Photo by Lilo Raymond (1922–2009), Short Tulips, 1989. As a photograph , it appears in several collections both public and private, ©️ Lilo Raymond. #photography #artphotography #womanphotographer #womenphotographers #blackandwhitephotography

A quote from Lilo Raymond: “Photography for me is a way of avoiding grown-ups, boredom and going to the laundromat. It allows me to live in another world, intensified and of my own finding. I assume the right to stare long and hard, to be blunt, loving and unselfconscious. I attempt to find a kind of poetry that eludes me in other more sober activities. It has become a continuous search with no shining end in sight except to go on trying.”

From Beth E. Wilson, “Portfolio: Lilo Raymond,” Chronogram, September 25, 2008: “Lilo Raymond’s photographs relentlessly pare away the inessential, presenting simple subjects—a neatly made bed, a vase of flowers by a window, the carved stone face of an angel from a funeral monument—enveloped in a rich veil of natural light.

Born in 1922, in Frankfurt, Germany, Raymond fled the Nazi regime when she was 16, settling in New York, where she became part of the bohemian Greenwich Village art scene, taking various jobs as an artist’s model, a waitress, and even a tennis pro. She came to find her poetic vision only later in life, seriously taking up photography only in her late 30s, when she studied with the legendary photographer and fine art printer David Vestal at the Photo League. She began exhibiting her work at various galleries in the ’70s, eventually moving to the Hudson Valley.”

Your photography history post for today: by Lillian Bassman (1917-2012), “Night Bloom, Olga Pantushenkova, hat by Christian Lacroix Haute Couture, Paris,” gelatin silver print, published in The New York Times Magazine, 31 March 1996. #photography #photographyhistory #fashionphotography #darkroom #womanphotographer #womenphotographers

Excerpts from her obituary in The Guardian, written by Veronica Horwell, 16 Feb 2012: ‘Lillian Bassman wandered into fashion photography in pursuit of the happiness of constant creation. Her absorption in her work showed in every picture she took, or rather in every image she printed, for Bassman… was an exuberant experimenter in the darkroom. "In there, I felt a sense of being able to say something I wanted to say," she remarked. Her pictures are closer to those of the illustrators who shared the glossy pages of fashion magazines with photographers until the 1950s than to contemporaries such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Avedon knew what Bassman was up to though, saying that she made "visible that heartbreaking invisible place between the appearance and the disappearance of things".

Bassman was a bohemian from her childhood in Brooklyn and Greenwich Village, New York, onwards. She was the daughter of Ukrainian emigres who had courted in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum. Bassman admired the old masters, too, and was inspired by El Greco's near-monochrome, elongated portraits. Her early intention was to be a dancer, and she kept her eye for the grace in female movement that, she said, "usually passes unnoticed in everyday life".’

Exhibition celebrates pioneering #FinnishPhotographer Claire Aho: https://zorz.it/YTmjG

#PesalaBandara #exhibition #HundredHeroines #UK #ColourMeModern #ClaireAho #FemalePhotographer #finnish #culture #WomanPhotographer