Marilyn Monroe bent her knees, threw her legs backward, and leaped into the air, so that it looked as if she had lost her legs altogether. The photographer, confronted with what appeared to be a truncated Marilyn, demanded a retake.
“Marilyn,” Philippe Halsman later recalled telling her, “try to express your character a little more.”
“You mean that my jump shows my character?” Monroe responded hesitantly and then froze, unable to move. They continued with other pictures, including one in which Halsman held hands with Monroe and jumped in tandem, the actress tucking her legs underneath her again. Only later, Halsman remembers in Jump (Damiani), his 1959 photo book reissued this week, would he recognize the singularity of Monroe’s jump.
Before you Instagrammed your leap off that boat dock, before you watched that YouTube video instructing you exactly how to attractively achieve said fleeting, gravity-defying moment, before Arthur Elgort captured a generation of models and actors exuberantly midair in what would become a classic fashion pose, there was Philippe Halsman, self-described “jumpologist.” For magazines like Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post, he photographed royalty, scientists, society dames, industry captains, poets, presidents, CEOs, singers, and movie stars. At the end of every portrait session, he had a special request. He asked them all to jump.
Halsman considered this a psychological tool, his Rorschach test. Concentrating on the physical act of jumping, however large or small, necessitated a loss of inhibition and control and composure. (Halsman analyzes this at length in an endearingly overthought essay that accompanies his book on the “science” of jumping: “The jump does not always express what the jumper is. It can also express what he wants to be.”) It was the moment at which Halsman’s subjects, some of the most buttoned-up and venerated and recognizable figures in the world, were unmasked, briefly exposing their real selves, while still elegantly attired for their photo session. It did, as Monroe rightly, fearfully predicted, show one’s character. Does the act of jumping for the camera—now a well-documented, hashtagged trope—still produce such charmingly unpredictable results?
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor clasped hands and gamely jumped, she in her double strand of pearls. The street photographer Weegee kept his own camera around his neck and his cigar in his mouth. A pre-presidential Richard Nixon, neck crammed into his tight-collared suit, somehow appears to be floating. Jayne Mansfield brandished a sword, and Brigitte Bardot seemingly, joyously, took flight off a cliff. One of the most remarkable jumps, Salvador Dalí’s, was accomplished in no less than 28 takes (which meant 28 thrown cats and 28 splashes of water). He photographed John Steinbeck, Audrey Hepburn, Dean Martin, Marc Chagall, Groucho Marx, Eartha Kitt, all somewhere between the ground and the sky. When Halsman said jump, they did.