Muray was a prolific artist: his archives contain over 25,000 negatives, but undoubtedly the subject he portrayed most was Frida herself. Muray has been an experimenter in the field of colour photography since the early years of his career, and thus found great inspiration in Frida Kahlo’s work and in her as a person.
The photographs resulting from the professional and personal relationship between Kahlo and Muray have made their way into popular culture, through a variety of media, and have profoundly influenced the public’s view of Frida Kahlo. They have become iconic, the first image that comes to mind when one thinks of the Mexican painter. They are an integral part of understanding who Frida Kahlo was as the individual behind the artwork.
Muray was a true pioneer and experimenter in the field of photography: on the strength of his technical and chemical studies and thanks to his continuous search for new technologies, the name Muray became synonymous with colour photography. In 1931, Muray was the first person to have a colour photograph published in a magazine, and he received so many commissions that even though he charged $1,000 for a single page, he could not accept them all. From Time to Vanity Fair, every magazine wanted to work with him and Nick became one of the leading professionals in colour photography.
Muray was able to achieve this realism in colour by employing the Carbro printing technique. The Carbro process derives its name from the cross between carbon printing and bromide printing. A Carbro print is the union of three bichromated gelatin fabrics, each coated with colour pigments of the three primary colours, cyan, magenta or yellow. The image on each fabric is formed as a result of a chemical reaction that occurs when the dichromated gelatin fabric is placed in contact with a silver bromide print. When these fabrics are then placed on a paper backing, they combine to produce a colour photograph. Carbro prints are also known for their durability, which still allows us to vividly see images of personalities such as Frida Kahlo, as well as Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor and many other divas of those years.
Besides being an excellent photographer, Nickolas Muray also had a reputation for being irresistible to women. His friend Miguel Covarrubias – a Mexican painter and illustrator with whom the photographer had met in the studios of Vanity Fair magazine – created a caricature of Nick entitled ‘The Womanizer’, which actually highlighted another of Muray’s great passions, fencing. Throughout his life, in fact, Muray practised fencing at the highest level until he went on to represent the United States at the 1928 and 1932 Olympics. Death caught him in 1965 while he was fencing.
Illuminated by one of the lights in the photographer’s studio, in the caricature Muray smiles triumphantly as he greets his viewer, one foot above the naked body of his latest victim, foil in hand and beating heart in his chest. The painting, here reproduced in photograph by Muray himself, is kept in the collection of the Smithsonian Institue, Washington.