In Their Youth: Early Portraits comprises over 200 of the California-based photographer's previously unpublished portraits from the last three decades, featuring famous actors shot when they were still unknown young men, from teen years into their early twenties. "I decided to do a project that expressed my infatuation with male beauty," Gorman explains, "especially in terms of youth... the portraits don't have lots of backgrounds, they're straightforward. It's really about the person, not the elements. It boils down to the graphics of the individual more than the graphics of the setting." Gorman's intimate celebrity portraits hinge on the sense of his subjects' vulnerability. Here, famous young men are juxtaposed with photographs of promising unknowns: one of the first shots of Tom Cruise, for instance, shares a spread with some anonymous ephebe that Andy Warhol met at Studio 54. Greg Gorman discovered his calling after taking a borrowed camera to a Jimi Hendrix concert in 1968. In 1990, after producing images for over 20 years, he published his first book, Greg Gorman Volume One, which reveals his skills as a portraitist. Gorman has created innumerable unforgettable images (for instance, a 2000 portrait of Jeff Koons shows the artist perched on a filthy toilet, flanked by two leather-clad ladies). His work has been featured in ad campaigns and has been featured on the covers of a number of magazines, including Esquire, GQ, Interview, Vogue, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.
"This volume of almost one thousand images from the archive of Greg Gorman, selected by himself as a kind of bequest from a living person, is without doubt the most personal evidence of his obsessive search for pictures of radiant manly youth and his conceptions of beauty, which can only be realised in the black-and-white print of a photograph. "This notion of a contemporary version of 'mens sana in corpore sano' from this neo-Roman or neo-Greek person almost persuaded me to set an antique Antinous, the short-lived lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, at the head of these reflections. "The selection represents above all a celebration of the face, the classical form of the portrait, which photography took over from painting. Beyond that, Gorman supplements his selection of heads with nude portraits, with their varieties of body language, where the erotic imagination of both model and photographer becomes manifest. The over two hundred works reproduced here were imposed by Gorman on a graphic grid, where both the dialogue between different models as well as the confrontation of a nude and a portrait of the same model are significant."
Peter Weiermair, excerpted from his introduction to In Their Youth.
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.25 x 10.25 in. / 140 pgs / 200 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 ISBN: 9788862080972 PUBLISHER: Damiani AVAILABLE: 10/31/2009 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
In Their Youth: Early Portraits comprises over 200 of the California-based photographer's previously unpublished portraits from the last three decades, featuring famous actors shot when they were still unknown young men, from teen years into their early twenties. "I decided to do a project that expressed my infatuation with male beauty," Gorman explains, "especially in terms of youth... the portraits don't have lots of backgrounds, they're straightforward. It's really about the person, not the elements. It boils down to the graphics of the individual more than the graphics of the setting." Gorman's intimate celebrity portraits hinge on the sense of his subjects' vulnerability. Here, famous young men are juxtaposed with photographs of promising unknowns: one of the first shots of Tom Cruise, for instance, shares a spread with some anonymous ephebe that Andy Warhol met at Studio 54.
Greg Gorman discovered his calling after taking a borrowed camera to a Jimi Hendrix concert in 1968. In 1990, after producing images for over 20 years, he published his first book, Greg Gorman Volume One, which reveals his skills as a portraitist. Gorman has created innumerable unforgettable images (for instance, a 2000 portrait of Jeff Koons shows the artist perched on a filthy toilet, flanked by two leather-clad ladies). His work has been featured in ad campaigns and has been featured on the covers of a number of magazines, including Esquire, GQ, Interview, Vogue, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.
