.

Early life and education

Attie grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and graduated from Erasmus Hall High School, the same alma mater as Bobby Fischer, whom Attie later photographed. He briefly attended the Kansas City Art Institute and Cooper Union.

During his Army service, Attie painted pinup-style portraits on the noses of combat planes; two of these are singled out as "gems" of the "nose-art" genre in Edward Young's book on the subject, B-24 Liberator Units of the CBI.[3][4] Attie then worked as a commercial illustrator, drawing Med Men-era advertisements as well as the covers of magazines and "pulp" novels,[5] until he decided to pursue photography.

Photographic career

Attie began his photographic career as a student and protege of influential Harper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, who had similarly mentored the careers of Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Attie's close friend (and Brodovitch classmate) Hiro.

Brodovitch gave Attie his first professional assignment, which was to create a series of photo montages to illustrate Truman Capote's newest work, Breakfast at Tiffany's, for Harper's in 1958. But while Attie completed the montages, Capote began to clash with the publisher of Harper's, the Hearst Corporation, over the tart language and subject matter of his novella. Alice Morris, the magazine's literary editor, later recounted that Capote agreed to make the changes Hearst wanted "partly because I showed him the layouts... six pages with beautiful, atmospheric photographs."[6] But in the end, Hearst decided that Harper's could not run Breakfast at Tiffany's anyway; its language and subject matter were still deemed "not suitable," and there was concern that Tiffany's, a major advertiser, would react negatively.[7][8] By his own account, when Capote resold the novella to Esquire, he specified that he "would not be interested if [Esquire] did not use Attie's [original series of] photographs." He wrote to Esquire fiction editor Rust Hills, "I'm very happy that you are using his pictures, as I think they are excellent." But to Capote's disappointment, Esquire used just one full-page image of Attie's (though another was later used as the cover of at least one paperback edition of the novella).[9]

Attie's work on the project nonetheless launched his career, gaining him further assignments from both Harper's and Brodovitch. He also went on to shoot portraits of Capote and to illustrate his essay "Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir" for Holiday Magazine (later published as a book, A House on the Heights, Little Bookroom, 2002 and included in various anthologies).[10] Some of Attie's unused Breakfast at Tiffany's montages were later modified and used to illustrate Bill Manville's 1960 memoir Saloon Society, The Diary of a Year Beyond Aspirin, which was also designed by Brodovitch, and is still in print with its original photos and layout in a kindle edition.[11][12]

From that point forward, Attie’s commercial work was prolific and wide-ranging – including frequent covers and spreads for Vogue, Time, Newsweek, Playboy, and Harper’s; portraits of everyone from Bobby Fischer to Leonard Bernstein to Ralph Ellison and The Band; and his own books of photographs, 1977's Russian Self-Portraits,[13] and 1981's Portrait: Theory (together with Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe and others).[14] Attie also did the photos for a 1964 pinup book of Jayne Mansfield called "Jayne Mansfield for President," on which he declined to put his name.[15] As part of the promotion for Russian Self-Portraits, Attie appeared on a March, 1978 episode of the game show To Tell The Truth.

Attie's work is in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery[16] and continues to be exhibited and published and seen. As recently as 2014, New York Magazine published some of his previously-unseen portraits of Capote from 1958,[17] as well as a 1959 portrait of pioneering Brill Building songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, which was originally shot for Vogue Magazine.[18] A selection of his celebrity portraits has become available through the pop-culture-oriented fine art gallery Rock Paper Photo,[19] and his work is also available through Getty Images.[20] One of his Hansberry portraits appears in Netflix's acclaimed 2015 Nina Simone documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?.

In November, 2015, The Little Bookroom published a coffee-table book of Attie's portraits of Truman Capote and his street photography taken in connection with Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir, entitled "Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With The Lost Photographs of David Attie."[21] The book was well-reviewed in The New York Times [22][23] and many other publications in America and Europe; The Independent named it one of the eight best art books of 2015 and wrote "when it comes to illustrated works, [this] one relatively slim volume stands out... a real gem of a find.”[24] Its publication and reception have helped to bring renewed attention to Attie's work.

References

  1. ↑ "Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With The Lost Photographs of David Attie". Retrieved 15 September 2015.
  2. ↑ "Lorraine Hansberry portrait". 1hlt.org. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  3. ↑ Young, Edward M., B-24 Liberator Units of the CBI, 2011, Osprey Publishing: p86 and p95.
  4. ↑ "Stripped For Action". Retrieved 4 January 2015.
  5. ↑ "David Attie pulp covers". Retrieved 29 January 2015.
  6. ↑ Clarke, Gerald, Capote: A Biography, 1988, Simon & Schuster: p308.
  7. ↑ Plimpton, George, editor, Truman Capote, 1997, Doubleday: p162-163.
  8. ↑ Wise, Kelly, editor, Portrait: Theory, 1981, Lustrum Press: p7.
  9. ↑ "Truman Capote's Papers". Retrieved 9 September 2015.
  10. ↑ Christopher Bonanos (30 September 2014). "On His 90th Birthday, Unseen Truman Capote -- Vulture". Vulture. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  11. ↑ Manville, Bill, Saloon Society, 1960, Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
  12. ↑ "Saloon Society". Holden Books. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  13. ↑ Attie, David, Russian Self-Portraits, 1977, Harper and Row.
  14. ↑ Wise, Kelly, editor, Portrait: Theory, 1981, Lustrum Press.
  15. ↑ "Jayne Mansfield for President". Retrieved 11 September 2015.
  16. ↑ "National Portrait Gallery Archive". Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  17. ↑ Christopher Bonanos (30 September 2014). "On His 90th Birthday, Unseen Truman Capote -- Vulture". Vulture. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  18. ↑ Rebecca Milzoff (25 March 2014). "Mike Stoller On The Musical Universe Of The Brill Building -- Vulture". Vulture. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  19. ↑ "David Attie Rock Paper Photo collection". Retrieved 11 February 2015.
  20. ↑ "David Attie Getty Images collection". Retrieved 5 February 2016.
  21. ↑ "Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With The Lost Photographs of David Attie". Retrieved 15 September 2015.
  22. ↑ "Stories of Brooklyn, From Gowanus to the Heights". Retrieved 5 February 2016.
  23. ↑ "Patti Smith, Paul Theroux and Others on Places Near and Far". Retrieved 5 February 2016.
  24. ↑ "Christmas 2015: The 8 best books in art". Retrieved 8 February 2016.
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