Halsman ~ A Brief Biography 

Philippe Halsman was born 2^nd May 1906 to Jewish parents in Latvia. His father was a dentist and his mother was a principal of a grammar school.  

Philippe began taking pictures from the age of 15, using his father’s camera and found that he had a passion for portrait photography.  On leaving school he enrolled on an engineering course at the University of Dresden in Germany.  

Unfortunately, during a hiking tour in 1928, with his father, an incident occurred. Philippe insists that his father had taken a fall and Philippe ran for help. On returning his father he found his father dead with severe head injuries. It seems his head had been split open by an axe. Philippe was immediately arrested and charged with patricide. As soon as his mother and sister heard about the situation they organised a lawyer from the Jewish community.  

The whole situation became a living nightmare for Philippe and he was convicted of killing his father and sentenced to 10 years in prison. It wasn’t until such eminent people as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Reud and Thomas Mann became involved after a serious display of serious display of anti Jewish propaganda. They demanded a fair trial, and Philippe was freed, but psychologically he was never free – after being accused of causing his fathers death he was unable to grieve and had to endure the evidence put forward by the local coroner which included the severed head of his father, which had been removed during autopsy.  

When he was finally released in 1931, he was told he must leave Austria for good, never to return. So he headed to France and established himself in Paris as a Portrait Photographer. In 1932 he opened his first studio and less than two years later his work began to appear in such prestigious magazines as Vogue and Voila.  

Halsman’s career stalled when Hitler’s troop invaded Paris in 1940. Halsman’s family had already emigrated to America and with the aid of Albert Einstein in November 1940 Philippe arrived in New York. Once there, Halsman quickly established himself and began shooting for Life magazine.  

Philippe had a very psychological approach to his work; he endeavoured to get behind the persona, to reach the true character of the person he was photographing. Always aiming to reveal their unconscious self, was this because he had, in the final moments before his father died, seen his true character? Whatever the reason, it’s quite likely that his father’s death had a considerable influence on his unique method of photographing his subjects. 

He would ask clients to ‘jump’ in an effort to get their ‘mask’ to fall so that the real person appears. When using this method with Marilyn, he asked her;

“Are you sure you expressed yourself?” this caused her to enter a blind panic that something out of her control would be revealed. This method of photography became known as ‘jumpology’ and became his trademark/signature tune!true portrait should, today and a hundred years from today, the Testimony of how this person looked and what kind of human being he Halsman’s illustrious client portfolio included Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Alfred Hitchcock, John F & Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Halsman was also deeply involved with the surrealist movement, creating photographic art with the likes Salvador Dali. 

He died on 25^th June 1979, in New York.