While best known for his influential fashion photography, Horst P. Horst (1906-1999) also received international acclaim for celebrity portraits, nudes, still lives, and architectural images in a sixty-year career spanning the interwar and postwar periods of the twentieth century. He remains highly regarded as a master of lighting and composition who developed a unique aesthetic that blended various influences, including the sharp focus and formalism of modernism and neoclassicism's reverence for ancient Greek aesthetic ideals.

Born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann in Weißenfels-an-der-Saale, Germany, Horst studied architecture and furniture design at Hamburg Kunstgewerbeschule (1926-28) and then apprenticed with Le Corbusier's Paris studio in 1930. He began to experiment with photography after a chance meeting with Vogue photographer Baron George Hoyningen-Huene (1900-1968), who became his friend and teacher. Horst's first fashion images appeared in French Vogue in 1931, and by the mid-1930s, he was the magazine's primary photographer. He regularly traveled between Paris, London, and New York to photograph fashion spreads and celebrity portraits until immigrating to the United States at the outbreak of World War II. Horst became an American citizen in 1942 and served in the army as a photographer. After the war, Horst resumed fashion photography in America and Europe while also photographing for House and Garden and other photo-based magazines. He also began publishing photographic series, including Patterns from Nature (1946) and Return Engagement: Faces to Remember, Then and Now (1984). His work for Vogue remains best known, and he worked for the magazine throughout the rest of his career, publishing his last commercial photograph in British Vogue in 1991.

Horst received the Lifetime Achievement Award of The Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1989 and the Master of Photography Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in 1996. Retrospectives of Horst's work have been held at the International Center of Photography, New York (1984 and 1996); Museé des Arts de la Mode, Paris (1991); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1992); National Portrait Gallery, London which traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2001-02); and most recently a major traveling exhibition organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in 2014. His work is in many public collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Portrait Gallery, London; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.