Fashion photographer Lillian Bassman dies

"I didn't bring you to Paris to make art; I brought you here to do the buttons and bows," Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow famously snapped at photographer Lillian Bassman during a fashion shoot for the magazine in the late 1940s.

But Bassman's fashion photographs are considered to be among the greatest of the 20th century -- in a league with other masters, including Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.

Her photos captured a mid-century world of elegant, slightly elongated women, impeccably dressed, done up in high-contrast black and white. Avedon once described her style as making "visible that heartbreaking invisible place between the appearance and the disappearance of things." Bassman died Monday at 94 at her home in Manhattan, her son Eric Himmel announced.

Lillian Bassman was born June 15, 1917, in New York City, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. In her youth she spent many hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she studied the great painters and began to formulate her distinctive vision and style.

She studied fabric design at a vocational school and became a painter and graphic designer. Eventually she met Alexey Brodovitch, the renowned art director of Harper's Bazaar, and enrolled in his design lab class. Brodovitch invited her to join him as his assistant at Harper's. In 1945, when Junior Bazaar debuted, she became co-art director with Brodovitch.

By 1948, she had given up art direction for full-time photography. Her photography was informed by her work as a painter.