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French cabaret singer Yvonne George
Note: Click on each image to get an enlarged view, read more information, and begin navigating through the entire image gallery. See more Nickolas Muray photos here.
As a company, Condé Nast has a long history of attracting leading photographic talents. Nast himself was a firm believer in the importance of having the best editorial photographers on staff, and his outrageous and, at the time, record-breaking offer of one hundred dollars a week, guaranteed to Baron Adolphe de Meyer in 1913, showed that he wasn’t afraid to pay top dollar for top talent.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Hungarian-born American photographer Nickolas Muray was one of the most important photographers in the business, and for a few years he was the world’s highest-paid photographer. According to one commonly repeated statistic, he made more than 10,000 portraits between 1920 and 1940.
Dancer Dorothy Dilley, performing the "Butterfly Dance" in Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue
Muray was born in 1892 and arrived in America in 1913. Trained as an engraver in Berlin, he settled in New York and continued his career there. At the same time, he became interested in photography, and in 1920 he opened a small portrait studio in Greenwich Village. The following year he received his first commercial assignment, for Harper’s Bazaar. Within five years his photography business was a full-time occupation, and a successful one at that. The editors of Vanity Fair liked Muray’s style and work ethic and used him on hundreds of assignments in New York, London, and Hollywood.
Gilbert Seldes, writer and editor for Dial magazine
Muray was primarily a studio photographer, as was his contemporary (and boss at Condé Nast) Edward Steichen. Though their styles are similar at first glance, Muray’s portraits are more straightforward and lack Steichen’s trademark dramatic lighting, but to good effect. Muray’s sitters often fill, even crowd, the entire frame. Looking at the two photographers’ work brings to mind the relationship between Irving Penn and Richard Avedon: that of two contemporaries tackling the same problem – the seemingly insurmountable task of making a good photograph for the printed page – each in his own unique and masterful style.
Portrait of acting couple Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Mary Pickford
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and his wife, Joan Crawford, seated back to back on the beach in Santa Monica
Baseball legend Babe Ruth
