Francesco Scavullo, the ubiquitous photographer whose images glamorized the famous and the fashionable for more than 50 years in private portraits and dazzling magazine covers, created iconic imagery that defined a generation.  Scavullo's work ranged from portraits of such well-known personalities as Mick Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly to flower studies. He was particularly known for his seductive covers for Cosmopolitan magazine, which he photographed for more than three decades. Some of his models later went on to supermodel status and careers in television and motion pictures, among them Rene Russo, Farrah Fawcett and Brooke Shields, who for years called him Uncle Frank. Together with his companion, Sean M. Byrne, who began assisting him in 1972, Francesco Scavullo produced and designed the Cosmopolitan covers, choosing the models, selecting their provocative clothes and supervising their hair styles and makeup, a process often referred to as ''scavullo-ization.''

 

Scavullo was born in New York City in 1921. His career began when he was hired as an apprentice in a studio that produced catalogs. An introduction to a Vogue editor led to a trial at the magazine. For six months, he was assistant to Horst P. Horst, a photographer who became both a mentor and a friend.  By the time he was 19, he had several credit lines in prestigious publications.  Over the course of his long career, the artist produced images for Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Seventeen, Harper’s Bazaar, and Rolling Stone. He died on January 6, 2004 in New York City. Today, Scavullo’s works are held in the collections of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, among many others.