Philippe Halsman was a brilliant photographer. Not only did he take some amazing portraits of celebrities and politicians, he got many of them to jump.
Yep, the famous and powerful of the 1950’s had their photo taken while jumping. And they all look fantastic!
The National Portrait Gallery has a great retrospective on Halsman. Here’s their explanation of how the jump pictures came about:
In 1950, NBC asked Halsman to photograph many of its popular comedians. Milton Berle, Ed Wynn, Sid Caesar, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, and many others came to Halsman's studio, where they performed while he captured their antics on film. A single session could generate two or three hundred pictures. When Halsman compared these comic images to more traditional portraits, he found that comedians often jumped and always stayed in character. Desperation (and good humor) finally drove him to ask others to jump for his camera when the Ford Motor Company commissioned him to make an official family photograph in honor of the company's fiftieth anniversary. Halsman spent a long, tiring session with nine edgy adults and eleven restless children. Afterward, Halsman's irrepressible humor inspired him to ask matriarch Mrs. Edsel Ford, "May I take a picture of you jumping?'" The astonished Mrs. Ford replied, "You want me to jump with my high heels?" Next, her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Henry Ford II, requested a turn. The "jump" pictures had surprising charm, and over the next six years, Halsman asked many clients to jump for him. Van Cliburn, Edward R. Murrow, and Herbert Hoover declined Halsman's invitation, but most people realized they had nothing to lose. (Some gained considerably, like the suddenly buoyant and likable Vice President Richard Nixon, who jumped for Halsman in the White House.) Halsman claimed the jumps revealed character that was otherwise hidden. "When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears."
Marilyn
I’m planning to jump next time someone comes at me with a camera.
See more here
Via The Photography Post
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