Ylla

Ylla

Ylla with toucan, ca. 1950
Born Camilla Koffler
(1911-08-16)August 16, 1911
Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died March 30, 1955(1955-03-30) (aged 43)
Bharatpur, India
Nationality Hungarian
Education Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts,
Académie Colarossi
Known for Photography
Movement Nature, animals
U.S. Camera, October 1940

Ylla (/ˈiːlæ/, born Camilla Koffler; 16 August 1911 – 30 March 1955), was a Hungarian photographer who specialized in animal photography. At the time of her death she "was generally considered the most proficient animal photographer in the world."[1]

Biography

Koffler was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Romanian father and Serb mother, both Hungarian nationals. At age eight, she was placed in a German boarding school in Budapest, Hungary. In 1925, the teenage Koffler joined her mother in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where she studied sculpture with Italian Yugoslav sculptor Petar Pallavicini at the Academy of Fine Arts; finding that her given name Camilla was the same as the Serbian for "camel" (камила, kamyla),[2] she changed it to "Ylla."

In 1929, Ylla received a commission for a bas-relief sculpture for a Belgrade movie theater. By 1931, she had moved to Paris, France, where she studied sculpture at the Académie Colarossi and worked as photo retoucher and assistant to photographer Ergy Landau.

In 1932, Ylla began photographing animals, exhibited her work at Galerie de La Pléiade, and opened a studio to photograph pets. In 1933, she was introduced to Charles Rado of the Rapho Guillumette agency.

In 1940, New York's Museum of Modern Art submitted her name to the U.S. Department of State requesting an entry visa; she immigrated to the United States in 1941.

In 1952, Ylla traveled to Africa, and in 1954 she visited India for the first time.

In 1955, Ylla was fatally injured after falling from a jeep while photographing a bullock cart race during festivities in Bharatpur, North India.

Quotes and posthumous tributes

Julian Huxley:

. . . She is, I think, the outstanding animal photographer. She is outstanding in being able to seize in her pictures some essential quality of her subjects, which more orthodox photographers are apt to miss in their desire for so-called realistic and complete representation.[3]

Charles Rado:

[Ylla was] one of the most skilled and dedicated photographers of animals. They were her life, she loved them all. . . . She was wonderfully alive, amusing, fond of travel and people, and she loved her work because she loved and understood animals. Her books, in particular, gave her much satisfaction. She worked on them with infinite patience, supervising their design and printing. Animals (1951) won a prize as one of the most beautiful books of the year. . . . She contributed to practically every illustrated magazine here and in Europe. . . . The thrill of observing and photographing wild animals in their natural habitat was a new and exciting experience to Ylla; she would never again be content with photographing zoo animals.[4]

Movie Hatari! Character Based on Ylla

Her life work of photographing animals inspired famous movie director and producer, Howard Hawks, so much that he had his script writer, Leigh Brackett, change the script to create one of the main characters based on Ylla for his blockbuster movie, Hatari!, starring John Wayne. Hawks said, "We took that part of the story from a real character, a German girl. She was the best animal photographer in the world."[5] The movie character Anna Maria "Dallas" D’Alessandro is a photographer working for a zoo and was played by actress Elsa Martinelli.[6][7][8][9]

Selected bibliography

Notes

  1. ↑ "Fall Kills Ylla, Camera Artist," New York Times (Obituary) (31 March 1955).
  2. ↑ Auer, Michèle & Michel. Photographers Encyclopedia International, 1839 to the present (Editions Camera Obscura, Geneva, 1985)
  3. ↑ Huxley, Julian. Animals (New York: Hastings House; London: Harvill Press, 1950).
  4. ↑ Rado, Charles. "Ylla: One of the most skilled and dedicated photographer of animals. They were her life, she loved them all," US Camera (annual), ed. Tom Maloney (1959).
  5. ↑ Joseph McBride (writer), Hawks on Hawks”, University of California Press, 1982, pg 143, ISBN 0-520-04344-8
  6. ↑ Peter Bogdanovich,"The Cinema of Howard Hawks", Museum of Modern Art-Doubleday, 1962
  7. ↑ Scott Breivold, Peter Bogdanovich interviewer, “Howard Hawks: interviews”, University Press of Mississippi, 2006, pg. 38, ISBN 1-57806-832-0
  8. ↑ Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks: the grey fox of Hollywood, New York, Grove Press, 1997, pg 573, ISBN 0802115985
  9. ↑ Thomas McIntyre, May/June 2012, “Fifty Years of HATARI! – The Story of Most Expensive Safari In the World”, Sports Afield, pg 70

References

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