Clifton Hall Link

This exhibition, organized by the American Museum of the Moving Image, included 63 color and black-and-white celebrity portraits by 14 modern masters of the form: Josef Astor, Harry Benson, Greg Gorman, Brigitte Lacombe, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Steven Meisel, Sheila Metzner, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston, Albert Watson, Bruce Weber, and Firooz Zahedi. These photographers revitalized a Hollywood tradition by reinventing it; in the process, they established celebrity portraiture as a major force in contemporary photography.

The exhibition showcased these photographers’ unique, sometimes outrageous, and extravagantly inventive visions of our film and television royalty, including Robert DeNiro, Jodie Foster, Jack Nicholson, and Elizabeth Taylor. Most of these portraits appeared in magazines such as Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Life. Yet they had never been publicly displayed as photographs. This exhibition was the first to treat this influential group of photographers as representatives of the important art movement of contemporary photography. It also offered the rare opportunity to see their work in its original format.

Diana Edkins, Curator of Photographs and Permissions Editor of Condé Nast Publications, organized the show. She is the Curator and Project Coordinator of the book and exhibition On the Edge: The First Hundred Years of Vogue, which was presented at the New York Public Library in 1992.

This exhibition was organized by Diana Edkins, Curator of Photographs and Permissions Editor of Condé Nast Publications and the American Museum of the Moving Image.