Melvin Sokolsky‘s photographs are deeply imaginative, challenging the aesthetic conventions of the advertising and editorial worlds. Reflecting the artist’s fascination with Surrealist art, Sokolsky’s photographs play with spacial relationships, scale, proportion, visual rationality, and the laws of physics. Sokolsky defines an aesthetic that continually creates images which transcend the clothes they purport to feature, always provoking, always engaging, always alluring.
Sokolsky credits his surrealist ideas to the likes of Dali, who once visited Melvin at his studio, and more specifically to Hieronymus Bosch and his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. “If you look at his painting…you will come across a nude couple in a bubble. That image stayed with me from childhood.”
Though he is best known for his editorial fashion photographs for publications such as Harper’s Bazaar (for which he produced, in 1963, the “Bubble” series of photographs depicting fashion models “floating” in giant clear plastic bubbles suspended in midair above the River Seine in Paris), Vogue, and The New York Times, Sokolsky’s work is not limited to that field.
Melvin Sokolsky‘s photography has graced the covers of Harper’s Bazaar, McCall’s, Esquire as well as other notable magazine for over 30 years. His career includes both still photography as well as film, where he received every major television award including 25 CLIOS. His commercials are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. His work has been exhibited internationally, including the Louvre. He received one of the first Lucie Awards for “Outstanding achievement in Fashion Photography” in 2013.
