1. He didn’t set out to be a photographer.
Born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann in Germany in 1904, Horst studied design and carpentry in Hamburg before moving to Paris in 1930 to work as an apprentice to the celebrated architect Le Corbusier. ‘It’s not widely known,’ says Brown, ‘but what you see very clearly in his photographs is an understanding of 3D form. Part of what makes him such a skilled photographer is that he had this knowledge of the craft of architecture. He thought in three dimensions and about the sculptural quality of the light on form, not just about the two dimensional page.’ Marlene Dietrich complained about Horst’s dramatic lighting but even she couldn’t argue with the results.