David Attie

David Attie was an American commercial and fine art photographer, who was widely published in magazines and books from the late 1950s until his death in the 1980s, and whose work has been rediscovered and revived with the 2015 publication of his Truman Capote collaboration "Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With The Lost Photographs of David Attie,", and a 2016-17 exhibit of his early work at the Brooklyn Historical Society. While he worked in a wide range of styles, creating perhaps the best-known portraits of playwright Lorraine Hansberry and illustrating everything from novels to album covers to the work of Capote, Attie was known for multiple imagery—photo montages made by sandwiching negatives together—and also for a style of portraiture in which the subjects themselves controlled the exposure.

Attie grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and graduated from Erasmus Hall High School, the same alma mater as Bobby Fischer, whom Attie later photographed. He briefly attended the Kansas City Art Institute and Cooper Union.

During his Army service, Attie painted pinup-style portraits on the noses of combat planes; two of these are singled out as "gems" of the "nose-art" genre in Edward Young's book on the subject, B-24 Liberator Units of the CBI. Attie then worked as a commercial illustrator, drawing Med Men-era advertisements as well as the covers of magazines and "pulp" novels, until he decided to pursue photography.

Attie began his photographic career as a student and protege of influential Harper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, who had similarly mentored the careers of Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Attie's close friend (and Brodovitch classmate) Hiro. Brodovitch gave Attie his first professional assignment, which was to create a series of photo montages to illustrate Truman Capote's newest work, Breakfast at Tiffany's, for Harper's in 1958. But while Attie completed the montages, Capote began to clash with the publisher of Harper's, the Hearst Corporation, over the tart language and subject matter of his novella. Alice Morris, the magazine's literary editor, later recounted that Capote agreed to make the changes Hearst wanted "partly because I showed him the layouts... six pages with beautiful, atmospheric photographs." But in the end, Hearst decided that Harper's could not run Breakfast at Tiffany's anyway; its language and subject matter were still deemed "not suitable," and there was concern that Tiffany's, a major advertiser, would react negatively.

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