Horst P. Horst; Created Hard-Edged Glamour Photos of 1930s Fashions

Like many great artists in the world of photography, Horst P. Horst did not set out to be one of the finest fashion photographers and portraitists of the century, though he was undoubtedly just that.

Horst came into photography in his mid-20s while living in Paris after discovering through experience what he did not like--art school in Hamburg, the study of Chinese, or apprenticing in the office of the Bauhaus architect Le Corbusier.

What Horst, the younger of two sons of a hardware merchant from eastern Germany, did like was the Parisian beau monde, the high society that he discovered as an assistant and sometime model for George Hoyingen-Huene, a noted fashion photographer for the French and American editions of Vogue magazine.

In that milieu, Horst came to know some of the great personalities of the day. People like Coco Chanel, Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, Marlene Dietrich, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Jean Cocteau. Many came under his lens as he developed a career that started with work for Vogue magazine in 1932.

Horst, who died Thursday at his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., at the age of 93, would forever be linked to the hard-edged glamour and sensibilities of the 1930s.

As a young photographer, he developed a unique style that was marked by an easy elegance, a dash of theatricality, a spot of humor and always dramatic composition.

He worked best in the studio where he could use complex lighting arrangements to underscore his inventive images.

“Horst’s work really reflects the kind of work that was done in the grand studio style of lighting. It’s an emphasis on light and shadow, on dramatic lighting as opposed to natural outdoor photography or photojournalism,” Etheleen Staley, co-owner of the Staley-Wise Gallery in New York and Horst’s longtime representative, told the San Francisco Examiner some years ago.

Horst used floodlights and spotlights, never strobes, saying later that strobes showed “everything too clearly,” leaving no mystery to the image.

Because he was such a painstakingly slow and meticulous worker, a photo session with Horst would sometimes last days as he waited for just the right moment to create his photograph.

Of a body of work from over 60 years, his most famous image is probably “The Mainbocher Corset.” Named for the American designer, then living in Paris, the image shows the back of a platinum-haired model. She is wearing a loosened ivory corset and her arms are raised above it. The image is bathed in light and shadow, which some critics say combine to produce a photograph of great intimacy and also great sadness.

In the book “Horst: His Work and His World,” written by his longtime companion, Valentine Lawford, Horst said the image--the last one he took in Paris before the start of World War II--was “peculiar for me [because] it was the essence of that moment [in time].”

“While I was taking it, I was thinking of all that I was leaving behind,” he said.

Beginning in 1935, Horst began splitting time between New York and Paris. He moved permanently to New York in 1940 and was drafted into the Army in 1943 when he became an American citizen. He photographed for several military publications, briefly shot pinup photos, and met and photographed Harry S. Truman before he became president.

During the war years, Horst also changed his name legally from Horst Paul Albert Bohrman to Horst P. [Paul] Horst because he didn’t want to be confused in any way with the Nazi henchman Martin Bormann. Whether he was legally Horst Bohrman or Horst Horst, everyone still called him by one name: Horst.

In 1945, Horst published his first book, “Photographs of the Decade.” His second book, “Patterns From Nature,” came the next year.

He began taking on lucrative advertising contracts in the late 1940s partly because fashion houses and cosmetic companies were more receptive than magazines to the subtleties of lighting in his photographs. Horst continued this advertising work well into the second half of the century working for Bill Blass and Calvin Klein.

Interestingly, Horst fell out of favor with Vogue in the early 1950s when the magazine’s editor retired and was replaced by someone whose outlook reflected the conservative nature of the times.

“I was told that no model was to be photographed with her feet more than 12 inches apart, standing or walking,” Horst recalled in the Lawford book.

“A photograph that I took of a girl sitting on the floor had to be retaken ‘because no lady sits on the floor,’ ” he added.

“Inhibited” by these new editorial constraints, Horst stayed with advertising work until Diana Vreeland took over Vogue’s American edition in the 1970s. With Vreeland, Horst began a highly successful run shooting home interiors focusing not as much on the grandeur of the dwellings but on those overlooked details that revealed much about the people who lived there. His fashion work picked up again in the late 70s with French Vogue, and Horst was still a sought after photographer well into the 1990s even though glaucoma and a bad hip cut down on his activities.

Some years ago, he told Maureen Dowd, who was then writing features for the New York Times, that he was never terribly knowledgeable about fashion.

“I was asked to look through my photographs for a Dior book they were putting together,” he said.

But the man who had shot the works of many of the century’s great designers like Chanel, Schiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and, yes, Dior; was at a loss.

“I didn’t know which dresses were Diors,” he said.

Despite his popularity, his work was shown infrequently in Los Angeles. But in 1979, his images were part of a group exhibition called “The Fashionable World” at the Stephen White Gallery.

White, who is now a cultural historian and prominent photography collector summed up Horst’s career: “He created a style of fashion photography that makes his images as contemporary today as they were then. And just as popular.”