Born in New York City, Sokolsky had no formal training in photography, but started to use his father's box camera at about the age of ten.
In 1963, he made for Harper's Bazaar, the "Bubble" series of photographs depicting fashion models "floating" in giant clear plastic bubbles suspended in midair above the River Seine in Paris.
Back in 1963 there's no photoshop so they build a plastic bubble for the models and lift them up in the air with a machine and a cable.
You can see this lifting machine if you pay attention to the details. Look at the reflexion on this bubble. What do you see?
“Just admit that it’s Photoshop”, people tell fashion photographer Melvin Sokolsky when looking at his iconic photograph of model Simone D’Aillencourt landing in a glass bubble on the River Seine in Paris.
“But it was 1963,” says Melvin who designed the bubble for the surreal Harper’s Bazaar magazine spring shoot. The plexiglass bubble was hung from a cable on a crane in various locations around Paris. There is no retouching on this picture other than taking that cable out. Nothing is stripped in.”
Sokolsky credits his surrealist ideas to the likes of Dali, who once visited Melvin at his studio, and more specifically to Hieronymus Bosch and his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights.(see below)
“If you look at his painting … you will come across a nude couple in a bubble. That image stayed with me from childhood.”
You can find more about this paining here
or you can visit it in Museo del Prado, Madrid
inspiring, isn't it?
if you have a fovorite artist/designer share it with us!
love, ralu