Scavullo Photographs 50 years

Scavullo Photographs 50 years.

Francesco Scavullo, one of the world’s leading photographers, says his career began the day he went to the movies with his grandfather more than sixty years ago. There he saw Greta Garbo on the screen in Queen Christina and, as he later wrote, “Instantly another magical world opened up for me, introduced by the most perfect distillation of female beauty I’d ever seen or could hope to see. The young Scavullo had fallen in love with beauty.

First photographing his sisters, then their neighborhood girl-friends, and eventually moving into the professional world of photography as an assistant to Horst, Scavullo has been aiming his eye, and his heart, at making the world look beautiful. Magazines offered the best exposure (and a reliable paycheck), and it was first at Seventeen that Scavullo made his mark. Although he soon had assignments from other publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Town & Country, and Good Housekeeping, it was at Harper’s Bazaar, in 1955, that Scavullo was fully launched as a fashion pho-tographer. By the 1960s, there followed the now well known cover assigments for Cosmopolitan and, through his friend and model Lauren Hutton, work at Vogue. Scavullo – as he became known – had realized his dream.

Scavullo: Photographs, 50 Years is the definitive collection of his work, and showcases the enormity and variety of his passion for taking pictures. In addition to Scavullo’s artful lighting and his easy, gentle way with models, he also made friends with some of the most celebrated, outrageous, , and powerful people in the world, all of whom wanted Scavullo to take their photographs.

Here, in this superb book of 100 full-color pictures and 125 in duotone, are portraits of the world’s most beautiful women – Sophia Loren, Catherine Deneuve, Isabella Rossellini, Elizabeth Taylor – and those whose careers and stature has become legendary.

Among them: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Shirley MacLaine, Mick Jagger, Sting, Raul Julia, Barbra Streisand, Julie Andrews, Diana Ross, And Warhol, Margaux Hemingway, Edward Albee, Christopher Reeve, Susan Sarandon, Candice Bergen, Diana Vreeland, Truman Capote.

There are special sections on Brooke Shields, whom Scavullo first photographed when she was only seven months old for an Ivory soap ad, Lauren Hutton, Rene Russo, Madonna, and Janis Joplin, the latter in a group of images never before published. And of course there are the models – from Veruschka to Iman to Claudia Schiffer – who are made forever more beautiful by Scavullo.

With an introduction by Enid Nemy, a feature writer for The New York Times, and personal commentaries throughout by the photographer as well as an illustrated chronology, this exceptional book forms the photographer’s most complete, intimate portrait of his life and work.

It’s a dazzling achievement of five decades of photographs by a man who today says, “I don’t look back. I don’t look ahead. I just look around.” And in looking around, Scavullo has brought ele-gance, beauty, and wit to some of the most magical pictures one could ever want.

225 illustrations, including 100 plates in full color and 125 in dustone.

225 pages.

Condition: Great