Light as a bubble
“You could never pull off a shoot like that today,” Melvin Sokolsky says of his 1963 “bubble series” of photographs that captured a model floating in Plexiglas bubbles against the Paris cityscape. “Insurance and permits alone would cost millions of dollars.”
But with the help of a connection in the Paris police department and a not-yet-famous personal assistant, producer and stylist named Ali MacGraw, Sokolsky pulled off the March 1963 Harper’s Bazaar cover shoot for $18,000.
The photos show model Simone D’Aillencourt wearing spring-collection looks inside a giant plastic bubble above the city. In “Bubble on the Seine,” left, she seems to float on the surface of the river Seine.
Sokolsky, now 70 and an L.A. resident since 1975, turned up at an installation of five of the prints at Smashbox Studios during the recent Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week to share the back story.
Arriving in Paris to shoot his idea (inspired by a Hieronymus Bosch painting, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”), Sokolsky found out that getting the required permits would take three months -- which he could ill afford. So he called on a friend.
“The husband of a model I knew played cards with the Paris chief of police, so they’d sit in the petit camion playing cards,” he said. “Whenever someone came around looking for a permit, we’d swing the door open, and he would give them this salute, and that would be the end of it.”
Today, the local Fahey/Klein Gallery represents Sokolsky, selling bubble-series prints for as much as $35,000 each -- or about twice what it cost Sokolsky to do the entire shoot in 1963.
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Adam Tschorn
