Horst P. Horst is ranked alongside Irving Penn and Richard Avedon as one of the last century’s leading photographers. In an extraordinary sixty-year career, Horst’s photographs graced the pages of Vogue and House and Garden.

He was renowned as a master of expressive lighting and atmospheric illusion. In the early 1930s, Horst moved to Paris – the center of the creative avant-garde – and befriended designers and creative people like Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Salvador Dali.​

Horst’s career spanned the opulence of Parisian pre-war haute couture and the rise of ready-to-wear fashions in post-war America. Not confined to fashion, Horst excelled in portraiture, nude studies, interiors, and still life photography drawing from an extended range of sources from ancient Greek and Roman sculpture to surrealist discourse.

Horst was a classic black-and-white photographer who became a great color photographer, recording rooms as if you were actually inside them. The German-born lensman (who died in 1999) often positioned his camera from unusual vantage points, such as a homeowner’s favored armchair to conjure an atmosphere of uncommon intimacy.