Philippe Halsman
Death before Life
Did his father fall or was he pushed?
This was the question that the jury had to answer in the trial of Philippe Halsman, a 22-year-old Latvian engineering student who in 1928 was accused of murdering his father while they were hiking in the Tyrolean mountains.
The jury found him guilty by a majority verdict of 9-3, despite only having circumstantial evidence, with the judge sentencing him to ten years in solitary confinement. Anti-semitism was rife in the area—this was five years before Hitler came to power in Germany—and the Austrian Supreme Court demanded a retrial. In this subsequent trial, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to four years.
Thanks to the efforts of his sister, whose thousands of letters received supportive replies from Einstein, Freud, and Thomas Mann, Halsman was eventually pardoned. He changed his name, moved to Paris and became a photographer.
In 1940, the Nazis attacked France and he was forced to escape to the United States, again with the help of Einstein. Once there he became one of the most famous portrait photographers of the twentieth century, shooting over 100 covers for Life magazine.
It is a remarkable story, all the more so for the fact that he never mentioned the trial after he came to the United States. It is skated over in his photobooks and nor was it included in the New York Times obituary, despite being a huge legal scandal. It even took four years before someone added the trial to Halsman's Wikipedia page.
The earliest mention of the murder I've been able to find is from an article by Allen Arpadi and Deborah Weinstein from 2000, a full 21 years after Halsman’s death. Since that article, his story has been turned into a film starring Patrick Swayze and Martine McCutcheon and a book. A documentary by Halsman's grandson is apparently forthcoming.
I generally avoid summarising the biographies of photographers I write about (there are enough summaries out there) but this one was too good not to share. Not least because one of Halsman's signature techniques is called Jumpology. When you know that his father fell from a mountain, there is something slightly discomfiting about The Jump Book.
Halsman's theory was that when someone jumps they reveal their true self and their self-conscious barriers disappear. He writes:
Our entire civilization, starting with the earliest childhood education, teaches us how to dissimulate our thoughts, how to be polite with people we dislike, how to control our emotions. "Keep smiling" or "stiff upper lip" are now categorical imperatives.
The result of this is: when we look at somebody's face, we don't know what he thinks or feels. We don't even know what he is like. Everybody wears an armour. Everybody hides behind a mask.
Halsman writes about how this idea troubled Marilyn Monroe:
I expected to see the leap of a sex goddess, but she leaped like a little girl. "Marilyn," I said, "are you sure that you expressed your character? Please, jump again." "You mean that my jump reveals my character?" she asked. "Yes," I answered, "this is why I call it jumpology." With a look of sudden panic, Marilyn refused to jump again.
Halsman's more conventional portraits are some of the defining celebrity images of the twentieth century.
But his genius emerges when he uses his creativity to get to the essence of the celebrity's public persona.
Take this superb portrait of Vladimir Nabokov, lepidopterist and literary trickster:
The collaboration for which Halsman is best known is with Salvador Dalí, including the ultimate jump portrait, Dalí Atomicus, which took 26 goes to get right.
In the only interview I've been able to find—conducted bizarrely enough by Leonard Nimoy—he comes across as a serious, intense person to the point of humourlessness. Perhaps Halsman didn't need to talk about the trial or the death of his father because it was so deeply imprinted in everything he did. There is, after all, no urgency in life without acknowledging mortality. Halsman’s portraits are alive.
The photographs in this article are used for criticism and review under the Fair Dealing provision of UK Copyright Law. All rights to the image remain with the photographer/copyright holder. This use does not claim any rights to the original work and is not for commercial purposes.
Oh, I love his jump theory and would love to see photos of Einstein etc. jumping. Thank you for sharing!
Really nice read, thanks for sharing!