You and I have probably both had a variation on the same nightmare. Your lifetime's body of work, all gone in an instant. The specifics don't really matter (negatives going up in flames, a dead hard drive, cloud storage that vanishes into the ether). The pain, the sense of loss is unbearable. Thank goodness these are only dreams, right?
Well, for Jewish photographer Philippe Halsman (1906-1979) it was a reality. When German forces invaded France in 1940, he was living in Paris and didn't want to wait around.
Halsman wasn't a stranger to adversity. Born in Riga, in the part of the Russian Empire which later became Latvia, at 22, he'd been wrongfully accused of killing his father when hiking in Tyrol, Austria (a place rife with antisemitism) and spent two years in prison.
So when the Nazis arrived in France, he fled Paris with only his camera and 12 prints, leaving behind an entire body of work.
He went on to become one of the best-known portrait photographers of the 20th century. Working in New York, he is best known for his portraits of celebrities jumping - captured in mid-air.
Famous names who agreed to leap for Halsman included Salvador Dali, Marilyn Monroe, Groucho Marx and The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. But the images he made before the war were presumed lost.
Actually, they weren't – and a crate of his glass-plate negatives was returned after the war. But they sat there ignored until Halsman died in 1979. It wasn't until 2006 that his grandson, Oliver Halsman Rosenberg, rediscovered them.
Publisher Thames & Hudson has brought the best of this work together in Philippe Halsman: The French Crate, a new book that offers a rare opportunity: a look at the work of a major photographer in their formative years. And there was plenty for the publisher to dig its teeth into.
Solving the mystery
Halsman dropped out of engineering school in 1931 to pursue photography full time – and set out to investigate what he called “the mystery of another human being" under the influence of the writer Dostoevsky.
The rediscovered images are mostly portrait sittings. But even within the studio-standard poses, his eye for asymmetry and unguarded expression is sharp.
One portrait catches a sitter mid-grimace, eyes not quite matched, mouth pulled into something between a smile and a wince. It's a world away from the flattering symmetry that most 1930s studio photographers were selling to their clients.
Halsman was also ahead of his time in experimenting with double exposure. Several images layer a sitter's face beneath sheer fabric or veiling, eyes glowing where the exposures overlap.
Career of two halves
Fundamentally, the gap between these images and Halsman's later career is stark – and that's not hugely surprising.
After Albert Einstein helped him relocate to New York in 1940, Halsman went on to photograph Marilyn Monroe and Einstein himself, form a working relationship with Salvador Dalí and shoot 101 Life magazine covers, a record that remains unbeaten.
None of that success is visible yet in these crate images, but what you can see is the groundwork being laid. A young photographer testing ideas, exploring psychology and playing with technique, years before the world started watching.
Philippe Halsman: The French Crate will be published by Thames & Hudson on October 01 for $50 / £35; pre-orders are available. Hardcover, 8.5 x 10.875", 160 pages.
