JERRY SCHATZBERG

[128]

— In 1962 Alex Liberman, the artistic director of Vogue, asked me to do a series in which he wanted to reflect different shapes, different than what we normally see the model doing. He wanted this because the collections from Paris were of different shapes.

I used to spend a lot of time at the Palladium on Broadway, watching the real people dance the Cha Cha Cha and although their clothes were not what you would find in Vogue, I thought their movements were as elegant as anything I had ever seen. So I hired two dancers from West Side Story and in my studio I had them dance, and when I liked a movement, I would have the model copy it. In order to make it appropriate for Vogue I would just give them a little extra to do like ….holding a glass of wine, holding a compact, managing a cat or dog and the accompanying photos were the result. Whenever I look at them I can hear the music and feel their movements.

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Jerry Schatzberg was born in 1927 in Bronx, New York. Over the past three decades Schatzberg has excelled in both the realms of photography and filmmaking. Published in Vogue, McCall’s, Esquire, Glamour, and Life in the 1960s. Schatzberg captured intimate portraits of the generations most notable artists, celebrities and thinkers (from Bob Dylan to Robert Rauschenberg), and he pushed on in the 1970s to the medium of film and participated in the renaissance of American cinema, directing films such as: PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD, THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK, and SCARECROW. His films mark a significant time in the history of film when the importance of solid and introspective narrative proved paramount. WOMEN THEN, a collection of Schatzberg’s rarely seen black-and-white photographs, taken of women in the 1950s and 1960s, was published by Rizzoli in 2010.