Florence Henri 1915

Although initially trained as a pianist and a painter, Florence Henri earned artistic renown as an avant-garde photographer. She produced a wide range of photographic work throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including still lifes, portraits, nudes, advertising images, and photomontages.

Henri was born on June 28,1893 in New York to a German mother and a French father who served as director of a petroleum company; both parents passed away by the time Henri was fifteen.

Financially independent and culturally cosmopolitan, Henri lived in several European capitals–including Rome, London, and Berlin–before finally settling in Paris in the mid-1920s. In 1924 she had a quick marriage of convenience to a Swiss house servant in order to facilitate her move to France. As both the center of the art world and a haven for queer artists and writers, Paris was an ideal environment for Henri. There she thrived artistically.

Upon moving to the city in 1925, Henri first enrolled in painting courses at André Lhote’s Académie Montparnasse, and then at Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant’s Académie Moderne. She explored the formalist vocabularies of geometric abstraction and late cubism, tendencies that would eventually inflect her photographic style.

In the summer of 1927, Henri traveled to the Bauhaus in Dessau, where she visited her friend Margarete Schall and took more courses in painting. Yet she had grown somewhat weary of painting and became inspired by the photographic fervor of László Moholy-Nagy and his wife Lucia Moholy. At Lucia’s encouragement, Henri began experimenting with a camera and thereby launched her photographic career.

Upon returning to Paris, Henri began taking portraits, self-portraits, and still lifes with inserted mirrors, a strategy that served to disrupt dramatically her compositions and disorient the viewer. The mirror became Henri’s favorite prop, and she rarely made still lifes without them.

When the Great Depression of the 1930s put a strain on her income, Henri opened a highly successful photography studio. To supplement her finances, she accepted advertising projects and trained students. She continued to make and exhibit artistic work, experimenting with many of the avant-garde movements and tendencies of the inter-war period, including abstraction, surrealism, and the New Vision. Yet no single artistic program could contain her transgressive imagination, and she refrained from pledging a permanent allegiance to any of them…

Although she always insisted that her images were merely formalist exercises and should not be analyzed for content, Henri had a unique means of addressing gender and sexuality in her photography. Her many self-portraits, for example, demonstrate how she emphasized her female-ness to a virtually theatrical extent.

excerpts from glbtq.com/arts

Posted by puzzlemaster on 2009-01-19 17:40:46

Tagged: , passport Photo , photographer , artist