Constantine joffe biography

Constantin Joffé was a Russian-French-American fashion and advertising photographer who worked for the magazines Vogue and Glamor in the 1940s and 1950s, during their period of widest circulation.
Constantin Joffé (1910–1992) was a Russian-French-American fashion and advertising photographer who worked for the magazines Vogue and Glamor in the 1940s.
Biography.

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Constantin Joffé

Few fashion photographers have as colorful a background as Constantin Joffé. Born in Russia, Joffé spent his early years as a photographer in Paris, working for the fashion magazines. At the outset of World War II, Joffé joined the French Foreign Legion and served as an anti-tank gunner until his capture by the Germans in 1940. His 1944 memoir, We Were Free, documents his time in captivity.

Remarkably, Joffé escaped captivity and found his way to New York where he was hired by Condé Nast to document wartime fashions. Joffé’s inventive approach, and his eye for the elegance of the time, set the tone for fashion photography’s flowering in the post-war period. Joffé was as adept with color photography as he was with black-and-white, and he was one of a select group of 17 photographers covered in Alexander Lieberman’s classic 1951 book, The Art and Technique of Fashion Photography, alongside Irving Penn, Horst P. Horst, and Norman Parkinson, among others.

The Constantin Joffé image offered here was used in 1997 on the reception invitation for The Fords: 50 Ye

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Constantin Joffé

When Paris was liberated in 1944, the city was on its knees. Within little more than a decade, it had regained its status as a world capital of unmatchable style, romance and allure.

The mood on the streets and the streets themselves had certainly improved a bit. But the really startling difference was to the city’s reputation. How did Paris manage such a stunning transformation in what we would these days call its brand image?

Post World War II, France is broke, its economy on its knees, and over a sixth of all the buildings in Paris are in a seriously dilapidated state. In Paris: Biography of a City, Colin Jones reports that the wear and tear of decades of neglect are painfully obvious in smoke-blackened stone facades, cracked and untended stucco, and peeling paintwork. In Another Me, Ann Montgomery, who worked as a model in Paris, recounts that when she arrived there in 1954, “Much of Paris was still infected by a war-weary shabbiness that cast a despairing shadow over the grandeur of the ancient city.”

According to Antony Beever and Artemis

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Constantin Joffé

Russian-French-American photographer

Constantin Joffé (1910–1992) was a Russian-French-American fashion and advertising photographer who worked for the magazines Vogue and Glamor in the 1940s and 1950s, during their period of widest circulation.

Early life

Born in Russia, Joffé moved to France when he was young.

Before the war Joffé worked as a fashion photographer for French fashion magazines.^[1] As Europe became more unsettled, it has been reported^[2] that Joffé was to board the Hindenburg airship flight to the US in 1937, but luckily missed the expensive flight (equivalent to €10,000 today) that famously ended in disaster.

Prisoner of war

Joffé joined the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the French Foreign Legion in 1939 at the outbreak of war and was made a corporal and put in charge of a 25mm antitank gun, but was captured in May 1940 by the Germans during the Battle of France, one of only 800 who survived, most wounded, from a regiment of 2,800 men.^[3] He was held in Stalag XVIIA Kaisersteinbru