1934 Remie Lohse Photograph for Vogue

About the Item

Remie Lohse was born in Puerto Rico, studied painting in Denmark, and settled in New York in 1928, where he became a professional photographer. In the 1930s he was a freelancer who specialized in advertising and magazine features, and shot covers for Vogue. If he often focused on the high life, seen in this couple stepping out on the town, he also shot humble subjects. He was more interested in his art than a particular milieu, and many of his photographs are little masterpieces. His contemporary Gilbert Seldes, the noted Vanity Fair media critic and “public intellectual” (not to mention father of actress Marian Seldes), featured Lohse in his 1934 book 'This is New York, The First Modern Photographic Book of New York.' In 1939 Lohse came out with his own book titled 'The Miniature Camera in Professional Hands.' Our photograph was one of three shot by Lohse for a 1934 Vogue article titled “High Spots and Low Music." If the photograph (image size 4 1/4" x 6") show a couple making the nocturnal rounds of Manhattan restaurants, bars, and jazz clubs, the story itself also covers the daytime meeting places of the ladies who lunch. The twist is that Lohse’s model was the author herself, Elena Mumm Thornton, and her husband James Worth Thornton. He was the son of an English lord who was recently ruined by the Depression. She was born Helene-Marthe Mumm von Schwarzenstein, and was the daughter of a Mumm, as in Mumm champagne, and the French ambassador to Russia. In Paris she had attended art school with the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and in New York she became a freelance writer. In the years that followed she was a Town & Country editor. Later, she fell in love with Edmund Wilson, the novelist and literary critic, who was by no means a teetotaler. In 1946 they divorced their respective spouses in Reno and married. As a widow, Elena, the fourth Mrs. Wilson, edited the two volumes of her second husband’s journals, and published them to acclaim in 1972.

Creator:

Remie Lohse (Photographer)

Dimensions:

Height: 11.5 in (29.21 cm)Width: 10.5 in (26.67 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)

Style:

Art Deco (Of the Period)

Materials and Techniques:

Paper

Place of Origin:

United States

Period:

1930-1939