Scavullo, Francesco

(b. 16 January 1921 in New York City; d. 6 January 2004 in New York City), fashion and portrait photographer.

Scavullo was born on Staten Island, one of the five children of Angelo Carmelo Scavullo and Margaret (Pavis) Scavullo. Perhaps in keeping with the fashion world’s celebration of youth, he later shaved eight years off his date of birth. In 1937 Scavullo’s father sold his cooking utensil business and bought the Central Park Casino, a fashionable Manhattan supper club.

Living in one of most glamorous places in the world thrilled Scavullo. He loved to go window-shopping on Fifth Avenue with his mother, a former employee in the fashion section of the department store B. Altman and Company. At home Scavullo pored over his mother’s fashion magazines. Having seen a Greta Garbo movie with his grandmother in 1933, Scavullo became fascinated with the idea of transforming women into goddesses with the aid of a camera. Photographing his sisters, Scavullo was surprised that they did not look as gorgeous as Garbo. Only later did he realize that makeup and clothing were crucial to the transformation.

Scavullo was a self-taught photographer. He received his elementary education at Cathedral School and attended Saint Francis Xavier High School but never graduated from high school or attended college. He spent his time cleaning photography studios and practicing photography by using his sister and her friends as models. Scavullo styled their hair and applied their makeup to turn them into the image of movie stars. By a process of trial and error, reading books, and haunting camera shops, Scavullo learned about light reflection, retouching, and the stratagems of the trade. His mother gave a room in the family home to use as a studio, but Scavullo’s ambition to become a photographer met with resistance from his father, who wanted him to go into the restaurant business.

Scavullo was fired from his first job for using all of his film to shoot celebrity photographs of Carmen Miranda. In 1945 he was hired as an apprentice at Becker Studios, which produced catalogs. An introduction to Claire Mallison, an editor at Vogue, led to a job at the fashion magazine. For six months Scavullo was an assistant to the famed photographer Horst P. Horst. The relationship was initially stormy. Horst had lost his previous assistant to the military draft and took his anger out on the generally mild-mannered Scavullo. The men eventually became friendly, with Scavullo citing Horst as a mentor. In 1946 Scavullo left Vogue to work for the fashion illustrator Jerry Plucer. He developed his trademark seductive style, and his pictures so impressed the editors of Seventeen that they signed him to a contract, making him an established fashion photographer.

Scavullo used innovative lighting techniques that helped glamorize his subjects. He typically used white umbrellas to shade models from the glare of spotlights, and on location achieved a similar effect by stringing muslin sheets on poles. He highlighted models’ faces by framing them with large pieces of cardboard. In this early era of fashion photography Scavullo also chose the clothes for his subjects and applied their makeup. The overall effect was one of overwhelming glamour.

A shy and withdrawn man when he was not behind a camera, Scavullo had health problems for much of his life. In 1951 he experienced a nervous breakdown and spent two weeks in a hospital. After his release and while under the influence of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), Scavullo went to Merton’s monastery, the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane, in the hope of becoming a monk. This new career lasted a week. Scavullo had three more nervous breakdowns before receiving the diagnosis of manic-depressive disorder in 1981. He later credited his manic phases for contributing to his work but also became a public spokesman for the illness, encouraging people to seek treatment.

It is not known when Scavullo first identified as gay. On 13 April 1952 he married the model Carol McCallson. The marriage ended in 1956. In 1971 Sean M. Byrnes began assisting Scavullo in his work. A relationship blossomed that lasted until Scavullo’s death.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s Scavullo was consistently in demand for fashion photography, but a turning point in his career came in 1965, when Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan, hired him to develop a new, sexier look for the magazine’s covers. Taking charge of selecting the models, wardrobe, makeup, and hairstyles, Scavullo created the image of the “Cosmo girl.” He went on to shoot every Cosmopolitan cover for the next thirty years. Some of Scavullo’s work was controversial, including a Cosmopolitan nude centerfold of the actor Burt Reynolds and photographs that sexualized young girls.

By the 1970s Scavullo had worked for almost every major women’s magazine. He went on to shoot covers for People, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Interview. Although advertising was never a major part of his career, Scavullo photographed print advertisements for Valentino, Karl Lagerfield, Yves Saint Laurent, and DeBeers as well as catalogs for stores such as Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. In 1976 Scavullo was the creative consultant and appeared in the film Lipstick, which was set in the fashion industry. Although he shifted from photography to silk-screen portraits in the 1980s, Scavullo never stopped working as a photographer. He died of heart failure in New York City. He is buried in Southampton Cemetery, Southampton, New York.

A dominant photographic influence on American fashion and beauty, Scavullo helped determine the modern celebrity image. His glamorous portraits of models, actors, actresses, singers, and athletes created the expectation of a stylized, sexualized type of photograph. Scavullo produced and collaborated on four books: Scavullo on Beauty (1976), Scavullo on Men (1977), Scavullo (1984), Scavullo Women (1982), and Scavullo Nudes (2000). His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

In Francesco Scavullo, “Picture Perfectionist: My Life as a Photographer,” Saturday Evening Post (May–June 1987), the photographer describes the start of his career. Enid Nemy, Scavullo: Photographs 50 Years (2000), contains a biography of Scavullo as well as his photographs and his commentary on them. Obituaries are in the New York Times (7 Jan. 2004), Washington Post (8 Jan. 2004), and the Advocate (17 Feb. 2004).

Caryn E. Neumann