| Names: | Born: John Arthur Hiller
Other: Lejaren Hiller
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| | Dates: | 1880, 3 July - 1969, 23 May | | Born: | US, WI, MIlwaukee | | Died: | US, NY, New York City | | Active: | US |
He used sets and costumes to reconstruct tableaux vivants of surgical procedures and produced one a year between 1927 and the 1950s as advertising for the American medical suture company Davis & Geck. Some of these were published in 1944 in the book ‘Surgery Through the Ages: A Pictorial Chronicle‘ (New York: Hasting House) with text by Paul Benton and John H. Hewlett.Preparing biographies
Biography provided by Focal Press
Opened commercial photography to American print advertisers in 1913 by making less realistic and more fantastic images by combining fine art aesthetics and pictorialist methods to create subjective tableaux using elaborate sets involving costumed actors. Hiller used combination printing, dramatic lighting, soft-focus, and heavy retouching to produce narrative theatrical scenes that gave his images a sense of emotion and dreamy desire that delighted advertisers. Best known for his humorous and slightly erotic ad campaign, now considered sexist, Surgery Through the Ages (1927 and 1933) done for Davis & Geck, Inc. who were makers of surgical sutures. For this project Hiller concocted a historic series of tableaux vivants consisting of over 200 great moments in medical history that appeared in medical journals and hung in hospitals and physician’s offices throughout the country.
(Author: Robert Hirsch - Independent scholar and writer)
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409]
(Used with permission)
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