CHANEL NEXUS HALL

Lillian Bassman was a leading fashion photographer of the legendary postwar generation that brought a new sense of freedom to the medium. Originally trained as an artist and art director, she created graphically arresting, atmospheric images that used photography as a medium for making pictures in fresh and surprising ways. In a career spanning five decades, she never ceased to innovate. Bassman began her career as a photographer at Harper’s Bazaar in 1948 and she was one of its leading contributors during the years of its greatest influence. Over the next twenty years, working with all of the major models of the day, she assembled a definitive body of work that captured the inner lives of sophisticated women. She turned from fashion photography to more personal forms of expression in the 1970s, but in the late 1996, at the age of seventy-nine, she returned to fashion photography, and since then her contributions to photography have gained her an international following.
Bassman had photographed over such a long period of her life. We present a selection of many of her iconic images for the first time in Japan that encapsulate her eye, her energy for experimenting with form and her love of her Art.