...Cocteau wearing a jacket back-to-front, while he smokes, reads and brandishes scissors all at once. It’s a photograph that thrillingly captures the artistic temperaments of both Cocteau, the artist, and Halsman, the photographer, with seeming ease.... While Cocteau had, by 1949, proven himself a multifaceted poet, filmmaker, painter and even ballet director, Halsman was famous for his masterful command of one trade: producing striking images that were compositionally simple, but stylistically experimental. Halsman, too, was an early embracer of surrealist tenets, and as a close friend of Dali could not have been a... Indeed, to photograph a quirky subject like Cocteau in a pretty straightforward studio setting was in keeping with 2 of Halsman’s rules of photography ― rules he later outlined in his 1961 book, Halsman on the Creation of Photographic Ideas: keep it simple, but make it special. (http://time.com/3878148/jean-cocteau-by-philippe-halsman-playful-portraits-of-a-surrealist/)