“It is a feast for the senses to leaf through this book …” — Lovely Books Germany
Audrey Hepburn once said “I never thought I’d land in pictures with a face like mine.” Nothing could be further from the truth. As one of the 20th century’s most loved icons, her face is instantly recognizable the world over. Here, for the first time, ACC Art Books and Iconic Images proudly present the work of six wonderful photographers – Norman Parkinson, Milton H. Greene, Douglas Kirkland, Lawrence Fried, Terry O’Neill and Eva Sereny – who were fortunate enough to capture the star at different moments of her life. In addition, former Curator of Photographs for the National Portrait Gallery and co-curator of the Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an Icon exhibition, Terence Pepper, opens up his personal archive of vintage press prints, making this ode to Hepburn truly unique. Throughout the book, Douglas Kirkland, Terry O’Neill and Eva Sereny share their memories of working with the icon. They present a wonderful mix of on-set, fashion, portrait and behind-the-scenes photographs, including contact sheets and never-before-seen images. With an introduction by Terence Pepper, Always Audrey is sure to delight any Hepburn fan.
With shimmering outfits, poetic texts and energetic performances David Bowie delighted millions of fans. As Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom or the Thin White Duke he proved his innovative power and eagerness to experiment. Bowie showed the world that, to stay true to yourself, you have to keep on reinventing yourself.
On the occasion of the 5th anniversary of Bowie’s death, photographer Masayoshi Sukita presents an extraordinary illustrated book on the celebrated musician, actor and producer. During their 40-year cooperation Sukita captured the essence of Bowie – in iconic black-and-white photos and extravagant portrait photos. The best of them were chosen for this book and topped off with informative texts.
The musician and his photographer – a different Bowie biography
An ode to Alberic ‘Briek’ Schotte, the godfather of all flandriens.
The heroes of the Tour of Flanders and the Paris-Roubaix are tough and determined. The Flemings specialize in riding on bad roads and in bad weather. This set of photos provides an intimate and emotional portrait of these legendary athletes, landscapes and the Flemish culture. Stephan Vanfleteren has been photographing cycling races in Belgium and its surrounding areas for more than 15 years already.
With more than 100 images, carefully selected by photographer Stephan Vanfleteren.
“It’s very hard for me to accept that Sukita-san has been snapping away at me since 1972, but that really is the case. I suspect that it’s because whenever he’s asked me to do a session, I conjure up in my mind’s eye the sweet, creative and big-hearted man who has always made these potentially tedious affairs so relaxed and painless. May he click into eternity.” – David Bowie
For Sukita, the creative mastermind behind the iconic cover for David Bowie’s album ‘Heroes’, photography is an expression of a ‘fundamental secret’ shared between artists: a spiritual communication that transcends the minutiae of language. Born and raised in Kyushu, Japan, Sukita’s reverence of American and Western counter-culture lured him to New York and London. He immersed himself in the western music scene which he loved, while his relaxed photo sessions endeared him to many celebrity figures, including David Bowie and Iggy Pop (with both of whom Sukita had a 40-year long professional relationship), Marc Bolan, and Japanese musician Hotei, best known for his work on the Kill Bill soundtrack. His work spans the early US and UK seventies rock scene, the London punk-rock era to the present crop of emerging Japanese rock artists.
This photo book is the first time the photographer has collaborated on a major retrospective of his career and includes some of his early documentary work and his rarely-seen travel and street photography. It introduces the artist through two essays that explore his place within the wider context of both Western and Japanese photography, presented alongside the many iconic shots of both Western and Japanese artists that earned him his eternal reputation.
“Stunning and vibrant, the studio portrait photography of Omar Victor Diop is breathtakingly brilliant.” — Amateur Photographer
Since 2012, Dakar-born Omar Victor Diop has been hailed by the art world for his stunning, color-saturated studio photography. His conceptual projects are primarily staged as beautifully costumed portraits and self-portraits, and focus on important historical figures and events from Black history and the African diaspora. In the three projects presented in this book, Diaspora (2014), Liberty (2017) and Allegory (2021), he revisits Black African history in poignant photographs that weave together the past and the present.
Text in English and French.
We love them. Rock stars, movie stars, icons of the art world. And we love pictures of them. Most portraits we see today document our abstract ideas of what’s best and what’s worst – in them and in ourselves. That’s why they work. Portraiture as a means of artistic expression and human understanding remains important and vital.
It is certainly a great aspect of Søren Rønholt’s work: the invisible dialogue between the people he portrays and himself is undeniable. The majority of his portrayed characters may be famous, but that’s not the point. He uses every ounce of his empathy to create images of real people. Despite the clever, accentuating mood and strong, often monochromatic style – what he seeks is the truth behind the face.
“A joyous, mysterious portrait of rural American boyhood.” – THE NEW YORKER ON RANDY
Robin de Puy (b. 1986) has lived for several years in Wormer, a small village just to the north of Amsterdam. She is fascinated by the American countryside, and during the recent lockdown discovered that her new environment proves to be very universal, with the same sort of local small-town icons that she has often encountered during her travels through the rural landscapes of America.
For example, she meets an eleven-year-old shaman who shows her around barefoot in forbidden territory, she drives around with four giggling brothers in the back seat, and she meets a palm reader who immediately gives her the keys to his house. Dozens of encounters follow and, slowly, not only a photo book is created but also a world in which she starts to feel at home.
Text in English and Dutch.
The identical reproduction of the Meuricoffre album, acquired by the Louvre in 2018, is a good opportunity to leaf through one of the only two portrait books attributed to the French painter Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835). It is a testimony to Gros’ activity as a portrait painter during his stay in Italy (1793-1800) and illustrates the privileged relationship that the painter had in Genoa with the family of the Franco-Swiss banker Jean-Georges Meuricoffre. The beautiful gallery of portraits, drawn in the intimacy of this family, restores the physiognomies of representatives of Franco-Swiss high society who were in contact with the Meuricoffre family at the time and, through them, with Gros.
The study that accompanies the publication of the notebook reveals the hitherto unknown identity of these characters. A material description of the album, an essential scientific support for its understanding, completes the subject.
Text in French.
The Medici family ruled unofficially and later as dukes the city of Florence and Tuscany, from the end of 14th to the end of the 18th century. Under their patronage the Renaissance was born.
The members of this powerful family were able to build their public image in a sophisticated cultural environment where famous artists such as Raphael, Pontormo, Bronzino, Vasari, as well as poets, men of letters, scientists, humanists, were active. Portraits played an important role in this public relations strategy. The portrait types were quite different: from State portraits to family portraits, from those depicting the young heirs of the family name to those of the women that either ruled or played important roles in the dynastic allegiances.
In this guide the marvellous works, held in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery and Palazzo Pitti, are presented in chronological order making possible to trace the main stages in the history and genealogy of the Medici family.
In this evocative new book, historian David Kynaston tells the fascinating story of Anthony de Rothschild (1887–1961). Through access to never previously consulted diaries and letters, a three-dimensional picture emerges of a complex and thoughtful man guiding the City’s most famous merchant bank through the turbulent years between the 1920s and 1950s.
In politics he was open-minded and constructive whilst in his philanthropy, not least through his leading role in helping Jewish refugees (especially children) to leave Nazi Germany for England, he was thoughtful and generous. Austere on the surface but warm beneath, impatient equally of fools and idealogues, always searching for how he could contribute to make a better world – Anthony de Rothschild deserves, arguably more than almost anyone else in the 20th-century City, to be known properly by later generations.
“…the panorama of a self-forgotten milieu.” — Monopol
“Toffs behaving badly: 1980s high society in photos.” — The Times
“The pictorial equivalents of Evelyn Waugh’s sentences.” — The New Yorker
“Modest though he is, Dafydd’s photographs will endure for having perfectly captured a society on the brink of decline. Unmissable listening.” — Country & Townhouse podcast
“Wonderfully ironic, every point in the picture ignites and knows how to entertain very well.” — Lovely Books
“Dafydd catches those moments of genuine exhilaration, wealth and youth.” — The Hollywood Reporter
“I wondered if the party guests I’d photographed were just re-enacting a nostalgic fantasy, an imaginary version of England that already no longer existed.” – Dafydd Jones
Throughout the 1980s, award-winning photographer Dafydd Jones was granted access to some of England’s most exclusive upper-class events. Now, the author of Oxford: The Last Hurrah presents this irreverent and intimate portrait of birthday parties and charity balls, Eton picnics and private school celebrations.
With the crack of a hunting rifle and a spray of champagne, these photos give an almost cinematic account of high-society England at its most riotous and its most vulnerable. Against the backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain, globalization, the Falklands War, rising stocks and dwindling inherited fortunes, Jones reveals the inner lives of the established elite as they party long into the night-time of their fading world.
Praise for Oxford: The Last Hurrah
‘Sublime vintage photographs…’ – Hermione Eyre, The Telegraph
‘In The Last Hurrah…we see familiar faces from British high society poised on the brink of adulthood.’ – Eve Watling, Independent
Marzena Pogorzaly made two trips to Havana. There, she walked the streets of Havana Vieja and El Centro, the old districts, trying to capture the melancholy beauty and decay of the city, and its inhabitants. Pogorzaly’s calmly gorgeous images are not directly concerned with politics, but as someone who grew up in pre-Solidarity Poland, she combines mature scepticism about communist regimes with due respect for some of its achievements. As she explains in her introduction: “Some of it was familiar. I was born, and grew up, behind the Iron Curtain. I immediately felt at home with the way The System worked, or rather the way it did not. But where the palette of my homeland was dull, drab and irredeemably monochrome, here I found a vivid treasure chest of visual epiphanies.” Her chief care is for people, either viewed directly or by means of the traces they leave: posters of Che Guevara, neglected chairs, rickety old American cars. Her photographs are entirely without sentimentality but rich in that tradition of humanism which sees the deeper qualities that unite us with strangers, as well as the surface differences that divide us. Her Cubans are not pathetic victims of a dictatorship but a handsome, vital, proud and resourceful people.
This is the most comprehensive English-language presentation of the work of Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875), a Japanese nun famed for her multifaceted artistic skills and prodigious output. Rengetsu (Lotus Moon) was one of the most remarkable women in Japanese culture, a trained samurai, wife, mother, nun, poet, calligrapher, painter, and potter.
This book was developed as a catalog for an exhibition of Rengetsu’s work mounted at the Royal Monastery of St. Mary of Pedralbes in Barcelona. Written by Professor John Stevens, the foremost authority on the artist, it includes a biography of Rengetsu based on his latest research, plus an introduction to her poetry, calligraphy, painting, and pottery.
The catalog of 90 entries includes several pieces not seen in the exhibition. Entries present full-color photos of both the entire work and important details, plus the original Japanese kana, romanization, and English translations, with illuminating commentary. Taken as a whole, the book offers as an intimate portrait of the life and work of a remarkable female artist, as well as insights into significant thematic and cultural concerns of 19th-century Japanese art.
The most comprehensive anthology of writings by visitors to the eternal city ever compiled – witty, profound and endlessly entertaining.
Drawing on French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Scandinavian and American sources, Ronald Ridley has compiled a vivid collage-portrait of Rome through the centuries, illustrated with three hundred images and published in three elegant volumes: The Middles Ages to the Seventeenth Century, The Eighteenth Century and The Nineteenth Century. Presented here is the first volume.
How did visitors arrive? Where did they stay? What were their expenses? What did they see of churches, palaces, villas and antiquities? What did they like or dislike of what they saw? What did they think of Rome in all its contemporary facets? What events did they witness? What portraits do they provide of people in Rome at the time of their visit? Excerpts from memoirs by more than two hundred visitors give a myriad fascinating insights and together provide a detailed account of Rome over nearly a millennium.
The most comprehensive anthology of writings by visitors to the eternal city ever compiled – witty, profound and endlessly entertaining.
Drawing on French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Scandinavian and American sources, Ronald Ridley has compiled a vivid collage-portrait of Rome through the centuries, illustrated with three hundred images and published in three elegant volumes: The Middles Ages to the Seventeenth Century, The Eighteenth Century and The Nineteenth Century. Presented here is the second volume.
How did visitors arrive? Where did they stay? What were their expenses? What did they see of churches, palaces, villas and antiquities? What did they like or dislike of what they saw? What did they think of Rome in all its contemporary facets? What events did they witness? What portraits do they provide of people in Rome at the time of their visit? Excerpts from memoirs by more than two hundred visitors give a myriad fascinating insights and together provide a detailed account of Rome over nearly a millennium.
“Ronald’s detailed and thoroughly enjoyable collection shows how it can take a visitor to appreciate what the residents are so used to, they take for granted.” — Camden New Journal/Islington Tribune/West End Extra
The most comprehensive anthology of writings by visitors to the eternal city ever compiled – witty, profound and endlessly entertaining.
Drawing on French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Scandinavian and American sources, Ronald Ridley has compiled a vivid collage-portrait of Rome through the centuries, illustrated with three hundred images and published in three elegant volumes: The Middles Ages to the Seventeenth Century, The Eighteenth Century and The Nineteenth Century. Presented here is the third volume.
How did visitors arrive? Where did they stay? What were their expenses? What did they see of churches, palaces, villas and antiquities? What did they like or dislike of what they saw? What did they think of Rome in all its contemporary facets? What events did they witness? What portraits do they provide of people in Rome at the time of their visit? Excerpts from memoirs by more than two hundred visitors give a myriad fascinating insights and together provide a detailed account of Rome over nearly a millennium.
“This is the very best of Antwerp and the best from here in Oxford.” — The Oxford Times Weekend
“This entertaining exhibition of the 16th- and 17th-century drawings from the Low Countries has energy to spare.” — The Telegraph
This catalogue will accompany the Bruegel to Rubens exhibition held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford between 23 March and 23 June 2024.
Through a selection of over 100 world-class drawings created by Flemish artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an insightful and comprehensive overview will be given into how these drawn sheets were used as part of artistic practice, within or beyond the artist’s studio. By revealing the drawings’ function, rather than on their attribution or iconography, these sheets will become more fully understood through the eyes of contemporary readers. Identifying how and why these sheets were created will render these artworks more accessible to a wider audience. The three main essays will each deal with one of the principal functions of drawings at the time: studies (copies and sketches), designs for other artworks (paintings, prints, tapestries, metalwork, stained glass, sculpture and architecture), and finally the independent drawings. Each essay will discuss the relevant works within their functional context and compared with other related objects. Introductory chapters will focus on what precisely can be considered a drawing, including its materials, media and techniques, in addition to an attempt to explain the notion of Flanders and Flemish art. Emphasis will be placed throughout the catalogue on how Flemish artists collaborated in creating the most astonishing artworks of their time, unveiling their networks and friendships, as well as their travels across Europe, revealing their international importance.
The exhibition is a partnership with the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp and will bring together for the first time the most stunning drawings from both the Ashmolean and the Plantin-Moretus collections, in addition to further loans from renowned Antwerp and Oxford institutions like the Rubenshuis and Christ Church Picture Gallery. Many of the sheets coming from Antwerp are registered on the Flemish Government’s Masterpieces List and will not be shown again for the next five to ten years to protect them from fading. Prominent artists featured in this catalogue include Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacques Jordaens, among many others. Highlights will include a sketchbook in which a young Rubens has copied Holbein’s Dance of Death woodcuts, intricate pen and ink drawings by Pieter Bruegel, meticulously drawn miniatures by Joris Hoefnagel, portrait studies by Anthony van Dyck, and a rare survival of a friendship album containing numerous drawings and poems dedicated to its owner. Two recently discovered sheets by Rubens will also be included, a design for a book-illustration on optics and an anatomical study of three legs.
“The London Youth Portraits (ACC Art Books), a sumptuous collection of never-before-seen photographs of punks, skinheads, New Romantics, goths, ravers, and fetishists.” — Huck Magazine
“A new edit of a beloved classic.” — Marc Jacobs Instagram
“Across 176 pages, the oversized volume documents Ridgers’ vision of England’s seminal youth culture from the height of punk to the birth of acid house, each image a tribute to the trials and triumphs of youth.” — 10 Magazine
‘As time passes, this kind of observational photography attains a new importance’ – Sean O’Hagan, The Observer
‘Ridgers’ portraits of young boys and girls are weighted with a raw poetry and beauty’ – Cory Reynolds, artbook.com
Between 1978 and 1987, renowned British photographer Derek Ridgers captured London youth culture in all its glory. With skinheads, punks and new romantics, in clubs and on the street, his images have come to define a seminal decade of British subculture.
Broadly based on the now out of print book 78/87 London Youth, this showcases a completely fresh selection of images from the depths of Ridgers’ exceptional archive – including many previously unseen – beautifully printed and bound in an oversized volume.
Each picture is a tribute to the trials and triumphs of youth, and a precious document of style and culture in 1980s England, from the height of punk to the birth of acid house. Several have been exhibited internationally in cities as far-ranging as Moscow, Adelaide and Beverly Hills, in the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain and Somerset House. Ridgers has also collaborated with a number of major fashion houses, including Saint Laurent and Gucci, and his images continue to inspire photographers, artists and fashion designers around the world.
“This is a reissue of a sought after classic that has stood the test of time, and this new edition now stands as a testament to its creators and an age that has passed.” — Black + White Photography Magazine
“My London is Soho” — Frank Norman
For as long as anyone can remember, Soho has been the fluttering heart of London. Its storied pubs, shops, trattorias, gambling dens and nightclubs are every bit as alive as the millions of tourists, locals and crosstown visitors who crowd the streets all year round. People from all walks of life are made and unmade in Soho, and few knew it better than Frank Norman and Jeffrey Bernard. Writers and raconteurs, the pair haunted Soho’s establishments for much of their lives. While Bernard was renowned for his Low Life column in the Spectator, these pages collect his photos of the Soho he loved, with insightful commentary from Norman, an acclaimed novelist in his own right. Soho Night & Day is an authentic and very personal portrait of a special time and place, telling the tale of Soho in the ’60s.
This new edition is embellished with an introduction by Barry Miles, as well as Jeffrey Bernard’s moving obituary for Frank Norman.
“I have never read a text which goes even half as far as this one in expressing the particular poignancy which lay at the heart of the impressionist movement. I say this as an art critic. As a novelist I would simply like to pay my tribute to the mastery of language, portraiture and storytelling which Figes has now at her command.” – John Berger
“A small masterpiece” – Susan Hill
“A luminous prose poem” – Joyce Carol Oates
This shimmering novel is an extraordinary portrait of a day in the life of an artist at work and at home. In prose as luminous as the colors Monet is using to portray his garden, Eva Figes guides us from dawn (‘midnight blueblack growing grey and misty’) through midday (‘the sun was high now… shrinking what little shadow remained, fading colors, the pink rambler roses on the fence by the railway track looked almost white’) to evening (‘the tide of shadows rising as the sunset glow faded outside.’) Monet’s wife, grieving for a lost daughter; a living daughter, fretting that she will not be able to marry the man she loves; their friend the abbé, eating and drinking with them; two children playing, closest to Monet in the freshness and certainty of their vision; all experiencing in different ways the richness of the light that Monet works unceasingly to pin down in his last, great paintings.
“Legendary Bruce Springsteen photographer’s iconic travel images showcased in lavish new coffee-table book, from storms in South Dakota to penguins in Antarctica.” — The Daily Mail
Bending Light: The Moods of Color showcases photographer Eric Meola’s use of light and color throughout his career of editorial, advertising, and personal work. In one hundred iconic photographs, including recent experiments with color abstracts, and in dozens of stories and anecdotes, he examines his five-decade journey using color in photography, its symbolism, and how it affects our moods.
Meola’s work is informed by writers, painters, musicians, and the desire to create visual metaphors with his imagery — whether intimate portraits, unique landscapes, or color-saturated abstracts, his use of geometry within the frame of the photograph creates a tension that is instantly recognizable.
In awarding him its Lifetime Achievement Award for 2023, the Professional Photographers of America noted that “Eric Meola champions photography as a visual language capable of great emotion. He’s a photographer with a love affair for color, light, and artistic freedom.”
As Meola says, “Light and color are my subject as much as the subject itself. It’s the confluence of color with light — the movement within the color — that’s important to me. Although the end image is a still photograph, the story of its creation, the how and why it came to be, is part of every photographer’s psyche. Telling the stories behind the photographs is my way to revisit the creative process, both as a means of introspection as well as expression. Photography has always been a way for me to create what I feel, and feel as I create.”
Bending Light: The Moods of Color takes us on a visual journey around the world as Meola tells the story behind the creation of each image, giving insight into the thought process behind creating photographs. A photographer from Rangefinder magazine referred to him as one of “a handful of color photographers who are true innovators.”
In Anouk Masson Krantz’s most expansive work to date, she travels tens of thousands of miles across the Americas, broadening her focus from the United States to both American continents. In her exquisite, large-scale photographs – all new for this book – Anouk captures sweeping landscapes and paints an intimate portrait of the enduring cross-boundary legacies of the North American cowboy, Central American vaquero, and South American gaucho. Her time spent at ranches and rodeos across The Americas has culminated in a magnificent book honouring a way of life many around the world dream of but rarely have experienced first-hand. Frontier builds upon Anouk’s renowned body of work with her bestselling Wild Horses of Cumberland Island (2017); West: The American Cowboy (2019); American Cowboys (2021); and Ranchland (2022). Her stunning black and white, large-scale photographs capture a culture deeply rooted in principled, timeless values, sacrifice, strength, and self-reliance. From stunning panoramas to the intimate everyday lives of working cowboys and their families, Frontier is a must-have addition to her impressive body of work.
Bernie Taupin, Oscar winner, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and long-time song-writing collaborator with Elton John, has contributed an exceptional foreword.
“There’s an honesty and integrity in these images that parlays all the elements of what it means to exist outside the boundaries of conformity and confinement. The rebel spirit, the rugged individualism, and the absolute unapologetic rhythm of history. This is stunning work—a true testament to the men and women who are the anvil on which America’s backbone was forged.” —Bernie Taupin
In Anouk Masson Krantz’s most expansive work to date, she travels tens of thousands of miles across the Americas, broadening her focus from the United States to both American continents. In her exquisite, large-scale photographs – all new for this book – Anouk captures sweeping landscapes and paints an intimate portrait of the enduring cross-boundary legacies of the North American cowboy, Central American vaquero, and South American gaucho. Her time spent at ranches and rodeos across The Americas has culminated in a magnificent book honouring a way of life many around the world dream of but rarely have experienced first-hand. Frontier builds upon Anouk’s renowned body of work with her bestselling Wild Horses of Cumberland Island (2017); West: The American Cowboy (2019); American Cowboys (2021); and Ranchland (2022). Her stunning black and white, large-scale photographs capture a culture deeply rooted in principled, timeless values, sacrifice, strength, and self-reliance. From stunning panoramas to the intimate everyday lives of working cowboys and their families, Frontier is a must-have addition to her impressive body of work.
Bernie Taupin, Oscar winner, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and long-time song-writing collaborator with Elton John, has contributed an exceptional foreword.
“There’s an honesty and integrity in these images that parlays all the elements of what it means to exist outside the boundaries of conformity and confinement. The rebel spirit, the rugged individualism, and the absolute unapologetic rhythm of history. This is stunning work—a true testament to the men and women who are the anvil on which America’s backbone was forged.” —Bernie Taupin
Also available in a standard edition Frontier ISBN 9781864709810, £70.00.
‘Beauty is the beacon of God,’ said Botticelli. ‘No, it’s not. Love is,’ snapped his sister.
Beauty: Botticelli in Florence imagines what Botticelli was feeling and thinking as he painted. The people he loved and despised, his private struggle between spirituality and sensuality, the tempestuous times he lived through – all come to life in his images…
The novel is a speculation based on the few facts known about Botticelli, informed by his paintings. There are many surprises. The Birth of Venus was a tapestry design. And his famed self-portrait didn’t depict him (as widely believed) but Pierfrancesco de Medici, who sued his powerful cousin Lorenzo for robbing him, abolished Florence’s homophobic witch-hunts, funded Vespucci’s journey to the New World and commissioned Botticelli’s most famous works. There was boiling tension between him and Botticelli.
This is the first in a sequence of illustrated ‘painting novels’ that make sights as telling as words.