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Gene Fenn ( April 16, 1911 – November 14, 2001) was an American photographer and painter. He is known for his fashion photography for ‘Harper's Bazaar’ and ‘Mademoiselle’ in the thirties and forties and his portraits of some of the major artists of the twentieth century : Picasso, Miró, Braque, Léger, Zadkine, Stravinsky, Sagan, Mary McCarthy, Auden, Losey to name a few as well as French fashion designers like Dior, Balmain, Cardin, Givenchy, Saint Laurent, Schiaparelli, Chanel. He is responsible for the recognition of Copyrights in France for photographers, illustrators and reporters. He is the brother of Otto Fenn, close and inspiring of Andy Warhol.

Background and early life
Gene Fenn grew up in Lincoln Park New Jersey in a family of Music-hall artists. Both his parents worked at the New York Hippodrome, his mother as a dancer and singer, his father as a stage electrician, stunt man and actor. The eldest of four children, Gene with his brother Otto staged plays in the family home’s garage in which they performed with their sisters Camille and Dolores. Having been trained by his father, Gene would light the plays with his father’s stage lights.

At age 15 he took a summer job developing film for a New Jersey-based photographic studio. Then in the early thirties, as he sold vegetables on sixth avenue, a summer job before attending his photographic and painting studies at Cooper Union in New York, he clashed with one of his regular customers who happened to be the rising fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar, Louise Dahl-Wolfe. On that occasion, they realised they both were photographers. Louise asked Gene to show her his portfolio. After leafing through it, she hired him as her assistant on the spot. Dahl-Wolfe perfected her skills by having Gene light her photo shoots.

His career is interrupted by his military duties during which he is struck by lightning which prevented him from becoming a war photographer. Gene said of the experience: “It transformed me from a middle class idiot into an artist.

Photographic career in New York
Back from the military he resumed his job at Harper’s Bazaar as George Hoyningen-Huene’s assistant. At that time Carmel Snow was Harper’s editor-in-chief and Alexey Brodovitch, its art director. Gene began experimenting with still lives and fashion photography and Brodovitch commissioned him for the Harper’s Bazaar Junior magazine’s July 1944 cover.

Simultaneously Marie Faulkner, art director at Mademoiselle, offered him the chance to work for her magazine. Prompted by a constant research for innovation on a technical and visual effects, Fenn produced for Mademoiselle very different images compared to the ones he shot for Harper’s. He would mix black and white images with coloured pictures or superimposed one shot onto the other, creating exceptionally modern collages for the times.

One example of this technique was Fenn's iconic photograph entitled “The girl in a cake of ice” that produced an amazing optical illusion and gave the viewer the impression of seeing a naked woman frozen inside an ice block.

While many photographers at that time operated in natural light, Fenn, influenced by his experience in lighting design for theatre stages and film sets, used artificial lighting, working with electronic flashes and special equipment he bought from the US army after the war, such as a 305mm zoom used for aerial shoots or a parachute through which he filtered the light.

The 305mm zoom lens that opens at 2.8 allowed him to have very little depth of field: a defined foreground and a blurred background. This gave him the freedom to work anywhere and hide the imperfections in the background.

Even when he took his images in the open air, Fenn tried to experiment further with light.

When he shot the advertising campaign for a wedding gown manufacturer on the roof of his studio, he filtered the natural light through a parachute to give the image a sort of dreamily eerie atmosphere.

Move to Paris
While working as a photographer, Fenn pursued his painting studies at the experimental Cooper Union School and, in 1949, benefitting from the G.I. Bill of Rights, he moved to Paris to further study with Fernand Léger and André Lhote. This established him in the Art World. He met Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Kees Van Dongen, Ossip Zadkine and Man Ray and shot numerous portraits of those artists along with taking pictures of personalities who inspired him.

For many years he worked as the official photographer for the Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas.

Living in the French capital allowed him to follow twice a year the Parisian catwalk shows for Mademoiselle and collaborate at the same time with other fashion magazines and publications such as Marie Claire, Elle and L’album du Figaro. In Paris he developed his technique for exterior sessions and shot Marie Claire’s first cover when it was republished in 1954.

He is known for his 8”x10” Kodachrome(20x25) fashion photographs of Dior, Givenchy, Schiaparelli’s… work taken with a view camera and introducing in France the first professional electronic flashes used later on by Balcar.

Fenn also started developing advertising campaigns for important clients such as General Motors, who chose him along with Richard Avedon and Cecil Beaton for the ‘Cadillac’ campaign, contributing to make the fashion and cars connection. He also produced photo-reportage for Newsweek and created in the 1970s advertising campaigns for the International Herald Tribune.

Personal work
Never having been able to choose between painting and photography, he turned towards a hybrid form that integrated those two mediums, which he refused to call collages but rather “Integrated Photo-Paintings”. They celebrate in an original art form many artists he admired or people he came across in his life like the baker Poilâne or the Chanoine Kir. He would combine blown up, reduced or cut up photographs and painted around them in an integrated vision that reflected his own inner world. A mixture of all the influences that crossed his path in a vision reminiscent of childhood. His childlike spirit was reflected in the universe of his apartment where objects, photographs, paintings, souvenirs piled up for years and eventually were coupled with each other into works of art.

Along with this original art form, he also created a body of experimental photographic work.

Exhibits
Gene Fenn’s fashion photography from the 40-50ties, a show curated by José de Carvalho, was exhibited in the premises of the BRED bank as part of the Mois de la Photo in November 1986 in Paris along with some of Fenn’s paintings and an impressive stage curtain he painted for The Monte Carlo Ballets. The Galerie d’Anvers owned by José de Carvalho, exhibited that same month a series of Fenn’s black and white vintage prints of portraits of artists and Hollywood writers.

A major retrospective of his work was organised at The Tom Blau Gallery in London from March to May 1993.

The cover of L’Album du Figaro number 43 (Sept-Oct 1953) and the cover of the Gazette Jacques Heim number 20 (Sept.1957) were shown at the Alexey Brodovitch exhibit at the Grand-Palais (Oct-Nov 1982) in Paris.

Gene Fenn photographies 1940-2001, at the Gorsline Museum in Bussy-le-Grand (Burgundy, France) in 2016. A show curated by Françoise Le Corre.

Gene FENN: The many worlds of a photographer: New York- Paris at Françoise Le Corre’s Atelier / Galerie. April 28- June 9. 2018.

References and sources
ZOOM MAGAZINE 131 MODE JULY 23 1987

MARIE CLAIRE MAISON. SEPTEMBER 1994

GENE FENN COLLAGE AND LIGHT MAGICIAN.IRENEBRINATION APRIL 2010