Who Is Marvin Israel?

As art director for Harper’s Bazaar in the sixties, Israel published the work of Richard Avedon and Walker Evans alongside that of less established photographers such as Bill Brandt and Lee Friedlander. “The whole point of Bazaar, with Marvin, was that you never just ran a beautiful portfolio of extraordinarily beautiful women retouched,” the art director Ruth Ansel says. “You ran also a Diane Arbus portfolio of strange people who tattooed their body and lived on the Bowery, to have a counterbalance.”