cover image Public Appearances

Public Appearances

Antony Armstrong-Jones Snowdon, Lord Snowdon, Snowdon. Vendome Press, $40 (158pp) ISBN 978-0-86565-130-2

In top form with visual games and jokes galore, England's peer photographer Lord Snowden (Stills 1984-87) gathers 90 stars of ballet, drama, music, design, politics and the written word in his 14th and perhaps his best book of photographs (he hates the word portrait). Snowden reads up intensely on his subjects before a sitting, to which he arrives with a concept and props, often bizarre ones. Seen here, for example, are actor Barry Humphries with his head thrust up through the seat of a commode, comedian Les Dawson with hair curlers and curled lips and the Kirov Ballet's Andris Liepa as Siegfried in midair. For a potter and a sculptor only the hands are photographed, a decorator is shown aglare through a torn lampshade, and (a surprise for American TV viewers) John Goodman is shot as pseudo-monarch King Ralph. More conventionally, but rich in color and percept, Graham Greene, V. S. Pritchett, Dirk Bogarde, Jean Simmons, Yehudi Menuhin, Roald Dahl, Dame Margot Fonteyn, and 100-year-old Tommy Sopwith show their age with dignity. (Oct.)