Attie worked in a wide range of styles, illustrating everything from novels to magazine and album covers to subway posters,[1] and taking now-iconic portraits of Truman Capote, Bobby Fischer, Lorraine Hansberry, and many others.
[2] He also created the first-ever visual depiction of Holly Golightly, the main character in Breakfast at Tiffany's, when he illustrated the Capote novella's first appearance in Esquire Magazine.
He was best known in his lifetime for his signature photo montages—an approach he called "multiple-image photography": highly inventive, pre-Photoshop collages that he made by combining negatives in the darkroom.
During his Army service, Attie painted pinup-style portraits on the noses of combat planes; two of these are singled out as "gems" of the "nose-art" genre in Edward Young's book on the subject, B-24 Liberator Units of the CBI.
According to his Capote book, his success in Brodovitch's famously difficult course was the result of a creative accident: "One night, [he] was developing film for his very first class assignment [photos of the original Penn Station], when he realized he’d underexposed every single frame.
"[10] On the final night of the course, Brodovitch gave Attie his first professional assignment, which was to create a series of photo montages to illustrate Truman Capote's newest work, Breakfast at Tiffany's, for its first-ever publication Bazaar in 1958.
But while Attie completed the montages, Capote began to clash with the publisher of Bazaar, the Hearst Corporation, over the tart language and subject matter of his novella.
Alice Morris, the magazine's literary editor, later recounted that Capote agreed to make the changes Hearst wanted "partly because I showed him the layouts... six pages with beautiful, atmospheric photographs.
[16] Some of Attie's unused Breakfast at Tiffany's montages were later modified and used to illustrate Bill Manville's 1960 memoir Saloon Society, The Diary of a Year Beyond Aspirin, which was also designed by Brodovitch.
"[19] From that point forward, Attie's commercial work was prolific and wide-ranging – including frequent covers and spreads for Vogue, Time, Newsweek, Playboy, and Bazaar; portraits of everyone from Carl Reiner and Leonard Bernstein to Ralph Ellison and W.E.B.
Du Bois and The Band; a variety of album covers (including at least one edition of Sammy Davis Jr. and Carmen McRae performing Porgy and Bess); and his own books of photographs, 1977's Russian Self-Portraits,[20] and 1981's Portrait: Theory (together with Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe and others).
[36] Its publication and reception have helped to bring considerable attention to Attie's work, including prominent supporters such as Bruce Weber and Mary Louise Parker, who called it an "extraordinary book,"[37] and is seen leafing through it in the 2018 indie drama Golden Exits.