The BBC documentary about German Jew Erwin Blumenfeld, once the highest paid photographer in the world, mentioned that he had contributed to the lavish French art magazine Verve in the 1930s , and that artist and sculptor Henri Matisse had admired his work. British fashion , portrait and war photographer and interior designer , Cecil Beaton , impressed by Blumenfeld's Verve photographs, arranged for him to do work for French Vogue , one famous shot showing model Lisa Fonssagrives balanced on the edge of the Eiffel Tower , her dress swirling out into space .
After viewing the superb BBC film, this blogger decided to dive into Little Darwin's two early copies of Verve , 1938 and 1939 , bought on Magnetic Island , to see if they contain examples of Blumenfeld's camera artistry.
Placed on a trestle table on the back verandah , the magazines were examined page by page , while an impatient Curlew mother waiting for a feed hissed to draw attention , her fast growing chicks close by , awaiting a Continental breakfast.
Alas, no Blumenfeld shots were found . However, there were many beautiful women from history , above , one being subjected to extreme violence , within the covers in tipped in lithographs and full page colour plates and examples of Matisse's paintings and sculptures.
An interesting , illustrated , article dealt with Abraham Lincoln's favourite photographer , Mathew B. Brady, whose New York studio, The Valhalla of Broadway, was the meeting place of fashionable America from 1841 to 1860.
Brady spent his fortune making a pictorial record of the Civil War and rumbled about the battlefields in a darkroom on wheels which the enemy is said to have regarded as some kind of new-fangled war machine .
Blumenfeld went to America and became famous for his fabulous Vogue and Harper's Bazaar photographs of women and fashion , dubbed the most influential photographer of the 20th Century .
