Horst P Horst's long career in photography was almost cut short just months

Horst P Horst's long career in photography was almost cut short just months after it had begun. Arriving in New York for the first time nearly 70 years ago, the young German (born Horst Bohrmann, in Lower Saxony, in 1906) was interned for two days as an undesirable alien. As a result, he found himself a full five minutes late for his Monday morning interview with Edna Woolman Chase, the formidable editor-in-chief of American Vogue. On telling her of his problems at Ellis Island, she replied with considerable sang-froid: "We have all been away for the weekend, you know," and dismissed him from her office Horst survived this incident to become an employee.

Not long afterwards, however, he incurred the fury of the magazine's proprietor, Conde Nast, after failing to show due deference during a "discussion" of his work. The young photographer was sacked, took the boat back to France and, during the next decade, produced some of the most celebrated fashion pictures of the century for French Vogue. His dramatic lighting, his modernism (he had for a time assisted the architect Le Corbusier) and his twinkling charm were soon being emulated by many. Before his ill-starred US trip, Horst had begun his career under the wing of French Vogue's volatile star photographer George Hoyningen-Huene. By 1934 he had taken over his former mentor's position, after a jealous Huene upended a half- finished meal over the magazine's art director and stormed out.Horst stopped taking photographs only recently He is 93 and nearly blind.

He still lives in Oyster Bay, the home he bought on New York's Long Island Sound in the late Forties and where he has entertained successive generations of the beau mondeFar left: Lisa with harp, 1939With her ability to invest photographs with a sense of movement, conveyed by gesture and expression, model Lisa Fonssagrives inspired Horst's most famous set of nudes: "One day I wanted to make some nude photographs, which I had never done before. She [Lisa] has a very beautiful body and was not afraid of it - she was used to Nachtcultur." Horst always tried to ensure his nudes of women looked romantic and to make some kind of effect, theatrical or otherwise. This picture caused the irate editor of Town and Country to call up Horst, apoplectic with rage, shouting that it was quite plain for all to see that the naked woman in Horst's photograph was his wife. Nina de Voe, 1951This picture is among Horst's last for American Vogue editor Edna Woolman Chase. She was succeeded in 1952 by her deputy, Jessica Daves, under whom a rollercoaster of "Americana" - cheerful, cardiganed female students bicycling to doughnut shops - careered into Vogue's pages. Horst spent much of Daves' decade- long tenure travelling abroad and working for House and Garden (another Nast-owned magazine) before being asked back in 1962 to work with Daves' successor, the exotic Diana Vreeland.