Capturing Fashion: Derujinsky

Groundbreaking fashion photographer Gleb Derujinsky invigorated the fashion industry with his glamorous, exotic, and often unconventional photographs. Gleb Derujinsky’s career as a fashion photographer took hold in the golden age of European haute couture, when Balenciaga and Pierre Balmain were at the top of their game and Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld were designing their first runway shows.

Although air travel was still reserved for the happy few, Derujinsky convinced his editors Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland to send him around the world to photograph beautiful models—like Carmen Dell’Orefice and his future wife, Ruth Neumann—draped in expensive gowns juxtaposed against rough desert dunes or a glittering ocean at sunset. His ideas were revolutionary and they gave rise to the mystique and glamour that is now pervasive in fashion. Derujinsky was the quintessential Renaissance man—photographer, award-winning cinematographer and commercial director, inventor, WWII veteran, world traveler, jewelry designer, musician, ski instructor, Ferrari America race-car driver, and champion glider pilot.

His passion for photography started at the tender age of six, by ten, he had built a photo enlarger, and as a teenager, he became the youngest member of the Camera Club of New York. His photographs appeared in major lifestyle magazines and extensively in Harper’s Bazaar from 1950 to 1970. This is the first monograph to celebrate his major contributions to the history of fashion and photography.

Gleb Derujinsky (1925–2011) worked for Esquire, Look, Life, Glamour, Town and Country, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s Bazaar.

His daughter Andrea Derujinsky is an artist, jewelry designer, and archivist for the Derujinsky estate.