Few fashion photographers have as colorful a background as Constantin Joffé. Born in Russia, Joffé spent his early years as a photographer in Paris, working for the fashion magazines. At the outset of World War II, Joffé joined the French Foreign Legion and served as an anti-tank gunner until his capture by the Germans in 1940. His 1944 memoir, We Were Free, documents his time in captivity.

Remarkably, Joffé escaped captivity and found his way to New York where he was hired by Condé Nast to document wartime fashions. Joffé’s inventive approach, and his eye for the elegance of the time, set the tone for fashion photography’s flowering in the post-war period. Joffé was as adept with color photography as he was with black-and-white, and he was one of a select group of 17 photographers covered in Alexander Lieberman’s classic 1951 book, The Art and Technique of Fashion Photography, alongside Irving Penn, Horst P. Horst, and Norman Parkinson, among others.

The Constantin Joffé image offered here was used in 1997 on the reception invitation for The Fords: 50 Years in Fashion at Staley-Wise Gallery in New York. The reception honored Eileen and Jerry Ford of the legendary Ford Modeling Agency, and the attendant exhibition served as a celebration of their immeasurable contributions to the field of fashion photography.