David Attie

David Attie was a commercial and fine art photographer, whose work was widely published in magazines and books from the late 1950s until his passing in the 1980s. While he worked in a wide range of styles, creating perhaps the best-known portraits of playwright Lorraine Hansberry^[1] and illustrating everything from novels to album covers to the work of Truman Capote, Attie became known for multiple imagery—photo montages made by sandwiching negatives together—and also for a style of portraiture in which the subjects themselves controlled the exposure.

Early life and education

Attie grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and graduated from Erasmus Hall High School, the same alma mater as Bobby Fischer, whom Attie later photographed. He briefly attended the Kansas City Art Institute and Cooper Union.

During his Army service, Attie painted pinup-style portraits on the noses of combat planes; two of these are singled out as "gems" of the "nose-art" genre in Edward Young's book on the subject, B-24 Liberator Units of the CBI.^[2][3] Attie then worked as a commercial illustrator, drawing Med Men-era advertisements as well as the covers of magazines and "pulp" novels,^[4] until he decided to pursue photography.

Photographic career

Attie began his photographic career as a student and protege of influential Harper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, who had similarly mentored the careers of Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Attie's close friend Hiro.

Brodovitch gave Attie his first professional assignment, which was to create a series of photo montages to illustrate Truman Capote's newest work, Breakfast at Tiffany's, for Harper's in 1958. But while Attie completed the montages, Capote began to clash with the publisher of Harper's, the Hearst Corporation, over the tart language and subject matter of his novella. Alice Morris, the magazine's literary editor, later recounted that Capote agreed to make the changes Hearst wanted "partly because I showed him the layouts... six pages with beautiful, atmospheric photographs."^[5] But in the end, Hearst decided that Harper's could not run Breakfast at Tiffany's anyway; its language and subject matter were still deemed "not suitable," and there was concern that Tiffany's, a major advertiser, would react negatively.^[6][7] Attie's work on the project nonetheless launched his career, gaining him further assignments from both Harper's and Brodovitch. He also went on to shoot portraits of Capote and to illustrate his essay "Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir" for Holiday Magazine (later published as a book, A House on the Heights, Little Bookroom, 2002 and included in various anthologies).^[8] Some of Attie's original Breakfast at Tiffany's montages were later used to illustrate Bill Manville's 1960 memoir Saloon Society, The Diary of a Year Beyond Aspirin, which was also designed by Brodovitch, and is still in print with its original photos and layout in a kindle edition.^[9][10]

From that point forward, Attie’s commercial work was prolific and wide-ranging – including frequent covers and spreads for Vogue, Time, Newsweek, Playboy, and Harper’s; portraits of everyone from Bobby Fischer to Leonard Bernstein to Ralph Ellison and The Band; and his own books of photographs, 1977's Russian Self-Portraits,^[11] and 1981's Portrait: Theory (together with Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe and others).^[12] As part of the promotion for Russian Self-Portraits, Attie appeared on a March, 1978 episode of the game show To Tell The Truth.

Attie's work is in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery^[13] and continues to be published and seen. As recently as 2014, New York Magazine published some of his previously-unseen portraits of Capote from 1958,^[14] as well as a 1959 portrait of pioneering Brill Building songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, which was originally shot for Vogue Magazine.^[15] A selection of his celebrity portraits has become available through the pop-culture-oriented fine art gallery Rock Paper Photo as well.^[16]

References