Queer Places:
1218 E Mendocino St, Altadena, CA 91001
108 E 38th St, New York, NY 10016
Pasadena Athletic Club, 425 E Green St, Pasadena, CA 91101
Clifford
Coffin (June 18, 1913 – March, 1972) is known to a handful of admirers as the greatest of Vogue magazine’s ‘lost’ photographers. But for over a decade, in London, Paris and New York, he produced some of Vogue’s most impeccably elegant fashion pictures. A separate body of work – his portraits for Vogue – is equally fascinating as a trenchant observation of art and society across the globe in the post-war years. As well as covering the couture collections for Vogue on two memorable occasions, 1948 and 1954, he took one of the few photographs of
Christian Dior at his inaugural ‘New Look’ collection of 1947. He also nurtured the careers of a generation of models including Wenda Rogerson (Mrs Norman Parkinson), Barbara Goalen and Suzy Parker, and discovered Elsa Martinelli and Audrey Hepburn, who worked with him as a model in Paris.
As a portraitist for the magazine’s ‘Spotlight’ pages, he photographed many of his subjects at the outset of their careers.
Truman Capote and Arthur Miller (1948),
Gore Vidal (1949),
Lucian Freud and Richard Attenborough (1947), as well as more internationally well-known figures such as Gloria Swanson, Lady
Diana Cooper,
Ernest Hemingway and
Tennessee Williams.
His adaptation of the ‘ring light’, used in cosmetic dentistry, had a far-reaching effect on studio lighting and on the technique of photographers of future generations, including David Bailey,
Helmut Newton and Nick Knight, who have all used electronic versions of his discovery.
That he is so little-known outside the fashion world has much to do with his own ambivalent attitude towards self-promotion. He felt too that he never ‘fitted in ‘– ‘He was a weird, wild man,’ wrote Vogue model Wilhemina. ‘He used to throw the editors down the staircase’ and added that ‘He should have lived in the sixties. He was witty, bitchy and for the dull fifties shockingly so.’ When he achieved what he wanted, financially and artistically, he slipped effortlessly from view, leaving his work in the offices of Vogue London and New York. He oversaw no exhibitions of his work nor produced, like many of his colleagues, books of his vintage photographs. Only one print has ever appeared at auction. His lifestyle also hastened an early retirement. As his workload escalated (at one point, for his advertised work, he was one of the world’s highest-paid photographers), his health disintegrated and he suffered bouts of alcoholism and drug addiction. But his professionalism behind the lens has never been disputed: ‘He taught all who worked with him a lesson in dedication,’ wrote Vogue in 1966. ‘Nothing was too much trouble. In his search for what he wanted he reduced his models to tears, fashion editors to desperation and himself to complete exhaustion. From the rubble of emotion emerged a perfect cool picture.’
His New York studio was destroyed by fire in the mid-sixties and nothing could be salvaged, so all that remains is his collection with Vogue which, after nearly fifty years in its archives in London and New York, deserves re-evaluation once more.
Clifford Coffin: The Varnished Truth – Photographs from Vogue 1945 to 1955 was an exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery for three months in 1997. [2]
Coffin suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction, and died of throat cancer in Pasadena, California, in 1972, aged 58.[2]
Jean Marais (1913-98)
Actor
Paris, 10 May 1946
Vintage print
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Lucian Freud (1922-2011)
Painter
London, 18 March 1947
Vintage print
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Christian Dior (1905-57)
Fashion designer
Paris, c. February 1947
Modern print
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Gore Vidal (1925-2012)
Writer
Paris, 17 February 1949
Vintage print
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Jean Patchett (1926-2002) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Fashion model; writer
Finca Vigiá, Cuba (CHK) 1950
Fashion: B.H. Wragge
Modern print
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Lady Diana Cooper (Viscountess Norwich 1892-1986)
Paris, 26 May6 1948
Fashion: Molyneux
Vintage print
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Mrs Sachverell Sitwell (Georgia Doble, 1905-80)
London, 17 September 1947
Fashion: Adrienne
Vintage print
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams 1911-83)
Playwright
London, 15 June 1948
Vintage print
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Vivien Leigh (1913-67)
Actress
London, 19 December 1947
Fragment of vintage tear contact sheet
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Elsa Martinelli,
Fashion model and actress
Paris, July 1954
Fashion: Givenchy Vintage print
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Truman Capote by Clifford Coffin
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