The holiday season is coming soon, and publishers start to release titles that can have broad appeal to become favorite gifts. Sometimes these new releases are photobooks and although most will not be that interesting to me, two recent publications are worth to mention because they are extraordinary photobooks on their own.
The first book is “Vanity Fair, the portraits: a century of iconic images“. This is a fabulous photobook, with perhaps the most interesting collection of celebrity portraits that made Vanity Fair an iconic magazine in the history of portrait photography.
Vanity Fair: The Portraits brings together 300 iconic portraits from Vanity Fair’s 95-year history in a remarkable book that captures the image of modern fame—the magical thing that happens when individual talent and beauty (and sometimes genius) is caught in the spotlight of popular curiosity and passion. The photographers—from Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton to Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino—are a glittering and celebrated group themselves. Their portraits have become the iconic likenesses of the best-known figures from the worlds of art, film, music, sports, business, and politics.
When you hear Vanity Fair and portraits you think about about Annie Leibovitz. So I like to point you to a very interesting documentary, Annie Leibovitz: life through a lens, released few weeks ago on this iconic photographer. You can rent -or purchase- the DVD online at the iTunes store [USA] [trailer here]
The second book I like to highlight is LIFE, The Classic Collection, a large-format hardcover filled with 100 of the magazine’s iconic images. The images in this book are part of our memory and the history of photography and the book is beautiful. But what cough my attention is that the book comes with 25 prints of some of these images, prints that can be easily detached from the pages to be framed if you wish to do so [look at this promo]. After seeing the book and the prints it seems such an obvious and interesting approach that makes me wonder why it is not a more common practice in the publication of photobooks. Just for the prints it is worthwhile to buy the book. Here there is a video interview with the Director of Photography at LIFE, Bobbi Baker commenting some of the images of the book.
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