Synopses & Reviews
Vanity Fair 100 Years showcases a century of personality and power, art and commerce, crisis and cultureboth highbrow and low. From its inception in 1913, through the Jazz Age and the Depression, to its reincarnation in the boom-boom Reagan years, to the image-saturated Information Age,
Vanity Fair has presented the modern era as it has unfolded, using wit, imagination, peerless literary narrative, and bold, groundbreaking imagery from the greatest photographers, artists, and illustrators of the day. This sumptuous book takes a decade-by-decade look at the world as seen by the magazine, stopping to describe the incomparable editor Frank Crowninshield and the birth of the Jazz Age
Vanity Fair, the magazines controversial rebirth in 1983, and the history of the glamorous
Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
With its exhaustive sweep, visual impact, and time-capsule format, Vanity Fair 100 Years is the book everyone will want in 2013. Praise for Vanity Fair 100 Years:
The book is a stunning artifact that begets staring, less for the words and publishing industry than as an exercise in visual storytelling reflected through the prism of society and celebrity. The best photographers, the best designers, the best illustrators all came together over Vanity Fairs contents, and the book unfolds in page after page of stunningly rendered images, some iconic and some that never even ran.” New York Times Book Review
Review
Vanity Fair magazine has a reputation as one of the preeminent showcases for portraits in the world, and this book gathers together a good chunk of them in all their glossy, artificial splendor. There's almost as much celebrity behind the lens as in front of it: Edward Steichen, Herb Ritts, Mario Testino, David LaChapelle and, of course, Annie Leibovitz are all included, and the portraits themselves amount to a who's who of culture and politics, with the quality of the images justifying the inclusion of the occasional lesser-known figures. The photographs have been arranged to supply the reader with subtle (and not so subtle) visual and cultural frisson: what are we meant to think when Joseph Goebbels is juxtaposed with Richard Perle? In a face-off between Rob Lowe and Louise Brooks, who has the most glamorous jaw line? For posing questions such as this, and for the production values and sheer scale, not to mention introductory essays by Graydon Carter, Christopher Hitchens, Terence Pepper and David Friend, this is a book that will no doubt be adorning the coffee tables of the world's culture brokers for many years to come.
Synopsis
Vanity Fair 100 Years showcases a century of personality and power, art and commerce, crisis and culture--both highbrow and low--in this collection of images that graced the pages of magazine, and some published for the very first time. From its inception in 1913, through the Jazz Age and the Depression, to its reincarnation in the boom-boom Reagan years, to the image-saturated Information Age, Vanity Fair has presented the modern era as it has unfolded, using wit, imagination, peerless literary narrative, and bold, groundbreaking imagery from the greatest photographers, artists, and illustrators of the day.
Edited by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, this sumptuous book takes a decade-by-decade look at the world as seen by the magazine, stopping to describe the incomparable editor Frank Crowninshield and the birth of the Jazz Age Vanity Fair, the magazine's controversial rebirth in 1983, and the history of the glamorous Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
"The book is a stunning artifact that begets staring, less for the words and publishing industry than as an exercise in visual storytelling reflected through the prism of society and celebrity. The best photographers, the best designers, the best illustrators all came together over Vanity Fair's contents, and the book unfolds in page after page of stunningly rendered images, some iconic and some that never even ran." --New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Graydon Carter is the editor of Vanity Fair. David Friend is editor of creative development at Vanity Fair and author of Watching the World Change.
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Christopher Hitchens is a journalist, literary critic, and social commentator. He is the author most recently of the bestselling God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
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Terence Pepper, curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London, was awarded an OBE for services to photography and art.