Adolf de Meyer

Adolph de Meyer was reportedly born in France and educated in Dresden. He began his career in photography in Berlin in the 1880s. He was hired by publisher Condé Nast in 1914 as the first chief photographer for his flagship magazines, Vogue and Vanity Fair, a position that forged his reputation as photography's fashion photographer. Prior to his tenure in New York, however, de Meyer lived in London and was an ardent practitioner of pictorialist photography. This international movement took root in the late 1880s and 1890s in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia, as photographers reacted against the idea that the camera was merely a slavish recorder of facts and set out to demonstrate that photographic materials were malleable enough to express the vision of its practitioners. These ideas were disseminated through the international network of camera clubs and photographic societies that the photographers formed to provide instruction, social outings, and exchange and exhibition through publications and juried salons. The preferred aesthetic was a soft-focused image that privileged broad effects over crisp detail, one that de Meyer adopted and practiced with his customary refinement.

De Meyer became well-connected in the pictorialist movement in both Europe and the United States. Alfred Stieglitz, who would become a driving force for photography in the United States, also studied in Berlin from 1881 to 1890. Stieglitz would remain a strong supporter of de Meyer's, exhibiting de Meyer's work first in 1907 at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and publishing it in Camerawork on numerous occasions, notably in 1908 when he devoted the full issue of Camerawork 24 to de Meyer. In England, the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, founded in 1892, upheld the values of pictorialism and de Meyer was invited to join their ranks in 1898. His accomplished photographs as well as his refined taste and social connections (his wife Olga was the goddaughter of King Edward VII), and his elegant portraits of society women paved the way for the Condé Nast position that he held from 1914-1921. De Meyer regularly exhibited his work until he assumed that role.