The life and work of an essential photographer whose feminism and pictorialist images distanced her from the mainstream
In the first book devoted to Anne Brigman (1869-1950), Kathleen Pyne traces the groundbreaking photographer's life from Hawai'i to the Sierra and elsewhere in California, revealing how her photographs emerged from her experience of local place and cultural politics. Brigman's work caught the eye of the well-known photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who welcomed her as one of the original members of his Photo-Secession group. He promoted her work as exemplary of his modernism and praised her Sierra landscapes with female nudes-work that at the time separated Brigman from the spiritualized upper-class femininity of other women photographers. Stieglitz later drew on Brigman's images of the expressive female body in shaping the public persona of Georgia O'Keeffe into his ideal woman artist. This nuanced account reasserts Brigman's place among photography's most important early advocates and provides new insight into the gender and racialist dynamics of the early twentieth-century art world, especially on the West Coast of the United States.
Photographe hollandais, né en 1895, Leendert Blok a très tôt expérimenté la photographie couleur et l'utilisation du format panoramique. Dans les années 1920, il travaille en étroite collaboration avec des producteurs de fleurs à qui il fournit des tirages couleurs et des autochromes pour leurs catalogues de présentation des diverses espèces produites. Dans son approche documentaire, Blok saisit les fleurs telles des objets de désir et restitue leur part de mystère grâce à la technique de l'autochrome. Pour lui, la photographie est d'abord un regard. Il s'approche au plus près de la matière et le végétal semble alors s'épanouir sous son objectif.
Tons sourds et douceur mordorée révèlent un monde végétal intemporel, où corolles, pétales et boutons sont sublimés par le clair-obscur. Les fleurs se détachent sur un fond sombre et uni offrant un clin d'oeil aux célèbres vanités du Siècle d'Or néerlandais. Tulipes, dahlias, narcisses, iris, jacinthes, pivoines se révèlent dans toute leur diversité. Réminiscences des planches de botanistes d'autrefois, les photographies de Leendert Blok nous plongent dans l'immanence du végétal, où chaque fleur devient sculpture.
Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) is one of the most celebrated British Portrait photographers of the twentieth century and is renowned for his images of elegance, glamour and style. His influence on portrait photography was profound and lives on today in the work of many contemporary photographers.
Beaton used his camera, his ambition and his larger-than-life personality to mingle with a flamboyant and rebellious group of artists, writers, socialites and partygoers. These 'Bright Young Things' captured the spirit of the roaring twenties and thirties as they cut a dramatic swathe through the epoch. Beaton quickly developed a reputation for his beautiful, often striking and fantastic photographs, which culminated in his portraits of Queen Elizabeth in 1939. More than a photographer, Beaton became a society fixture in his own right.
In a series of themed chapters, covering Beaton's first self-portraits and earliest sitters to his time at Cambridge and as principle society photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, over 60 leading figures who sat for him are profiled and the dazzling parties, pageants and balls of the period are brought to life. Among this glittering cast are Beaton's socialite sisters Baba and Nancy Beaton, Stephen Tennant, the Mitfords, Siegfried Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh and Daphne Du Maurier. Beaton's photographs are complemented by a wide range of letters, drawings and ephemera and contextualised by artworks created by those in his circle, including Christopher Wood, Rex Whistler and Henry Lamb.
Ce deuxième volume de la monographie du célèbre photographe François Halard présente ses photographies les plus récentes. L'exceptionnelle sensibilité de l'artiste, mêlant bohème et élégance de l'ancien, accessibilité et intimité, est inimitable. Chaque image est imprégnée de sa connaissance profonde de l'histoire du design d'intérieur, de son amour des artistes et chaque scène offre un enseignement selon la conception du maître: la Menil House de Philip Johnson et de Charles James, le studio de Giorgio Morandi, l'appartement parisien radical de Rick Owen, et tant d'autres encore... Tout comme le premier volume, cet ouvrage est une ressource visuelle recherchée, un outil indispensable pour tous les amoureux des intérieurs, du charme et du style.
Peter Lindbergh's seminal compendium, now published in a special anniversary edition. Through collaborations with the most venerated names in fashion, Lindbergh created new narratives with his humanist approach. This book features more than 300 images, many previously unpublished, and an adapted interview with Lindbergh.
