Photographer Patrick O’Higgins Celebrated In New Coffee Table Book

by SHOWstudio on 8 April 2024

Steve McQueen and Tennessee Williams feature amongst never-before-seen photographs in new Patrick O'Higgins monograph.

Steve McQueen and Tennessee Williams feature amongst never-before-seen photographs in new Patrick O'Higgins monograph.

Twentieth Century polymath Patrick O’Higgins (1922 - 1980) wasn't always a photographer. He was also an assistant. But not just anyone's assistant; Helena Rubinstein’s personal assistant, an unforgettable experience he rightly chronicled in his 1971 memoir Madame. Now, O'Higgins’ post-war portraits will be published this May in a book aptly titled Monsieur. The upcoming monograph comprises lost-but-found images of the little-known photographer's sitting sessions with the likes of Cecil Beaton, Elsa Schiaparelli and Tennessee Williams, all dating back to a post-World War II Europe. They aim to offer insights into stylish charm floating around art, literature and creative communities in the late 40s to early 50s. But what connects them altogether other than O'Higgins himself? They're all thoroughly driven by the visual.

'Monsieur' by Peter O'Higgins

Much like O'Higgins, Helena Rubinstein and Cecil Beaton too, were - at their fundamental core - visual communicators. Rubinstein helped create our daily expressions around artifice as a standard-bearer for beauty. Rubinstein used pop psychology — mixing class with societal expectations to impact personal aesthetic anxieties — that revolutionised cosmetic products to a 20th-century customer base. She not only creatively directed the first big beauty company but also decidedly took control of the manufacturing side of business; a rarity in those days, no less even more unusual because Rubenstein was a woman. Considering this, it's no surprise she became the first self-made American female millionaire, sold her company, bought it back at a reduced stock market price, then increased its value 13 times over. All through a focus on visual communication.

Helena Rubenstein with then-assistant Patrick O'Higgins

Cecil Beaton learned to create supernatural images by discovering beauty from his mum’s makeup drawer. This lesson in aesthetic standards transformed Beaton photography, set designs and his approach to daily life as an otherworldly stage. He went from photographing his sisters to Marlene Dietrich, Pablo Picasso and World War II through the lens of photojournalism. Beaton connected the surreal and the egalitarian to live quite the life, all through a focus on visual communication. Noticing a thread here?

Figures like Jean Cocteau are also included in the book's pages, but this hardly comes as a surprise. Whether Cocteau's project was a house or a dress, book design or a magazine cover - it's only too well documented that visual communication was an absolute necessity for the poet and playwright -even in his own peculiar writings.

Want to know more? Patrick O'Higgins' own story about visual communication includes a foreword by his niece Marianne Hinton and an essay on O’Higgins himself from the professional archivist Jane Marguerite Tippett. And we promise you, is just of a treat as the subjects the book pays tribute to.

Monsieur: Patrick O’Higgins — The Lost Photographer out 16 May 2024.

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