A Century of Fashion and Photographic Genius

Updated June 1, 2018 11:20 a.m. ET

The result was an energetic masterpiece, “Black Evening Dress in Flight, New York,” in which a model, seen from above, strides forward with her sandaled right foot. The photo made the final cut of more than 160 pictures in “Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911–2011,” opening June 26 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Such flashes of instinct and inspiration infuse the history of fashion photography, from

Edward Steichen’s

painstaking 1911 portraits of Paris couture, through years shadowed by war and financial depression, to the smartphone snapshots flowing through Instagram.

“Rather than building a show that…would focus in on the most popular, well-known photographers, I decided to do the opposite,” said

Paul Martineau,

the associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the exhibition’s organizer. “To highlight lots of photographers who are deserving but just aren’t out there.”

Among these 89 photographers, unusually, are 15 women, including the boundary-pushing

Louise Dahl-Wolfe,

whose 1946 shot “Model amid Ruins, Paris” captures a woman in gloves, fur-trimmed suit and high heels picking her way gingerly through the rubble of a bombed-out building.

The opening gallery covers the tumultuous period from 1911 to 1929. The “fathers of modern fashion photography,” Mr. Martineau said, are the triumvirate of Steichen,

Baron de Meyer

and Vogue publisher

Condé Nast.

Early in the 20th century, as magazines evolved to photographs from illustrations, photographers honed signature styles. De Meyer, a maestro of backlighting, crafted lush, silvery tableaus of socialites, including his 1913 “Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, in a Costume by

Léon Bakst.

” By contrast, Steichen “simplifies everything,” Mr. Martineau said, in coolly elegant images such as “Actress Caja Eric Modeling a Gown by Chanel, New York,” made in 1928 at Condé Nast’s Park Avenue apartment.

Supplementing the exhibit’s photographs are period clothes from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, including an ethereal low-waisted Chanel dress from 1924. The clothes demonstrate that after a period of more-daring fashion, the 1929 stock-market crash and the subsequent Great Depression whipsawed styles. “Whenever there’s some kind of turmoil economically, there’s kind of a backlash,” Mr. Martineau said. Fashion’s about-face is evident in

George Hurrell’s

1932 “

Joan Crawford

Wearing the

Letty Lynton

Dress,” in which the actress poses with hands clasped in a head-to-toe explosion of white ruffles. Adrian, a designer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, created the demure costume. “This dress was copied by

Macy’s

and sold over 50,000 copies, at the height of the Depression,” Mr. Martineau said.

The curator has also included German-born

Erwin Blumenfeld,

who shot to prominence as a photographer in the 1930s. The onetime leather-goods shop-owner broke through a locked door in the space he was renting “and found a full darkroom,” Mr. Martineau said. A born experimenter, Blumenfeld tried scratching, freezing and even burning his negatives as well as shooting through textured glass or gauze. In less than a decade, he was photographing one of the first supermodels—documented in the exhibit by 1938’s “Fashion Study,

Lisa Fonssagrives,

Paris.”

Despite their different styles, Mr. Martineau said,

Irving Penn

(1917-2009) and Avedon (1923-2004) “set the tone for everything that happened after the 1950s.” Penn’s hallmarks were stillness and poise, using studio lights to capture models as paragons of elegance. By contrast, the peripatetic Avedon plunged his models into unusual settings, where he peppered them with images to embody. “He would tell them stories,” Mr. Martineau said, “like, ‘Pretend you’re a crow on an icy branch in the middle of winter.’”

One of those striking settings is “Dovima with Elephants, Evening Dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955.” In it, the Queens-born Dorothy Juba, who took the mellifluous name Dovima, appears at the circus in Paris. Avedon sought to juxtapose “the elegance of the model and the unusually gritty location,” Mr. Martineau said. Dovima, the highest-paid fashion model of her time, is wearing “the first dress that Yves Saint Laurent made” for the House of Dior, Mr. Martineau said. In the picture, Dovima rests a hand on one elephant’s trunk and reaches out toward another’s ear. She exudes a rapturous serenity, Mr. Martineau said, despite being “leery of being knocked over or stepped on.”

The exhibition’s final sections include

Jamel Shabazz’s

glimpses of early hip-hop styles in Brooklyn in the early 1980s as well as edgy works by

Helmut Newton

and others, where a tone of sex and violence often leaves the clothes in the background. By the 1990s, technology took over. Digital retouching spread after Photoshop’s introduction. A decade later, fashion bloggers were ascendant, abandoning artful focus and giving sidewalk dandies a flicker of fame. The show wraps up with images of snappy dressers from Milan and New York.

Write to Brenda Cronin at brenda.cronin@wsj.com