Gleb Derujinsky

Balmain's Mermaid, A Night in Paris

1957

Groundbreaking fashion photographer Gleb Derujinsky invigorated the fashion industry with his glamorous, exotic, and often unconventional photographs. Gleb Derujinsky's career as a fashion photographer took hold in the golden age of European haute couture, when Balenciaga and Pierre Balmain were at the top of their game and Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld were designing their first runway shows. Although air travel was still reserved for the happy few, Derujinsky convinced his editors Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland to send him around the world to photograph beautiful models like Carmen Dell Orefice and his future wife, Ruth Neumann draped in expensive gowns juxtaposed against rough desert dunes or a glittering ocean at sunset. His ideas were revolutionary and they gave rise to the mystique and glamour that is now pervasive in fashion. Derujinsky was the quintessential Renaissance man photographer, award-winning cinematographer and commercial director, inventor, WWII veteran, world traveler, jewelry designer, musician, ski instructor, Ferrari America race-car driver, and champion glider pilot. His passion for photography started at the tender age of six, by ten, he had built a photo enlarger, and as a teenager, he became the youngest member of the Camera Club of New York. His photographs appeared in major lifestyle magazines and extensively in Harper's Bazaar from 1950 to 1970 Derujinsky’s best fashion photographs are typified by the frisson between high fashion in the 1950s and 1960s with the dynamism of locations and urban scenarios." Louis Vuitton Fashion Photography by Charlotte Cotton, Martin Harrison and Michel Mallard, New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2014, p342 “Gleb Derujinsky” "This is a photographer very well worth bringing out of the shadows of neglect to take his rightful place with the other top photographic talents of his time." —Colin McDowell, Business of Fashion "'You don’t take a photograph, you create it'. Ansel Adams used to say. And true creations are the photographs by Gleb Derujinsky, precious moments that are composed in every minute detail." —Vogue Italia