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Patricia Bosworth: Diane Arbus, A Biography |
This book is the most comprehensive and compelling biography to date of one of the twentieth century most exciting and powerful photograph. |
Diane Arbus is a fascinating character. First, because of her life. Born in New York, she enjoyed a pampered childhood in highest Jewish society. She could have then live a peaceful and wealthy life in her community but she decided to escape that world to follow her own path in life. |
Far from the frenzy on fashion magazine with which she started her career Diane Arbus met her fate in the darkest and gloomiest streets of New York where no other photograph had dare to go before. From this trip, she brought back dozens of images of dwarfs, twins, transvestites, and freaks. Her vision was quite of a challenge to 60s America that reacted strongly against these images that somehow violated the established aesthetic, physical, sexual standards of that period. |
Diane Arbus put an end to her story by committing suicide in 1971. Doing so, she enter the circle of America dramatic heroes together with Marilyn or James Dean. |
This book is sometimes a bit difficult to read when you are not totally used to all the characters that haunted the 60s in New York. But along its 400 page, it helps approaching the Diane Arbus enigma and understanding better this fascinating woman, this critical artist which was a reference for some US top photographs. Through the pages, you will come across Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Lisette Modele, Robert Frank… |
You will finally close the book having understood a bit better this woman who, along her life, have been wandering at the frontier of her darkest sides. You may regret that it does not finish by an happy end but the artist decided otherwise… Her pictures remain which are managed and preserved by the “Diane Arbus” Foundation. |
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Patricia Bosworth has written frequently for the New York Times and Vanity Fair. She is the author of Montgomery Clift: A Biography (1978), Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story (1997), Marlon Brando: A Biography (2000). |
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Alex Kersaw: Blood & Champagne, the life & times of Robert Capa |
Andre Friedman, known under the name of Robert Capa, born in Budapest in 1913, killed on a road in Indochina in 1954. What can be said about him. His life is so interlinked with the history of photography. Moreover, his life is the story on the twentieth century. Who could have forgotten this picture: 1937, a republican soldier is shot in the head by a francist bullet on a hill somewhere in Spain. June 6, 1994: in Omaha beach, American soldiers try to hide away from German machine gun bullets. “Slightly out of focus”… “If the picture is not good it is because you are not close enough”. Pushing his logic to the end, he is the only photographer to land with the first wave of troops on Omaha Beach. After having bath with wound and dead bodies, he will faint in a landing boat and will be brought back safe to England. Once again, he was lucky. Not alike the 95% of the soldiers who were lost on this Normandy Beach that day. |
By the time these photographs taken on Omaha Beach appeared in Life Magazine on 19 June 1944, Capa was a legend. A rogue, a gambler, a womanizer whose affairs with beautiful women – not least with Ingrid Bergman - were the envy & admiration of his friends, such as Ernest Hemingway, Henri Cartier-Bresson, John Huston. |
As the WW II ended, he founded together with David “Chim” Seymour & Cartier-Bresson, their own photo agency. They called it Magnum. For the first time photographers would retain their own copyright and their negatives. In the beginning of the 21st century it remains the most prestigious photographic agency in the world. |
Passionate war photojournalist, Capa died in 1954 on an Indochinese road where he was following the French army for what was supposed to be “his last campaign” |
This book is a passionate and fascinating biography which tell us the novel of the life of the first photograph who made photojournalism sexy and glamour. It is a trip in time and world at the same time: From Budapest of the 20s, to Paris of the 30s, in Spain stormed by the civil war, to Hollywood and New York of the 50s. The author does not try to hide how he admires Capa. But could it be otherwise? |
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Alex Kershaw is a journalist and screenwriter. As a frequent contributor to the Guardian, The Sunday Times Magazine and the Observer, he has worked closely with several award-winning photojournalists. His previous book was a biography of the American writer Jack London. |
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Don McCullin : “Unreasonable Behaviour” |
“Unreasonable Behaviour” is the autobiography of Don McCullin. Who is he? Most likely of the most stunning photograph and war reporter of the second half of the twentieth century. He is kind of successor of Robert Capa in the coverage of last century conflicts. If Capa started is career in the mid 30s with the Spanish Civil War and unfortunately ended it in 1954 killed in action in Indochina, McCullin started his own in the early 60s in Cyprus and luckily ended it in the 80s in Palestine. |
Nicknaming himself “Child of Adolf Hitler” , he grew up under the bombs that were falling on London before being exiled for his own safety in the countryside. He will reach teen age in the poor suburbs of a devastated London. Life decided that this London bad guy will become of the most talented twentieth century was photograph. Like Capa in this own time, in will be involved in the most important conflicts of his time. But if Capa seems to be moving through life and the wars he covers like a novel character that he is to a certain extend, McCullin shares with us all the horror that he sees and feel in the battles he is involved in. From Cyprus to Vietnam, Cambodia, Congo, Biaffra & Northern Ireland he is always in right in the middle of the battle. |
His vivid style permanently mixing anxiety and emotion works in a reflection of some his most know and stunning pictures. One closes the book with the feeling that the famous photograph allowed us to share for a moment his most close intimacy, full of solidarity and compassion. Thank you Sir. |
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