NICKOLAS MURAY
Babe Ruth circa 1940
george eastman house, rochester, new york
hands: david wooters, 3.4.93

Nickolas Muray, a Hungarian Olympic fencing champion, came to the United States in 1913 and found work as an engraver for Condé Nast. In 1920 he opened a photographic studio of his own in Greenwich Village. For the next 45 years he took portraits of celebrities, (at the beginning he did many for Nast’s Vanity Fair magazine), and photographed for advertising agencies.

Muray had a business-like attitude toward photography, as this head-on portrait of his fellow athlete George Herman Ruth suggests. “It is always the photographer’s job to make his pictures as attractive and dramatic as possible,” he wrote, adding, “You dream it, we’ll photograph it—all in a day’s work.”