Flower Girl Faces - Paris Harper's Bazaar - Model Simone D'Aillencourt in Guy Laroche, 1963

Melvin Sokolsky  

Melvin Sokolsky was born and raised in New York in 1933, where he began his career as a still-life photographer.

He began his career at Harper's Bazaar in 1959, at the age of 21.

Melvin's work is particularly influenced by art: surrealists Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dali, Francis Picabia and Flemish masters such as Jan Van Eyck, Rogier Van der Weyden, Jérôme Bosch and Pieter Brueghel. As in the paintings of Balthus, he is interested in the movement of the body under clothing, in the woman in front of the lens rather than fashion.

The ''Women in Bubble'' series, created for the Spring collections in Paris in 1963 for Harper's Bazaar, is one of his most famous creations. Her inspiration came from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Delights", in which characters can be seen in transparent bubbles. All that remained was to find the tricks to make the magic happen. Melvin went to Long Island to have the Plexiglas bubbles made by aeronautical engineers, plastic spheres joined together, leaving enough space between the two parts to allow air to pass through. The hinge system is inspired by Fabergé eggs, with hinges located at the top of the bubble for easy access to the mannequin. The bubbles are suspended from a crane by aircraft cables, the trace of which he makes disappear by scratching the film negative, creating the perfect illusion.

On the casting side, the challenge was to find models who could cope with entering the bubble without panicking or suffering from claustrophobia, and the photographer naturally turned to his favorite model, Simone d'Aillencourt.

Plexiglas bubbles drifting on the Seine, models made tiny by placing them next to gigantic pieces of furniture - a reference to Alice in Wonderland - levitating mannequins, ceiling-mounted furniture overturning weightlessness and numerous celebrity portraits are just some of the shots that have marked the history of photography.