"This selection of more than 700 mostly black-and-white photographs by Camilla McGrath is from a collection of 60,000 in 100 white leather bound albums covering the years 1948-1999. Camilla, one of four children of Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt, grew upwith a mother who was passionate about the arts: she painted, had a small theater, an art gallery, La Cometa, in Rome, and one in New York, and collected celebrated artists, writers, dancers and choreographers who often visited Marlia, the grand palazzo they owned outside Lucca where she took pictures of them displayed at the pool house. Camilla started taking her own pictures in the late 40s. She was fluent in English and Italian since at the beginning of the war the family had fled first to Santa Barbara and later moved to 9 East 84th Street in New York where Camilla went to Spence. Once they returned to Italy, there were attempts to marry Camilla off to a well-to-do Italian but she rebelled against that life. These photographs document McGrath's life in the 50s on and off boats in the Mediterranean, at the Agnelli wedding outside Strasberg, skiing in the Italian alps or in New York with Cy Twombly to witness his marriage at City Hall. After meeting Earl McGrath in 1958 at the opening of Gian Carlo Menotti's Festival of the Two Worlds where they both were working, they would marry in 1963. Six years younger, Earl was handsome, very funny and outgoing, a survivor of a rough childhood in Wisconsin and the Merchant Marine"--
Presents over 600 images taken by the nonprofessional photographer who played host to a unique mix of people in the 1950s and 1960s including Jackie Kennedy, Jerome Robbins, Dianne Feinstein, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, the Rolling Stones and Bette Midler. Illustrations.
Face to Face is a stunning collection of behind-the-scenes photographs of famous writers, poets, artists, architects, actors, directors, musicians, and social figures taken in Europe, New York, and Los Angeles
Camilla Pecci Blunt, a nonprofessional photographer who grew up between Italy and New York, was well placed to forge the path she did. Her mother was passionate about the arts, took photographs, painted, and collected artists around her, and had galleries in Rome and New York. The more than six hundred photographs in this book from the 1950s to the early 1990s capture our cultural icons in casual, playful moments.
After she married Earl McGrath in 1963, their homes--first in New York and then in Los Angeles--became gathering places for a wholly unexpected mix of people that Camilla documented in these surprising, in-the-moment photographs: Jackie Kennedy, Jerome Robbins, Calvin and Kelly Klein, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Bruce Chatwin, Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Jean Tinguely, Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, Allen Ginsberg, the Rolling Stones, Bryan Ferry, Bette Midler, Jerry Hall, Keith Haring, Linda Ronstadt, Jerry Brown, Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski, John Waters, Joan Didion, Angelia Huston, Robert Graham, David Hockney, Michael Crichton, and Barbra Streisand, among many others.
Andrea di Robilant's essay, along with memories from Griffin Dunne, Vincent Fremont, Harrison Ford, Fran Lebowitz, and Jann Wenner, reveal the backstory of this irresistible look at the larger-than-life cultural figures of our time as you have never seen them.
