The genius of Horst P Horst

The year is 1990. A woman leans against a white plinth. She faces away from the camera. Her torso, sculpted by the lighting, is tightly encased in a laced-up corset. Her arms flex and bend to the music, her shoulder blades circling in time to the beat. She's not sad, though it's hard to decipher her precise emotions. The camera slowly crops into her back, then shoulders, then her platinum-haired head. It's Madonna. She turns her face to the side and says one word: "Vogue."

That image - of a solitary corset-clad female with her back to the camera - is surely one of the most recognisable in the world. So famous, as the saying (sort of) goes, they made it twice. More, in fact. Countless are the times it's been aped and reproduced.

The original, known as the Mainbocher Corset by celebrated photographer Horst P Horst, is undoubtedly the greatest. While Madonna's video, groundbreaking in its own way, is beautifully lit, shot and choreographed, it doesn't have the depth and symbolic resonance of Horst's original composition. That photograph, taken in a studio in Paris on the eve of the Second World War, is iconic, a reminder of an era when fashion was considered to be more than just frivolity, and clothing, in the hands of the right photographer, could become art.

"It's such an icon," says Susanna Brown, curator of photographs at the V&A and editor of the museum's new publication Horst: Photographer Of Style, which ties in with an exhibition of the same title. "It's his Mona Lisa. For us, it's a star piece in the exhibition."

Horst himself said of the image: "It was the last photograph I took in Paris before the war. I left the studio at 4am, went back to the house, picked up my bags and caught the 7am train to Le Havre to board the Normandie. We all felt that war was coming. Too much armament, too much talk. And you knew that whatever happened, life would be different after … This photograph is peculiar - for me, it is the essence of that moment. While I was taking it, I was thinking of all that I was leaving behind."

Mainbocher Corset remains one of the world's most influential fashion photographs. The unique lighting, achieved with multiple spotlights, combined with the seductive pose make it both mysterious and alluring. His Mona Lisa indeed.

It is not, though, his only photographic masterpiece. There were Vogue covers - more than 90 in colour alone - movie star portraits and exquisite images of nature, all taken during his 60-year career. A photographer of people, places, plants and style, Horst carved a career in photography that spanned decades and continents.

Yet, outside of the worlds of fashion and photography, Horst isn't considered a household name. A man of the 20th century, well travelled, well educated and socialising in all the right circles (Horst counted Coco Chanel and Salvador Dali among his friends and collaborators), he inhabited a glamorous era, now long gone. All that remains are the names of a few photogenic film stars, artists and designers. The name of the man who took the images is hardly unknown but it no longer trips off the tongue.

The V&A book and exhibition will hopefully go some way to rectifying that. From the early days in Paris in the 1930s, when he started taking photographs of the French fashion collections, to his celebrity and royalty portraits of the 1960s and beyond, the book highlights the work of a man many consider to be one of the greatest fashion photographers of the 20th century.

American Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who has written a forward to the book, describes Horst as "a perfect gentleman". "Horst was the Mario Testino of his day," she says. "If you were faintly royal, or had social connections, having your photograph taken by Horst really meant something. He made everyone look beautiful, flawless and alluring."

Not only people, but places and interiors too. In the latter part of his career Horst, by then resident in the United States, worked with House And Garden. He had started photographing the interiors of famous and well-to-do people for Vogue many years before, and had become renowned for his Renaissance-like style of capturing his wealthy subjects in their astonishingly opulent surroundings. From Baroness Pauline de Rothschild to Truman Capote and Emilio Pucci, Horst showed them all living in picture-perfect - and completely unattainable - splendour.

Wintour adds: "Horst excelled at photographing interiors, capturing rooms so that they looked not only stylish but also lived-in. He would ask the home owners where they most liked to sit in a room and would take the picture from that vantage point, often shooting through a flower arrangement. The resulting image created the impression that you were a welcome guest, walking into the room for the first time."

Ultimately it was Horst's eye for the flawlessly lit, perfectly composed picture that made him so successful. His ability to light an image was legendary. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who worked with brighter overhead flood lighting, Horst preferred to highlight only certain parts of the image with the use of multiple spotlights. It was a technique that created a sense of drama in his pictures, though one that frequently frustrated fashion editors and designers as they often found that clothing was completely obscured.

"Rather than giving equal attention to everything he would draw your eye to a particular shimmering detail or a wonderful hat or a shoe," explains Brown. "Edna Woolman Chase [the editor of Vogue from 1914 to 1952] tacked up a little note on the studio wall that said: 'No black photographs,' because this dramatic lighting became so dark."

Some of the most beautiful images in the book are also some of the most surprising. Horst's detailed images of nature, some of which he made into tiled collages, aren't among his best-known work, though they rank among his most stunning. "Some of my favourites are actually those nature studies partly because they are so surprising," says Brown. "When I first discovered them I almost thought they were the work of a different photographer. They really show his range and his skill and the collages that he made from them are really hypnotic and beautiful."

Horst died at his home in Palm Beach Gardens in Florida in 1999. Renowned model Carmen Dell'Orefice, who started working with Horst when a teenager, remembers him as "a great teacher, enormously patient". Dell'Orefice spoke to Horst shortly before he died. "Richard, his assistant, handed him a phone, so he could speak to me from the swimming pool. He said, 'Carmen, you sound like you're smiling. I'm happy to hear that. I'm smiling too. I'm feeling the warm sun on my face, I can't see a thing any more, but it feels good and the water is warm."

"I said, 'That sounds wonderful.' Horst said: 'Let's keep smiling.' I can't stop smiling and laughing even now. Horst's legacy to me is the smile he put in my heart." n

Horst: Photographer Of Style, edited by Susanna Brown, is published by V&A Publishing, priced £40.