Assignments

Résumé du livre

"The career of a professional photographer is a succession of challenges. lf he is commissioned to photograph a famous personality, he must find a way of revealing something new in the familiar face of the sitter and at the same time avoid any facile distortion. If he sets out to expose a social evil--the loneliness of old age, the plight of the physically handicapped or the mentally disturbed--he must do so without unduly intruding on the privacy of his anonymous subjects. And if he is asked to confront a spectacular landscape, he must somehow avoid the banality of the picture-postcard. This book is a record of such problems successfully solved. Its contents span nearly twenty years, ranging from the first assignments of Tony Armstrong-Jones, working in black and white as a photo-journalist, to the most recent of Snowdon's colour essays in Peru. It is a collection of contrasts: between people, celebrated or obscure; between places, exotic or humdrum; and between the different styles which the photographer chose in order to interpret the essence of his various themes. It can be enjoyed as the interesting record of an artist's development, and also as a fascinating anthology of vivid images--some slyly satirical, some unsentimentally compassionate, and some just beautiful in themselves."--Dust jacket.