In 1937, the photographer Erwin Blumenfeld coaxed Carmen Visconti out of her clothes to model for his camera. It wasn't her first time posing nude. More then fifty years before, she'd been the nubile subject of The Kiss by Auguste Rodin, one of the 19th century's most iconic sculptures. By photographing her ravaged eighty-year-old body his Paris studio, Blumenfeld was not only showing the passage of time, but also signaling that photography was the fine art of his era. Blumenfeld made his living shooting fashion for magazines such as Coronet and Vogue when Visconti posed for him, and his magazine work increased exponentially over the following few decades. By the '50s, living in New York City, he was the highest-paid fashion photographer in the world. Yet as an important new retrospective at the Jeu de Paume shows, commercial success never corrupted his vision of photography as successor to sculpture and painting. Essay by Jonathon Keats for Forbes.com