Adolph de Meyer
1868–1946 · Franco-German-born fashion and portrait photographer
Adolf Eduard Sigismund de Meyer (Paris, 1868 – Los Angeles, 1946) was one of the first fashion photographers of international renown and a leading portraitist in the early twentieth century. The son of a German-Jewish father and a Scottish mother, he was born in Paris, educated in Dresden, and moved to London around 1895, where he joined the Royal Photographic Society. He was known as a baron, although the legitimacy of that title is not documented with certainty.
In 1899 he married Olga Caracciolo, an Italian noblewoman who appears in many of his photographs. The marriage was one of convenience, as neither partner pursued a conventional romantic relationship. After Olga died in 1931, he became involved with a young German man, Ernest Frohlich, whom he had hired as his chauffeur and later adopted.
He moved to the United States in 1913 and began working for Vogue, producing fashion photographs for the magazine into the early 1920s. In 1922 he became chief photographer of Harper's Bazaar in Paris, a post he held for twelve years. He returned to the United States in 1938.
His style rested on luminous, slightly blurred images with backlighting and white or silvery highlights. Rather than focusing on the model, he aimed for an overall atmosphere conceived with almost painterly principles. His fashion pictures were romantic and suggestive, showing indifferent-looking models who evoked a classical beauty. He also photographed celebrities such as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish and John Barrymore.
His influence was considerable in the 1920s, but his style began to fall out of fashion in the following decade. Much of his work was destroyed during the Second World War, and some of what survives has been rediscovered in later exhibitions.