Beaton: Photographs

Beaton: Photographs surveys six decades of work by Cecil Beaton (1904-1980). The English photographer's portraits and stage-managed tableaux shaped the visual language of British society, fashion and celebrity from the 1920s through the 1970s.

Edited by Mark Holborn, with an introductory appreciation by Annie Leibovitz, the book draws together Beaton's portraits of figures including Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, David Hockney and Mick Jagger. It sets these alongside his coverage of royal ceremonies, his wartime photography for the British Ministry of Information, Hollywood glamour portraiture and the pop culture of 1960s London. Abrams published this US edition in 2015, following Jonathan Cape's UK edition of the same material; both draw on the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive.

Beaton worked simultaneously as a society and fashion photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, an official war photographer, and a stage and costume designer for theatre and film. He won Academy Awards for his costume and set design on Gigi and My Fair Lady. Holborn, a longtime editor of photography books, also edited Beaton's Theatre of War for Jonathan Cape and the Imperial War Museums, drawing on the same archive of Beaton's wartime negatives.