Georges Dambier

Born in in 1925, Georges Dambier first studied drawing and graphic design before landing a job in a photographic portrait studio in Paris, where he learned the fundamentals of the medium and settled upon it as a career. In the years directly following World War II, when Paris reawakened and became once again the center of fashion, the young Dambier was perfectly placed to capture the glamour of the time. His first fashion assignments were for Elle magazine, where his refined and dynamic images regularly appeared. In the coming years Dambier’s photographs were published in Vogue, Le Jardin des Modes, Marie France, and elsewhere. Impressed with Dambier’s creative output, Robert Capa was considering him to head up a fashion division within the Magnum photo agency at the time of the photojournalist’s death in 1954. 

In 1964 Dambier launched his own fashion magazine, Twenty, which was aimed at a younger audience. The following decade he was co-founder of the magazine VSD, whose initials stood for Vendredi, Samedi, Dimanche (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), still in publication today. As a photographer and a publisher Dambier contributed significantly to the richness of fashion photography in the post-war period.