George Hoyningen-Huene took this famous picture, Divers, not at the French riviera, as it seems, but on the roof of the Vogue studio on the Champs-Élysées. The image originally appeared in a magazine spread headlined “Modern Mariners Put Out to Sea”. Its grand make-believe was characteristic of Hoyningen-Huene, friend and confidant to Coco Chanel, and a fixture in the French avant garde between the wars.

There has been speculation about the identity of the two models in the shot. It was long thought that the man on the “diving board” was Horst P Horst, the model who became Hoyningen-Huene’s lover and eventually supplanted him as the star photographer of French Vogue’s golden age. Recent research has shown, however, that the picture was taken a couple of months before the pair met. There is more certainty about the woman beside him, thought to be Lee Miller, another protege of Hoyningen-Huene, then just embarking on her career as an artist.

Because he was mostly a commercial photographer, Hoyningen-Huene’s work has tended to be overlooked beside those of his contemporaries and friends Man Ray, Berenice Abbott and André Kertész, with whom he exhibited at the Premier Salon Indépendant de la Photographie Moderne in 1928. More than half a century after his death in 1968, however, there is growing interest not only in his images but also in his life in Paris, and subsequently in Hollywood, where he befriended Ava Gardner and Greta Garbo (he liked the idea of being trusted to take Garbo’s passport photographs). Divers features in a new retrospective book of his images, which also recounts his formative years as the son of an Estonian nobleman who fled the Russian revolution, to become a sergeant in the British army in the first world war. Reportedly, inevitably, a Netflix drama about the photographer’s life is in the works.

• George Hoyningen-Huene is published by Thames & Hudson on 28 March