He was a one-time actor, a failed painter and a man of modest means who at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th created an immense body of work that systematically chronicled an old Paris that was in the process of disappearing. From inner courtyards...
Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is one of the most revered photographers of the modern age. Her appeal stems in large part from her rare ability to capture the uniqueness and even the pain in her subjects. A tense child gripping a toy grenade; a monstrous giant in the...
The Rencontres d'Arles photography festival stages forty exhibitions dotted around the small Provençal city best known as the place where Vincent Van Gogh cut off a small piece of his ear. But let’s leave Van Gogh to one side today, even if the brand new foundation...
The whiff of scandal seems to follow Andres Serrano (born 1950), but as an artist he’s so much more than that. Of course there was ‘Immersion (Piss Christ)’ from 1987, a highly stylised photograph of a crucifix submerged in a multi-coloured liquid that we know to be...
He’s an arch-narcissist, his teeth are falling out, he’s unattractive, provocative, intelligent, cynical, disabused and expresses himself spiritedly with his lapidary pronouncements. Michel Houellebecq, the runaway success of the French publishing world, a writer who...
‘Each time you talk to your friends on Facebook, each time you buy a book on Amazon, each time you save for your pension fund, you’re dealing with a company practicing tax optimisation. We’re not talking drug trafficking. It frequently turns out that these...
-It’s a massive sale of photographs: 316 prints, the vast majority of them vintage. -It’s a sale devoted to a major photographer, Philippe Halsman (1906-1979), who holds the record for Life Magazine covers (he has 101 to his name), invented ‘jump’ photography (when...
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was a great artist, not just a great photographer. He will forever be etched in memory as someone who immortalised in black and white those perfectly formed, statuesque naked male bodies in highly constructed environments. The numerous...