“Brando came up to the Cape when I was there,” said Philippe Halsman. “There was no point in discovering him, it was so obvious. I never saw such raw talent in an individual, except for Laurette Taylor, whose talent was hardly raw. Then, before he was famous, Brando was a gentle, lovely guy, a man of extraordinary beauty when I first met him. He was very natural and helpful. He repaired the plumbing that had gone on the whack, and he repaired the lights that had gone off. And then he just sat calmly down and began to read. After five minutes, Margo Jones, who was staying with us, said, ‘Oh, this is the greatest reading I’ve ever heard, even in Texas!’ And that’s how he was cast in Streetcar.”
In 1949 and 1950, renowned photographer Philippe Halsman captured a series of black and white portraits of a young Marlon Brando in New York City. These photographs are celebrated for their striking use of light and shadow, which emphasize Brando's contemplative expressions and youthful features. One notable image features Brando wearing a striped shirt, gazing pensively away from the camera, conveying depth and introspection.
Halsman was at one point considered the best photo-portraitist in France. He had an incessant interest in faces: “Every face I see seems to hide—and sometimes fleetingly reveal—the mystery of another human being.” Halsman’s photographs of politicians, celebrities, and intellectuals were featured widely in magazines like LIFE and Vogue. His more famous subjects included the likes of Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, Audrey Hepburn, and Albert Einstein. In the 1950s, Halsman began asking his sitters to jump in front of the camera, because he noticed that doing so paradoxically seemed to relax people. With his background in engineering, Halsman also made groundbreaking photographic inventions, including a twin-lens reflex camera that allowed the operator to see his sitter through a viewfinder.
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