Photographs by Roloff Beny have until now pictured images of classical art and architecture, nature and foreign lands. This book is a collection of recently-discovered portraits of some famous figures from the world of visual and performing arts, from literature and fashion, from politics, society and royalty. These figures include Jean Cocteau, Tennessee Williams, Henry Moore, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Peggy Guggenheim, Elizabeth Taylor, John Huston, Noel Coward, Ezra Pound, Leontyne Price, Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Coco Chanel. Mitchell Crites juxtaposes these celebrity shots with photographs of Renaissance and oriental sculpture, and pictures of ordinary people and ritual life taken during Beny's travels. Complementing the photographs is an anecdotal commentary, including extracts from Beny's personal diaries.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Canadian photographer Beny--best known for his pictures of landscape, sculpture, and architecture--left unfinished an album of portraiture when he died in 1984. That project his biographer Mitchell Crites has completed; we should all be grateful. Beny's work, mostly in duotone, is elegant and rich. He employed an extraordinarily complete tonal palette; virtually every shade appears in his images, but opaque, velvety black and stark white, always. He was fond of that dramatic composition, the silhouette; preferred the casual pose to the formal; and did no studio work. He hobnobbed with the famous and talented rather than with pop celebrities, so the musicians, writers, and actors represented here include not rock stars, pop novelists, or TV idols, but the likes of Glenn Gould, Isak Dinesen, and Vivien Leigh. The most beautiful juxtapositions of images in the book are in a section that frequently has a figure sculpture facing a live person, and the book begins with seven luscious color shots of ordinary people in India, Japan, Sri Lanka, Egypt, and Nepal. Ray Olson
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