Photographs, Photographers and Photography

Book review

Touring the ancestral manse the other day, it occurred to me to see which photographers’ work graced its many walls. Well, I found only three. Dozens of my own pictures (I like my work, so there), one signed by Lucien Clergue and two others. And those two are by the great […]

Book review

You know how you remember the first of anything? The first book you read, the first music you heard, the first glass of wine, and so on? Yes, that too.
Well, the first fashion photography I remember was by the French master Guy Bourdin. Sometime in the early 1970s when I had […]

Book review
No finer example of Chim Seymour’s photography can be found than this wonderful picture from the set of Funny Face, with a very young Richard Avedon showing Fred Astaire the ropes.
One of the founders of Magnum, the apochryphal story has it that Chim and HC-B met on a tram in Paris, with HC-B asking […]

Book review

Pure joy.
That’s what I’m feeling, looking at Robert Doisneau’s magnificent pictures of Paris.
It’s impossible to adequately convey the pure joy of his photography. So many scenes from the Tuileries, goodness. A setting that elevates all those who traverse its perfection. I’m not well travelled enough to pontificate on its world standing […]

Book review

It may be the most extraordinary creative partnership in the history of photography. The master, George Hoyningen-Huene and his pupil, companion and life long friend, Horst P. Horst (actually Horst Bohrmann, but as an American resident at the time of war, you would have changed your name too).
The Baron (Huene’s father had been […]

Book review

While Cecil Beaton was the ‘go to’ photographer at British Vogue in the 1930s, his counterpart at French Vogue was the aristocratic and temperamental George Hoyningen-Huene. (Cecil was temperamental but, try as he might, no aristocrat).
Where Beaton’s tastes tended to the frou-frou, Huene’s were solidly based in Greek c