Images

[Cecil Beaton]


Images is composed of sixty images by Beaton, created using an experimental technique of superimposing the same negative multiple times onto the print. The original photograph becomes blurred and multiplied, and a new image is created, pulsing with an inner life.  Beaton experimented with portraits selected from his archive of negatives. Sitters given the Images-effect include Laurence Olivier, Fonteyn and Nureyev, Picasso, W.H. Auden, Albert Finney, Edith Sitwell, Francis Bacon, Mary McCarthy, Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, Truman Capote, Greta Garbo, Maria Callas, Giacometti and Lucian Freud. Landscapes, Kabuki actors, nudes, sheep, sun flowers and potatoes are also visually manipulated. Edith Sitwell provides the preface and Christopher Isherwood writes the introduction.


Cecil Beaton. With a preface by Dame Edith Sitwell and an introduction by Christopher Isherwood. London House and Maxwell. New York. 1964. First American edition. First published in Britain in 1963. Hardback, small quarto; black cloth-bound boards, dust jacket. [64 pages]. 60 photographic illustrations. English. 255 x 195mm. 0.45kg. . Very good, in very good dust jacket; slight shelf wear, a short 1cm closed tear at front top edge of jacket, laminate starting to lift at spine, price-clipped.