Attie began his photographic career as a student and protege of famed
Harper's Bazaar art director
Alexey Brodovitch, who had similarly mentored the careers of
Richard Avedon,
Irving Penn,
Diane Arbus, and Attie's close friend (and fellow Brodovitch classmate)
Hiro. When Attie studied under Brodovitch, his legendary "Design Laboratory" course at
The New School For Social Research—which Brodovitch used to discover new talent for Bazaar—was held in Avedon's photo studio. According to his Capote book, his success in Brodovitch's famously difficult course was the result of a creative accident: "One night, [he] was developing film for his very first class assignment [photos of the original Penn Station], when he realized he’d underexposed every single frame. Class was the next day. In other words, he was toast -- and so was his new career. In a desperate panic, he started layering the negatives together, to create moody, impressionistic photo montages. His life must have been flashing before his eyes, and at the wrong exposure. Brodovitch loved the montages. He spent the entire class gushing over them." On the final night of the course, Brodovitch gave Attie his first professional assignment, which was to create a series of photo montages to illustrate
Truman Capote's newest work,
Breakfast at Tiffany's, for its first-ever publication Bazaar in 1958. But while Attie completed the montages, Capote began to clash with the publisher of Bazaar, the Hearst Corporation, over the tart language and subject matter of his novella. Alice Morris, the magazine's literary editor, later recounted that Capote agreed to make the changes Hearst wanted "partly because I showed him the layouts... six pages with beautiful, atmospheric photographs." But in the end, Hearst decided that Bazaar could not run
Breakfast at Tiffany's anyway; its language and subject matter were still deemed "not suitable," and there was concern that Tiffany's, a major advertiser, would react negatively. When Capote resold the novella to Esquire, he specified that he "would not be interested if [Esquire] did not use Attie's [original series of] photographs." He wrote to Esquire fiction editor
Rust Hills, "I'm happy that you are using his pictures, as I think they are excellent." But to Capote's disappointment, Esquire used just one full-page image of Attie's, which was the first-ever visual depiction of Holly Golightly. (Another image of his was later used as the cover of at least one paperback edition of the novella.) Attie's work on the project nonetheless launched his career, gaining him further assignments from both Bazaar and Brodovitch. In 2021 Esquire re-ran the novella online, reuniting the text with many of Attie's original images. Attie also went on to shoot portraits of Capote and to illustrate his essay
Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir for
Holiday Magazine (later republished many times, including in Attie's recent photo book, Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, Little Bookroom, 2015). Some of Attie's unused
Breakfast at Tiffany's montages were later modified and used to illustrate Bill Manville's 1960 memoir
Saloon Society, The Diary of a Year Beyond Aspirin, which was also designed by Brodovitch. Brodovitch biographer Kerry William Purcell has described Attie's work on this book as "an inspired set of experimental images." From that point forward, Attie's commercial work was prolific and wide-ranging – including frequent covers and spreads for
Vogue,
Time,
Newsweek,
Playboy, and
Bazaar; portraits of everyone from
Carl Reiner and
Leonard Bernstein to
Ralph Ellison and
W.E.B. Du Bois and
The Band; a variety of album covers (including at least one edition of
Sammy Davis Jr. and
Carmen McRae performing
Porgy and Bess); and his own books of photographs, 1977's
Russian Self-Portraits, and 1981's
Portrait: Theory (together with
Chuck Close,
Robert Mapplethorpe and others). Attie collaborated again with Brodovitch on a still-renowned special section of Harper's than ran in October 1959, "Writing in America," which was edited by future
New York Review of Books editor
Robert B. Silvers and used Attie's images to illustrate essays by
Budd Schulberg,
Kingsley Amis,
Archibald MacLeish and others; it has been republished in book form, most recently in 2018, and is now seen as a template for
The New York Review of Books itself. Attie also did the photos for a 1964 pinup book of
Jayne Mansfield called
Jayne Mansfield for President, on which he declined to put his name. As part of the promotion for
Russian Self-Portraits, Attie appeared on a March, 1978 episode of the game show
To Tell The Truth. Attie's April 1959 photo-shoot of
Lorraine Hansberry for
Vogue magazine, in the apartment at 337 Bleecker Street apartment where she had written
A Raisin in the Sun, has become especially widely published. In her award-winning Hansberry biography
Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,
Imani Perry writes that in his "gorgeous" images, "Attie captured her intellectual confidence, armor, and remarkable beauty." When
Bobby Fischer arrived for his August 10, 1971 portrait session with Attie—a cover shoot for the March, 1972 issue of
Amerika Magazine that was originally assigned to
Richard Avedon, whom Fischer rejected because of his work as a fashion photographer—the eccentric chess master believed he looked unshaven and asked Attie to shave him. Attie obliged, and an 8mm home movie of the proceedings, shot by Attie's wife
Dotty, was recently found by the family. In addition to his own work, Attie taught courses at Brodovitch's Design Laboratory in the 1960s, and at both the
School of Visual Arts and
The New School in the 1970s and '80s. He was also a Specialist-Lecturer at the U.S. Government exhibit "Photography USA" in Bucharest in 1974. While a number of Attie's portraits are in the
Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and his work is in the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art, for some years after his passing, his work was not widely seen. In the past handful of years, however, Attie's work has experienced a significant revival. In 2014,
New York Magazine published some of his previously unseen portraits of Capote from 1958, as well as a 1959 portrait of pioneering Brill Building songwriters
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, which was originally shot for Vogue. Then a small selection of his music-related portraits became available through the online gallery Rock Paper Photo. Then a much broader selection of his work became available through Getty Images, leading to its publication in magazines and books around the world. Attie's work has appeared in a number of recent documentaries as well. His Hansberry portraits appear in
Netflix's acclaimed 2015 Nina Simone documentary
What Happened, Miss Simone?, in the Oscar-nominated 2016
James Baldwin documentary
I Am Not Your Negro, and in director Tracy Strain's 2018 American Masters documentary about Hansberry herself, "Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart." His Leiber and Stoller portraits appear in HBO's 2018 documentary “Elvis Presley: The Searcher.” His 1969 studio portraits of
The Band appear in Daniel Roher's
Robbie Robertson documentary
Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band, as well as having their own four-page spread in
Harvey Kubernik and Ken Kubernik's “The Story of the Band: From Big Pink to The Last Waltz” (Sterling Publishing, 2018). Most significantly, in November 2015, The Little Bookroom published a coffee-table book of Attie's portraits of Capote and his
street photography taken in connection with
Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir, entitled
Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With The Lost Photographs of David Attie. The book was well-reviewed in
The New York Times and many other publications in America and around the world;
The Independent named it one of the eight best art books of 2015 and wrote "when it comes to illustrated works, [this] one relatively slim volume stands out... a real gem of a find.” The book was also a finalist for a 2016 Indie Book Award. Its publication and reception have helped to bring considerable attention to Attie's work, including prominent supporters such as Bruce Weber and Mary Louise Parker, who called it an "extraordinary book," and is seen leafing through it in the 2018 indie drama
Golden Exits. In December, 2021, Abrams published a book of Attie's behind-the-scenes photos from the very first season of
Sesame Street (capturing the making of portions of episodes 96, 106, 110, and 112), entitled "The Unseen Photos of Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street." In June 2018, Contact Photo LA opened an exhibit of Attie's long-unseen photo montages. In May 2019, Attie's Russian and American self-portraits were exhibited at the
Wednesbury Museum and Art Gallery in the West Midlands of England, as part of the BLAST! Photo Festival, along with work he had influenced by artists from that region. In March 2021, Keith de Lellis Gallery in NYC opened a solo exhibit of Attie's work. Keith De Lellis Gallery continues to represent Attie's work. Attie was married to acclaimed feminist painter
Dotty Attie, and was a cousin of visual artist
Shimon Attie. ==References==