Melvin Sokolsky passed away on August 29 at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was a photographer who broke barriers by producing fanciful tableaus for fashion bibles like Harper’s Bazaar that appeared to defy gravity and reason. He was 88.
The death was confirmed by his son, Bing.
Mr. Sokolsky was an amateur photographer who was raised in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As a youngster, he used his father’s box camera to take images. His fashion photographic career, which spanned the 1960s burst of colour and innovation, combined cool couture style with high-art surrealism. After winning more than 25 Clio Awards, he began directing and producing television advertisements in 1969. He was responsible for iconic pieces like Ricardo Montalbán’s “Corinthian leather” Chrysler advertising.
Whatever the case, it was his decade spent working for magazines that cemented his name and helped redefine what was possible in fashion photography. During this time, he captured iconic photographs of Hollywood icons like Mia Farrow and Natalie Wood and won the admiration of top models like Twiggy. Numerous of his photographs were eventually displayed in galleries and museums, such as the Getty in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Louvre in Paris.