With his cane, his famous waxed mus­tache, and his habit of tak­ing unusu­al ani­mals for walks, Sal­vador Dalí would appear to have cul­ti­vat­ed his own pho­tographa­bil­i­ty. But tak­ing a pic­ture of the man who stood as a liv­ing def­i­n­i­tion of pop­u­lar sur­re­al­ism was­n’t a task to be approached casu­al­ly — espe­cial­ly not for Philippe Hals­man, who did it more than any­one else. Orig­i­nal­ly from what’s now Latvia, he led a tur­bu­lent life that even­tu­al­ly (after a cou­ple of inter­ven­tions by none oth­er than Albert Ein­stein, of whom Hals­man lat­er made a famous por­trait) brought him to the Unit­ed States. It was in New York, in 1941, that he met Dalí, hav­ing been assigned to pho­to­graph one of his exhi­bi­tions in the city.

Hals­man had more oppor­tu­ni­ties to pho­to­graph Dalí, and these jobs turned into decades of col­lab­o­ra­tion. Its many fruits include a book con­tain­ing 36 views of the artist’s mus­tache alone, but also the more ambi­tious — and much more sur­re­al — image Dalí Atom­i­cus, from 1948. Inspired by the work-in-progress that would become Leda Atom­i­ca, a por­trait of Dalí’s wife Gala influ­enced by both mythol­o­gy and sci­ence, the pho­to­graph includes not just that paint­ing, but also an arc of water and three fly­ing cats. Or at least they look like they’re fly­ing; in real­i­ty, they were thrown into the frame by a team of assis­tants includ­ing Hals­man­’s wife and his young daugh­ter Irene.

Irene Hals­man recalls the expe­ri­ence in the BBC Time Frame video above, includ­ing the now-wide­ly known detail that Dalí’s own ini­tial con­cept for the pho­to involved blow­ing up a duck with fire­crack­ers. “Oh, no, no, you can’t do that,” she recalls her father respond­ing. “You’re in Amer­i­ca now. You don’t want to be put in jail for ani­mal cru­el­ty.” So fly­ing cats it was, to be visu­al­ly cap­tured in mid-air along with the con­tents of a buck­et of water. Leda Atom­i­ca and a chair were also made to appear as if lev­i­tat­ing, and Dalí him­self was instruct­ed to jump, in an instance of the pho­to­graph­ic prac­tice Hals­man called “jumpol­o­gy” (whose oth­er sub­jects includ­ed Audrey Hep­burn, J. Robert Oppen­heimer, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, and Richard Nixon).

Image via Library of Con­gress

Dalí Atom­i­cus was pub­lished in Life mag­a­zine, to which Hals­man was a pro­lif­ic con­trib­u­tor. The same issue includ­ed a few out­takes, which revealed some of what went into the five-to-six-hour-long process of nail­ing the shot. You can see a few such prints at Art­sy, whose labeled faults include “water splash­es Dalí instead of cat,” “Dalí jumps too late,” and “sec­re­tary gets into pic­ture.” But it was­n’t all just about tim­ing: the pic­ture also required a degree of pre-Pho­to­shop edit­ing to per­fect, and the emp­ty can­vas behind the jump­ing Dalí had to be filled in by the rush of the man him­self, who opt­ed to fill the non-exis­tent paint­ing with motifs drawn from the limbs of the cats. Now there was an artist who knew how to seize inspi­ra­tion when it float­ed by.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitch­cock Recalls Work­ing with Sal­vador Dali on Spell­bound: “No, You Can’t Pour Live Ants All Over Ingrid Bergman!

A Soft Self-Por­trait of Sal­vador Dali, Nar­rat­ed by the Great Orson Welles

Take a Jour­ney Through 933 Paint­ings by Sal­vador Dalí & Watch His Sig­na­ture Sur­re­al­ism Emerge

Sal­vador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Bad Painter” and Con­tributed “Noth­ing” to Art (1986)

Sal­vador Dalí Takes His Anteater for a Stroll in Paris, 1969

When Sal­vador Dalí Cre­at­ed Christ­mas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hall­mark (1960)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.