Alexey Cheslavovich Brodovitch was born into a wealthy family in Russia, in 1898.
He began his career as a designer in Paris in the 1920s before revolutionizing fashion photography and magazine publishing in America. In a parallel career, he taught and mentored a number of leading fashion photographers. Beginning his American life as a teacher at the Philadelphia College of Art in 1930, he taught his “Design Laboratory” workshops into the 1950s. Designed as an “experimental laboratory,” the workshop emphasized innovative learning from “accidents” and “mistakes” as a way of working through practical design problems. Questions such as “Could this line be better? Could it be like, say, Cocteau?” Brodovitch encouraged his students to take a real-world, interactive approach to design that explored divergent and often contradictory processes. His courses formed the foundation for future design education, and as such, his legacy has been passed on to future generations of designers and photographers.
During this same period, Brodovitch emerged as a true design icon through his role as art director of Harper’s Bazaar, a position he held from 1934 to 1958. Indeed, Brodovitch’s modernist sense of design revolutionized the fashion magazine format and introduced techniques that would become the blueprint for subsequent publications. As Irving Penn put it, “All designers, all photographers, all art directors, whether they know it or not, are students of Alexey Brodovitch. Pioneering the use of text and images in two-page layouts, the use of color photography, cropped and off-center images, and the extensive use of white space, his radical approach became an industry standard. In fact, as art director at Harper’s, Brodovitch was directly responsible for importing European modernism into mainstream American publications, giving fashion assignments to prominent avant-gardists such as Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Raoul Dufy, Marc Chagall, and A.M. Cassandre.
Brodovitch is also credited with freeing the fashion model from the studio, and his decision to shoot outdoors and photograph models engaged in ordinary activities influenced a number of photographic trends, from the “American” look of the 1930s to the “action shots” of the 1950s. Borrowing from photojournalism, he promoted the “action shot,” using real locations and positioning modern American women in their lived environments. Through his work in the magazine industry, he discovered and mentored a number of photographers who would go on to shape the direction of photographic history, including Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, and Lisette Model. Outside of fashion photography, his grainy, high-contrast action shots of ballet performances were early precursors of the snapshot aesthetic that came to dominate professional photography in the second half of the 20th century.
Having honed his craft as a graphic and theatrical designer for Sergei Diaghilev’s groundbreaking Ballet Russes in the 1920s, Brodovitch brought the audacity and spontaneity associated with that famous ensemble of performers, composers, and artists to the (comparatively) conservative format of the American fashion magazine.
Dedicated to exploring the aesthetic relationship between text and image, Brodovitch revolutionized the world of typographic design and tonal composition with his “white space” technique, in which the printed word takes on an aesthetic character equal to that of the photographic image.
Brodovitch saw the “duel-page spread” as analogous to the fluidity of a musical composition. Refusing to stick to a tried-and-true formula, Brodovitch experimented with techniques in which photography and typography became one (much like dance partners).
