The Sylphs (Les Sylphides)

Alexey Brodovitch, the pioneering art director of Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958, possessed an elegant, spare, and innovative design sensibility governed by intuition rather than grids and rules. This improvisational approach informed his only extended body of photographs, Ballet, which was published as a book in 1945. Shooting from the wings with a 35 mm camera, Brodovitch developed a visual style that broke with the conventions of both fine art photography and photojournalism. Rather than freeze the dancer’s movements with a flash, Brodovitch used only the available stage lighting. The blurs, lens flare, grain, and contrast of the resulting images echo in their spontaneity and vitality the dancers’ own leaps and dives. Printed to the edges, Brodovitch’s book heightened the dynamic flow of dance as one image seamlessly gave way to the next. The raw expressivity of Brodovitch’s work influenced photographers into the 1960s, many of whom—Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus, among others—worked for him at Harper’s Bazaar.