In 1927, at age 34, Henri enrolled as a non-matriculating student at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where she studied photography for the first time with László Moholy-Nagy, developing a close friendship with Lucia Moholy, who strongly encouraged Henri’s experimentation with the camera.
In 1927, at age 34, Henri enrolled as a non-matriculating student at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where she studied photography for the first time with László Moholy-Nagy, developing a close friendship with Lucia Moholy, who strongly encouraged Henri’s experimentation with the camera.
Florence Henri was an American-born Swiss photographer and artist, best known for her use of mirrors and unusual angles to create disorienting photographs. Her work included experimental photography, advertising, and portraits, many of artists.
Background
Ethnicity:
Her father was of French descent and her mother was Pole.
Born in New York on June 28, 1893, Florence Henri left the United States permanently at the age of two, following the death of her mother, and spent her childhood constantly travelling between maternal relatives in Silesia (then part of Germany), a convent school in Paris, and family homes in London and the Isle of Wight, where her father then died in 1908. After the death of her father, Henri went to live in Rome with Gino Gori, a poet who introduced Henri to the avant-garde art movement.
Education
Henri began to study music in Paris at the age of nine. She then studied it in London and Rome and by 1911 was a proficient pianist. In 1913, she moved to Berlin to continue her music studies with pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni.
After visiting the Academy of the Arts, Berlin, Henri, however, decided to pursue painting instead of music. Throughout this period, Henri focused on figure studies and landscapes. Henri moved to Paris by 1924 and enrolled in the Académie Moderne to study under Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfantbegan, working in the visual idiom of late Cubism.
In 1927, at the age of 34, Henri enrolled as a non-matriculating student at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where she studied photography for the first time with László Moholy-Nagy, developing a close friendship with Lucia Moholy, who strongly encouraged Henri’s experimentation with the camera.
After some period as an accompanist for silent movies in Berlin, Henri began her artistic career as an abstract painter but, upon studying at the Bauhaus in Germany, turned to photography as what she perceived as the medium of the future.
Between 1928 and the late 1930s, Henri produced the work for which she is best known, including her mirror compositions, participating in the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929. First she used mirrors simply as reflections for her portraits and self-portraits, then gave them a much more central role. Her self-portrait with spheres, where she is reflected both by a mirror and by metal spheres, quickly became a famous modernist landmark. Henri’s photographs became part of seminal international exhibitions, such as Fotografie der Gegenwart (Contemporary Photography, 1929), Film Und Foto (Film and Photo, 1929) and Das Lichtbild (The Photograph, 1931). At that time, due to Henri’s fame in Europe, she became influential in the field: photographer Ilse Bing, for instance, explained that she wanted to settle in Paris because Florence Henri worked there and she felt close to her ideas.
In 1929, just two years after leaving the Bauhaus, Henri’s Paris portrait studio became as well-known as that of Man Ray. She taught classes, and her students included future luminaries such as Gisèle Freund and Lisette Model.
After moving to Paris, Henri also worked for "Vogue", "Art et Decoration", and "The New York Herald". She did commissions for fashion, advertising, and portrait photography. Her images featured unusual perspectives and were carefully cropped. As she specialized in portrait photography, Henri became acquainted with many famous artists of that time, including Germaine Krull, André Kertész, Man Ray, and Maurice Tabard. She experimented with prisms, multiple exposures, and mirrors.
In addition to portraits of well-known figures of the Paris cultural scene, she also did anonymous portraits ("Portrait Compositions"), many self-portraits, and so-called "Mirror Compositions", which occupy a central place in her body of artistic work.
As the second World War approached with the occupation of the Nazi Party, there was a noticeable decline in her photographic work which would have been considered degenerate art. Photographic materials would have become increasingly hard to obtain and Florence Henri returned to abstract painting until her death in the 1980s.
As was the case with many women artists of the early 20th century, her work was forgotten until renewed interest by feminist scholars resurrected it in the 1970s. She had her first solo exhibition in four decades in 1974, at which time a small portfolio of her work was also published. Since then she has been included in a number of solo exhibitions and many group exhibitions alongside the many talented women of her era.
In 1963 Henri moved to Bellival, Picardie, and gave up photography, turning instead to abstract painting.
Florence Henri died in Compiègne on July 24, 1982.
Henri’s manipulation of mirrors, prisms, and reflective objects to frame, isolate, double, and otherwise interact with her subjects--one of the most distinctive and adventurous features of her photographic work--often confounds viewers’ ability to distinguish between reality and reflection. Henri also experimented with photomontage, multiple exposures, photograms, and negative printing in her work, consistently constructing images that undermine the camera’s capacity for realism to create multifaceted, artificial, imagined spaces. The spatial and psychological ambiguity produced by Henri’s complex and disorienting compositions accounts not only for their status as virtuosic examples of the formal and technical experimentation of New Vision photography at the Bauhaus, but also for the currency of her work within discussions of Surrealism.
Quotations:
"What I want above all," Florence Henri said near the end of her long life, "is to compose the photograph as I do with painting. Volumes, lines, shadows and light have to obey my will and say what I want them to say. This happens under the strict control of composition, since I do not pretend to explain the world nor to explain my thoughts."
Personality
Florence Henri was bisexual and at times adopted a tomboyish, androgynous style.
Quotes from others about the person
“With Florence Henri’s photos, photographic practice enters a new phase, the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today.” - László Moholy-Nagy.
Connections
Florence Henri was never married and had no children.