From the 1940s to the 1960s, Lillian Bassman was at photography's cutting edge -- a woman who, with Harper's Bazaar colleague Richard Avedon, helped bring a sophisticated new aesthetic to fashion work. Now, after a two-decade hiatus, the seventy-nine-year-old Bassman is once again at the fashion forefront, shooting last year's spring collection for the New York Times Magazine and a fall advertising campaign for Neiman Marcus.Inspired by the recovery of a cache of Bassman's early negatives in 1992, this extraordinary book traverses the entire fifty-year trajectory of her career -- and proves conclusively that she is, as Martin Harrison writes in his introduction, "one of the great figures" in the field. With their blurred silhouettes, unusual poses, and rigorous composition, Bassman's images -- a gown modeled in a mirror to resemble a butterfly, a dramatically lit lingerie model suggestively covering her face -- flirt with abstraction and conjure up an impossibly elegant, darkly sensuous dream world. For anyone who admires fashion photography, this stunning retrospective will be a revelation.