Pierre Et Gilles, Sailors & Sea - Softcover

Text: French, German, English

The highly stylized portraits by the French photographers known simply by their first names, Pierre et Gilles, function unapologetically in the grand tradition of glamour photography. The subjects?whether they are stars of film, music, or fashion or just friends of the photographers?are both idealized and irrelevant when standing amid complex fantasy sets under layers of makeup in photographs that have been heavily retouched. This contradiction, which we know to have been most fully realized in the Hollywood star system of the Forties, is perhaps the only irony in the artists' body of work. These are simply beautiful images of beautiful people, produced as a sincere homage to the beauty of the human form. As this mid-career catalog raisonne makes clear, they found their style with their first images from the late 1970s and have only finely honed it since then. It is nonetheless informative, and above all pleasurable to peruse the jungle of nearly 400 images after wandering through the phographers' 40-page collage-like "illustrated biography." Highly recommended for all contemporary photography and pop culture collections.?Eric Bryant, "Lirbrary Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.