Lillian Bassman: Apparitions of Light

Lillian Bassman, Narrowing Coat, Georgia Hamilton, NYC. Harper’s Bazaar, 1955

Lillian Bassman’s photographs breathe. Bodies dissolve into shadow and light, gestures stretch into abstraction, fabric rises like smoke. Edges blur until subject and atmosphere feel inseparable. The women hover in that space (part presence, part apparition) as if they might vanish and reappear in the same second.

I met Bassman once, along with her husband Paul Himmel, when he had a show at Keith de Lellis Gallery in the early 2000s. She arrived in oversized sunglasses (impossible to miss), her presence filling the room before she even spoke. The two of them bickered softly over some small detail (tenderly, like they’d done it for decades), and I remember thinking how much that dynamic mirrored what I sensed in her photographs — elegance with an edge, life-force wrapped in intimacy.

That sense of impermanence, that refusal to pin anything down, is what stays with me. Bassman didn’t insist her subjects resolve into something tidy. She let them sway between softness and strength, vulnerability and command. The blur doesn’t erase them, it magnifies them — like steam caught in light, visible in its shimmer and gone the next moment. The images are ethereal but not fragile. They hold contradictions with zero apology.

That sensibility filters into my own work almost without me noticing. In Metamorphosis, my book-in-progress devoted to women who’ve gone through mastectomy and reconstruction, I’m not echoing her dissolves or high contrasts. What I draw from is her permission to let complexity stand uncorrected — women who are whole not because they’re fixed, but because they’re allowed to stay multiple.