Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> So ends Cecil Beaton’s last published diary. In his final years he often recalled the photographs he took during the Second World War and tried to remember how be had made these pictures of peasants and soldiers war wounded and shell-shattered buildings. He once told me that he thought they were perhaps the most serious work he had ever done. And yet he added with a most searching look in his eye that he did not know from what part of himself they came. Before and after the Second World War he concentrated on creating a fantasy world: women posed against shimmering tin foil and surrealistic back-drops: costumes and sets for theatrical productions; pictures of matinee idols Hollywood stars and the splendour of royalty. He made high fashion and high society part of a dream only a few could otherwise share. Photographing a world which seemed bent on self-destruction challenged Beaton as a man and as an artist as never before and never again. The photographs he took at home and abroad in the period from topo to 1944 confirm that a major change took place in Cecil Beaton. How well he saw not only what he saw is the subject of this book In 1974 Cecil Beaton and I collaborated on The Magic Image an extensively illustrated anthology of the work of major photographers throughout the history of