Discovering the Unknown Philippe Halsman

The late photographer Philippe Halsman drowned the world in snapshots. His sensational portraits of universal superstars like Marilyn Monroe and Alfred Hitchcock are larger than life, and he produced dozens of powerful collections. Halsman is admired by millions in the art world as a camera wizard; however, the public didn't see that his skills reached beyond the yellow in Marilyn's hair. Halsman's obscurity and genius is shown in a new collection, Unknown Halsman, conceived and crafted by his grandson, Oliver Halsman Rosenberg. In talking with Rosenberg about the upcoming book, I learn that what goes on behind the lens will never be more than a mystery.

So you were in New York when you started researching Unknown Halsman?
Yeah, my grandparents lived in New York, they came here in the 1940s. I used to run an art gallery in San Francisco, and then I decided to leave it all behind to go study esoteric stuff in India. I stopped off in New York to hang out with my grandmother before I disappeared. She had a stroke while I was there, so I ended up staying. Then she passed away, and that’s where all my grandfather’s photographs were. I was looking through them, and decided re-archive them in a digital way. I was in his studio going through files every night and every day, just being in his space, looking at everything.

Was your grandmother’s stroke the event that triggered the conception of the book?
It was a lot of things. Ever since I was a kid, I had seen lots of his photographs that nobody else had ever seen, and it had always been in the back of my mind that it would be cool to create a book out of them. Then, once I came into contact with all of those images again, it felt like it was all at my fingertips, and I knew it was now or never. The book also has a subtle narrative that I created with the images that deals with life, death, and rebirth, so in a way, my grandmother’s death definitely brought me some wisdom that I translated through my grandfather’s photographs. The spirits of my grandmother and grandfather were so strong, it’s just a celebration of life coming from the experience of death. It’s all about transformation. Since I had a more digital perspective on the photographs, it became sort of metaphysical, too.

You’re an artist as well. How did your own art end up meshing with your grandfather’s in the book?
I felt like it was an ancestral collaboration in a way, because I was using all of his materials, but filtering it through my own artistic perspective. I did everything by hand, and I wanted it to have a handmade feel. It was a bit of a labor of love. Since my grandfather made so many books in his lifetime, it became sort of a weird legacy, making little art books.

Philippe Halsman was also known for his famous quotations, and you use them as captions in the book. How did you decide which to include?
I went through every single envelope of image and contact sheet, and all of the interviews written with him. I read everything, and if I liked a quote or phrase, I photocopied and highlighted it. I kept narrowing them down, and then it was a matter of finding the quote that fit at each point in the book. I could only choose 100, and there were so many brilliant things that ended up being left out.

The title has so many layers. What was the side of Halsman that he showed to the public, and the side he kept hidden, in terms of photography?
He was the most prolific Life Magazine cover photographer, and his celebrity images are really iconographic. I really wanted to look at his more artistic, bizarre side that was removed from celebrity. I mean, who are these people that are so important? I was more interested in discovering and revealing the part of my grandfather that was more playful, dark, and mysterious. Photography wasn’t even considered an art form when he was working at the time, so he never really had the chance to truly show himself. There were some images of his that had been used in advertisements, but when you take out the context, they’re just bizarre. I wanted to remove the context, and let the images speak for themselves.

The cover [a photo of Halsman with a camera, and a black cloth covering his head] is a great metaphor for what you’re trying to achieve in this book.
I think that’s how my grandfather’s subjects always saw him. He would wear a black cloth so he could focus, and no light would come in. There is something eerie in seeing his head in black. The viewer almost feels like the subject matter, and the first image you come across in the book is a self-portrait of him without the hood. Each image is sequenced very specifically, to reveal this unknown side.

How do you think your own relationship with your grandfather affected the book?
He passed away when I was four, and I never really got the chance to know him. So for me, the process of writing the book let me live through his working life. I read through all of his speeches, so I got to know him on a way deeper level than I had up until this point. It was such a treat because he had just been this larger than life, statuesque, person, who I never really knew as a human. But through this process, I got so much closer to him.

So his Albert Einstein portrait is alive?
Yeah, that’s a crazy story. Albert Einstein saved my grandfather’s life. He’s my family’s guardian angel really. When my grandfather was escaping from the Nazis, Einstein had his name placed on an artist list so he could get an emergency visa. That portrait of him has been hanging up in my grandparents’ studio forever. I remember, on that day, I was on the subway, and this woman was wearing a shirt that said “Hiroshima-60 years.” So that time period was on my mind. I came home and looked at the Einstein photograph, and all of a sudden, I noticed that tears had been coming out of the eyes. It freaked me out because it was the anniversary of Hiroshima, and when the photo was taken, my grandfather and Einstein were talking about the war, and everything that came with it. I asked my grandmother, and everyone else I could think of if they had seen the tears, but no one else had even noticed. There is some real magical energy in that apartment that is hopefully captured in the book. The eye was disintegrating too, now that I remember. It’s an incredibly powerful photograph. It strikes me to the core every time I see it.