1. Louise Dahl-Wolfe is known primarily for her work for Harper's Bazaar, in association with fashion editor Diana Vreeland.
26 Facts About Louise Dahl-Wolfe
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe took life drawing, anatomy, figure composition courses and other subjects over the next six years.
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In 1921, Louise Dahl-Wolfe met with photographer Anne Brigman, who inspired her to take up photography.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe's first dark-room enlarger was a makeshift one she built herself, which used a tin can, an apple crate, and a part of a Ghirardelli chocolate box for a reflector.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe studied design, decoration and architecture at Columbia University, New York in 1923.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe shared Wolfe's interest in sculptural form and from the 1920s, her photographs demonstrate a concern with architecture, antiquity and negative space.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe's first published photograph, known as Tennessee Mountain Woman, was published in November 1933 under the title The Smoky Mountaineer in Vanity Fair.
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From 1933 to 1960, Louise Dahl-Wolfe operated a New York City photographic studio on the corner of 6th Avenue and 57th.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe produced portrait and fashion photographs totaling 86 covers, 600 color pages and countless black-and-white shots.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe is known for her role in the discovery of a teenage Lauren Bacall whom she photographed for the March 1943 cover of Harper's Bazaar.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe was a great influence on photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.
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From 1958 until her retirement in 1960, Louise Dahl-Wolfe worked as a freelance photographer for Vogue, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe died in New Jersey of pneumonia in 1989.
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The full archive of Louise Dahl-Wolfe's work is located at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which manages the copyright of her work.
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In 1999, her work was the subject of a documentary film entitled Louise Dahl-Wolfe: Painting with Light.
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The film featured the only surviving modern footage of Louise Dahl-Wolfe, including extensive interviews.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe was most widely known for her work with Harper's Bazaar.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe was considered a pioneer of the 'female gaze' in the fashion industry and credited for creating a new image of strong, independent American women during World War II.
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From 1943, Louise Dahl-Wolfe introduced the "New American Look" to fashion photography, which Vicki Goldberg describes as "all clean hair, glowing skin and a figure both lithe and strong".
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe was known for taking photographs outdoors, with natural light in distant locations from South America to Africa in what became known as "environmental" fashion photography.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe's photographs brought a new naturalism to fashion photography which had previously been dominated by a stiff and haughty "European" or "Germanic" studio style.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe described it as "that heavy, heavy look, with everybody looking very clumsy".
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe's models appear to pose candidly, almost as if Dahl-Wolfe had just walked in on them.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe innovatively used color in photography and mainly concerned with the qualities of natural lighting, composition, and balance.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe dedicated to promoting patriotism in fashion in the World War II era.
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Louise Dahl-Wolfe is styling chicly in an elegant navy suit, white blouse, black gloves, a cloche hat with long waves in her hair and holding a red bag with matching lipstick.