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| Ara Gallant |
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He was born Ira Gallantz in 1932 in the Bronx but later changed his name because he felt Ara Gallant sounded more exotic. And the life he led was, indeed, an exotic one. Gallant started his career in fashion as a hairdresser, working at Bergdorf Goodman as one of the city’s top colorists. In the mid-1960s he was approached by Vogue and began working exclusively as a hair stylist on photo assignments. In fact, he was the first hair stylist to be paid for such work. (Before, stylists. had been paid only for editorial credit.)
Gallant worked with many of the great fashion photographers of the period—Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Bert Stern, among them. His most notable contribution was the introduction of “flying hair,” a visual gimmick he first used on an Avedon shoot with Twiggy in 1966. The effect is still widely copied today.
By the early 1970s Gallant began shooting pictures himself. His first assignment was celebrity portraits for Interview magazine. His work often juxtaposed classic Horst-like compositions with contemporary scenarios—models snorting cocaine or suggestive sexual situations involving multiple partners. In the early 1980s Gallant moved to Los Angeles to live with his friend Jack Nicholson and to pursue a directing career. It never happened. In 1990 he committed suicide in a hotel room in Las Vegas.
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