A photographer who created tableaux for fashion bibles likeHarper’s Bazaar that seemed to defy both gravity and logic died in August. He was old.
His son, Bing, confirmed that his father had died.
Mr. Sokolsky was an untrained photographer who grew up in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and took pictures with his father’s box camera as a child. His career in photography spanned the explosion of color and creativity of the 1960s. He moved on to directing and shooting television commercials in 1969 and won more than 25 awards.
His decade in magazines helped to redefine what was possible in fashion photography, as he produced memorable portraits of Hollywood stars like Mia Farrow and Natalie Wood and earned praise from top models. The Louvre in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Getty in Los Angeles were some of the places where his images were later shown.
David Fahey is the founder of the Fahey/Klein Gallery, which represented Mr. Sokolsky in Los Angeles. He was both an ideas man and a technician. He always had a challenge to the norm.
“Richard Avedon was the leading photographer of the Bazaar, taking classic high-society pictures,” Mr. Sokolsky said in the interview. I was new to the magazine and considered the kid.
He was a maverick.
Mr. Sokolsky was photographing models against peeling walls in tenements. One editor told him that people who read the Bazaar would not recognize the places where he was putting his fashions.
That was the point for Mr. Sokolsky. Diana Vreeland, the magazine’s fashion editor, had to lobby for the photos to be published. People wrote letters when the pictures ran. Mr. Sokolsky talked about it in an interview. Finally, I found a crowd.
His flights of imagination earned him more renown. The buttoned-up early ’60s was when he was already producing images that seemed to foreshadow the next era. The models in the “Fly” series were dressed in Dior and flew over the streets of Paris or over the tables of elegant restaurants filled with well-heeled diners.
Mr. Sokolsky was an art lover who drew inspiration from a lot of different painters.
Bing said that the man told him to steal from the masters.
The models were made to look like the scale of Barbie dolls, by posing on a giant wooden chair. He superimposed images of a model’s face from multiple perspectives and blended models’ faces with flower petals.
Maybe none of his work had an impact on thebubble series. He was invited to shoot the collections by Nancy White in December 1962. The idea was to place a model in a giant soap bubble over familiar locations around Paris. The orb was suspended by a thin cable that was edited out.
He said in the interview that when he built the bubble for the Bazaar shoot, he thought it was a Sokolsky aircraft that could fly anywhere on an engine built into one of the rings that contained the bubble hemispheres. It was not a girl who was captured in a bubble. It was a woman at the helm.
He reprised the concept in 2015, shooting a bubble shoot for Bazaar.
At first, not everyone was enamored with the idea. Ms. White didn’t think it was feasible. Mr. Avedon said that Mr. Sokolsky wouldn’t get the sphere off the ground.
Mr. Sokolsky was angry. Why is God doing something to me? In an interview with Wraparound, a photography and design magazine, he recalled how he thought. I started to realize that the world is not all that nice. There are no deities.
That was more of a reason to do it his way.
The oldest of two sons, David and Yetta (Kleinberg) Sokolsky, was born on October 9, 1933 in Manhattan. His father was a pressman at the printing company. Melvin took a job at the post office when he was 16 to help support his family after his father was diagnosed with multiplesclerosis.
He went on to market a line of form-fitting T-shirts and shorts, placing ads in the back of fitness magazines, Bing said. He invented a coin-operated box with sun lamps that fitness enthusiasts could bronze themselves from quarter to quarter.
His camera was close by. Efforts to get jobs in commercial photography were unsuccessful. Mr. Sokolsky told Wraparound that it was in the 1950s. I was too skilled.
His big break came in 1959 when an art director working on a fur company account threw him a coat. He created a picture of a fur-wrapped model that evoked 1920s glamour. He was credited by name in the magazine image. Henry Wolf, the art director for Bazaar, called him to offer him a job.
Mr. Sokolsky began directing commercials as the 1960s drew to a close. He conceived and directed hit campaigns like the “I’m a Pepper” series for Dr Pepper and a long-running campaign for Coors beer with the actor Mark Harmon. He took photographs for them too.
Mr. Sokolsky did occasional shoots for magazines but never considered moving to 30-second commercial spots.
Bing Sokolsky said that it wasn’t much changing for him. It was about telling a story. When you have a moving image, you can tell even better stories than you can with a single image.
Mr. Sokolsky is survived by his brother and son. His wife, Button, died.
Art, regardless of medium, was seen as acts of experimentation that were not bound by the rules of genre by Mr. Sokolsky.
He told Wraparound there is a place that he calls discovery when experimenting. He said that art is about trying things and discovering things you didn’t notice before.
When he was asked how he knew when an experiment was working, he said it was like a dream.
The invisible cold icicle that goes through your brain doesn’t touch your skin.