Victor Skrebneski

Born in Chicago in 1929 to Russian-Polish parents, Victor Skrebneski studied at The Art Institute of Chicago and Moholy Nagy’s Institute of Design. He first trained as a painter, and his immersion in the visual arts, particularly the impulses of Surrealism, Realism, Cubism and Dada, influenced the development of his own photographic style. Skrebneski’s work was also inspired by his brief career in the theatre, as well as his extensive travels.

Skrebneski’s earliest photographs were taken in New York and Europe before he opened a studio in his native Chicago in 1952. Today he is acknowledged as one of the world’s finest fashion, figural and portrait photographers. “His images are more real than the real, more beautiful than the beautiful, and they are constantly embroidered with myriad allusions,” comments Robert Sobieszek, Curator of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Whether the subject is a celebrity – Orson Welles, Bette Davis, Truman Capote, Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol, John Malkovich, Liza Minnelli, Oliver Stone, Diana Ross, Vanessa Redgrave – or a model for a top fashion label - Chanel, Givenchy, Galanos, Mikimoto, Carolyne Roehm – Skrebneski’s lens transforms each pose into a unique interpretation of both character and form. For him the art of photography is a constant re-invention of memory, place and time.

In 1962, Skrebneski was commissioned by Estee Lauder to do a cosmetic advertisement that would launch her practice of selecting one model to be the “face” of the brand. Over the next 25 years, Skrebneski became the exclusive photographer for Lauder, creating a series of widely published images that exude cosmetic beauty and earthly perfection. His muses include Phyllis Connor, Karen Harris, Karen Graham, Shaun Casey, Willow Bay, Paulina Porizkova and Elizabeth Hurley, and he presents them with a classical sense of glamour.

Photographs by Victor Skrebneski have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Orange County Museum in California; the Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, as well as at numerous galleries throughout America and in such European cities as Florence, London and Paris. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, among other institutions.