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PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9 x 12.5 in. / 240 pgs / 140 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/22/2016
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2015 p. 99

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783958290273 TRADE
List Price: $50.00 CAD $67.50

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

THE SPRING 2026 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

Preview our SPRING 2026 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.

Curtis Moffat: Silver Society

Experimental Photography and Design, 1923-1935

Edited with text by Martin Barnes. Text by Mark Haworth-Booth, James Stevenson.

This is the first publication on the American modernist photographer Curtis Moffat (1887-1949), who is known for his dynamic abstract photographs, innovative color still lifes and some of the most glamorous society portraits of the early 20th century. He was also a pivotal figure in modernist interior design and furniture. Living in London throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, in the era of the "Bright Young Things," Moffat produced stylish photographic portraits of leading figures in high society, theatre and the arts, including Cecil Beaton, the Sitwells, Nancy Cunard, Lady Diana Cooper, Tallulah Bankhead and Daphne du Maurier.

In 2003 and 2007, Moffat's daughter, Penelope Smail, generously donated her father's extensive archive to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This book is drawn from that archive and includes, in addition, digital reconstructions of color images from original tri-carbro process black-and-white negatives. It reveals Moffat's pioneering but hitherto little-known photography in all its depth and beauty.

Featured image is reproduced from Curtis Moffat: Silver Society.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

New York Magazine

Lena Rawley

After World War I, photographer Curtis Moffat moved…from New York to London, where he opened a photography studio with the British socialite and society photographer Olivia Wyndham. Over the next decade, Moffat’s stylish portraits of society women would capture the city’s 'Bright Young Things' — a name the British tabloids gave to a raucous crowd of young bohemian aristocrats and socialites.

Independent Photographer

Josh Bright

Reveals some of [Curtis Moffat's] most compelling photographic works, drawn from the extensive archives[...] It includes portraits, photograms, candid ‘snapshots’, and a selection of striking color imagery.