WOMEN ON FILM.(The Talk of the Town)

The photographer Lillian Bassman is an irreverent beauty of eighty-nine whose fashion pictures from the heyday of couture--the late nineteen-forties to the late nineteen-sixties--were influential in animating a stilted genre. In an era of artistic appropriations, Bassman is a self-appropriator. Her late works (on show at the Staley-Wise Gallery, in SoHo, until the end of the month) incorporate her earliest inspirations, those absorbed by a teen-aged free spirit from the Bronx who, in the nineteen-thirties, danced with Martha Graham; posed nude at the Art Students League for fifty cents an hour; got arrested (as "Rosa Bonheur") at a W.P.A. sit-down; and, with her boyfriend, Paul Himmel, she said recently, "lived at the Met for most of the Depression--that was our entertainment."

Those frugal dates gave Bassman an opportunity to study the way the Old Masters represented women's flesh and draperies, and "I lost my mind," she said, "to the elongated figures of El Greco." But the austerities of the period never chastened her enthusiasm for high style. Her mother and Himmel's mother--both "lefty bohemians like me"--made most of her clothes, a "gorgeously eccentric" wardrobe of flowing capes, jodhpurs, and clingy, hand-knitted dresses "with the kind of sexy, magpie swagger that kids have today." She and Himmel married, "for practical reasons," in 1935--"the bourgeois institution was against our principles"--and eventually had two children. Himmel, a noted photographer and psychotherapist, is now ninety-two. "We're either very boring or very well-mated," Bassman said.

An injury ended Bassman's career in dance, and she gave up painting "because it was too slow, and I discovered I could 'paint' more expressively in a darkroom." In 1941, she landed an internship at Harper's Bazaar, assisting the art director Alexey Brodovich. She became his co-art director at Junior Bazaar, and he encouraged her photography. In her six decades behind the camera, she produced magazine covers and big ad campaigns, but she also enjoyed a moment of renown as the designer who, she said, "dreamed up the concept of a 'one-size-fits-all' garment." Henri Bendel carried the line for four years.

On a recent visit to the couple's carriage house, Bassman was dressed in the uniform--a crisp man's shirt from Goodwill, black yoga trousers, and vintage saddle shoes--that she adopted when proto-hippie finery ceased to suit her. She wears her white hair pulled back severely, a bit of pink lip gloss to ...