Philippe Halsman was born in Riga (part of the Russian Empire which later became Latvia) in 1906, and died in New York City in 1979. He began taking photographs in Paris in the 1930s, and opened a portrait studio in Montparnasse in 1934. He arrived in the United States in 1940, just after the fall of France, having obtained an emergency visa through the intervention of Albert Einstein. In 1958, Halsman was voted one of the world’s top ten photographers in an international poll conducted by Popular Photography. In 1962, he founded the Famous Photographers School alongside Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and others. And in 1970, he made his 100th magazine cover for Life.
