1930s portraits

‘National Types of Beauty’ was a series of real photo cigarette cards distributed in the 1930s. Some of the women portrayed were well-known ...

The photography of Marianne Breslauer is striking for both its intimacy and its subjects—women, usually of the sleek, chic and gender-bending variety, posed to optimum androgynous elegance. A bohemian Berliner by birth, Breslauer studied under Man Ray for a time in Paris and achieved some commercial success before returning home to an increasingly volatile Germany. As a Jewish artist working in an obviously queer milieu, Breslauer eventually fled to Switzerland and retired from photography…

1920s portrait postcard of actor and artist Paul Swan, who in his early career was billed as “The Most Beautiful Man in the World.” Via Dix.