gGeorge Hoyningen-Huene took this famous photo, Miscellaneous, not on the Côte d’Azur, as it seems, but on the roof of the Vogue workshop on the Champs-Élysées. The image originally appeared in a magazine called “Modern Sailors Put to Sea.” His great imagination was characteristic of Hoyningen-Huene, friend and confidant of Coco Chanel, and an essential figure of the French avant-garde between the wars.
There have been speculation on the identity of the two models in the photo. The man on the “diving board” was long thought to be Horst P. Horst, the model who became Hoyningen-Huene’s lover and eventually supplanted him as the star photographer of French photography. VogueIt’s the golden age. However, recent research has shown that the photo was taken a few months before they met. There is more certainty about the woman beside him, it is believed to be Lee Miller, another protégé of Hoyningen-Huene, who had just launched her career as an artist.
Because he was primarily a commercial photographer, Hoyningen-Huene’s work has tended to be overlooked alongside that of his contemporaries and friends Man Ray, Berenice Abbott and André Kertész, with whom he exhibited at the Premier Salon Indépendant in Modern Photography in 1928. However, more than half a century after his death in 1968, there is growing interest not only in his images but also in his life in Paris, then in Hollywood, where he became involved friendship with Ava Gardner and Greta Garbo (he liked the idea of being trusted). take Garbo’s ID photos). Miscellaneous features in a new retrospective book of his images, which also recounts his formative years as the son of an Estonian nobleman who fled the Russian Revolution to become a sergeant in the British Army during the First World War. Seemingly, inevitably, a Netflix drama about the photographer’s life is in the works.
