By Carolyn Kleiner

It was a chilly, overcast day on the Long Island coast, in November 1933; not exactly bathing-suit weather, but Harper's Bazaar needed pictures for an upcoming "Palm Beach" issue. The man in charge was Martin Munkacsi, a news and sports photographer from Hungary who spoke little English and had never taken a fashion picture in his life. Using an interpreter and his own mad gesturing, Munkacsi ordered the model to run toward the camera–an inspired heresy at a time when all fashion photography was painstakingly posed, recalls then Editor-in-Chief Carmel Snow in her autobiography. "The resulting picture, of a typical American girl in action, with her cape billowing out behind her, made photographic history."

With its publication, the prim and proper fashion plate jumped off her pedestal, and a real woman emerged: a living, breathing, running, smiling, yet still impossibly chic creature. Munkacsi's informal snapshots signaled the start of action realism in fashion photography and offered a strong, less elitist vision of womanhood. "The photography was still glamorous, but it was meant to appeal to a broader audience, to appeal to the sensibility that you, too, can partake of a fashionable existence," says Nancy Hall-Duncan, author of The History of Fashion Photography.

Publications like Vogue had been running fashion pictures since the mid-1910s, thanks to the development of the halftone printing process, which allowed images to be reproduced on the same page as type. At the start, these photographs merely mimicked the intricate, late 18th- and 19th-century drawings or etchings known as fashion plates: Models are aristocratic; their couture clothes are central to the images; poses are stiff and formal; and the photos are soft-focus studio shots. But over the next decade or so, photographers such as Munkacsi, Edward Steichen, Horst P. Horst, and Erwin Blumenfeld experimented with modernism, surrealism, and other avant-garde ideas. Socialite and avid outdoorswoman Toni Frissell also helped pioneer realism, as did her great rival Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who was widely regarded as one of the early masters of color photography.

Thus, fashion photography grew more distinctive, with photographers commenting on dresses and everything that went along with them, as opposed to merely displaying them. "The smarter editors knew it wasn't really the clothes they were selling; it was the lifestyle," says William Ewing, director of the Musée de L'Elysée in Switzerland and author of several books on fashion photography. "There are so many levels of mythmaking, of falsehood, all of which don't really matter because the end result is a dream."

It was Munkacsi's grainy, energetic photographs that a young Richard Avedon hung on his bedroom wall. "He brought a taste for happiness and honesty and a love of women to what was, before him, a joyless, loveless, lying art," observed Avedon, who would further elevate these ideals–and almost single-handedly turn fashion photography into an attention-grabbing, increasingly respected pursuit in the late 1940s and '50s. As postwar consumerism fueled a growing ready-to-wear industry that brought fashion to the masses, Avedon introduced the notion of an alluring but authentic woman who finds herself enthralled by life's unexpected turns and adventures. "She laughed, danced, skated, gamboled among herds of elephants, sang in the rain, ran breathless down the Champs-Elysées, smiled and sipped cognac at cafe tables, and otherwise gave evidence of being human," wrote Winthrop Sargeant in a 1958 New Yorker profile. There was a story, or two or three, behind every picture.

Avedon's great contemporary was Irving Penn, whose elegant idealization of women resulted in straightforward but powerful shots of modern-looking models with arched brows, dark lips, and a searing, intelligent gaze. In fact, according to art historian Martin Harrison in Shots of Style, at one point, "Vogue had to decrease radically the number of pages Penn was given ... in response to complaints that his photographs 'burned on the pages.' " In recent years, such work has gained both critical and public acceptance. Indeed, a 1951 Vogue cover image by Penn of a glamorous, veiled model recently sold for $28,750. "When we see these photographs of sophisticated, confident, strong, independent women, it makes us feel better about ourselves," says critic Karen Lehrman. "It's completely fascinating that photographers pre-feminism treated women with more respect and dignity than they do today." It's not surprising, in other words, that fashion photography still has the power to shock–and delight.