Some of my pictures have been shot in the studio or more often in some one's sitting room and the background added afterwards. Photo-purists can bale out at this point. On occasions I know from the outset that elements will have to be added later, Bernarda and Galèt (right) for...
Vargas or 'Varga' was the most famous pin-up artist of all time. I came across him in the 60s when I found piles of Esquire magazines in my uncle's library dating back to the war years. The Varga gatefold was to my teenage eyes the only memorable part of the magazine. Esquire magazine was...
A remarkable feature of Italy is the amount of history simply abandoned to nature. A walk in the woods can lead to a ruined church with peeling frescoes, even entire towns abandoned and overgrown or as here a Renaissance sculpture park outside Pitigliano constructed by the once powerful...
I have taken to photographing the Belle in places that I have known of for some time, trusting that the beauty of the site, what the Romans called Genius Loci, will inspire both me and the model even though I may not have a very well formed idea of what I intend to do at the outset. I set...
How long does one look at a picture, a work of art, a piece of sculpture, a stanza of poetry? Seconds, minutes possibly, but compared to watching a film, listening to a concert or reading a book, a blinking of an eye. But brevity does not necessarily diminish the effect, it may even...
Cyclamen is dear to the muses and Hecate, the mother goddess of dark, chthonic places and witchcraft; cyclamen is the flower of opposites. In folklore it symbolised life and death; an ingredient of wedding cakes to increase fertility yet a woman who walked barefoot on cyclamen would abort; both a...
In the ancient world, given that fertility was of fundamental importance, sex and religion were entwined. Bacchanalian rites were famous for their eroticism. A Roman home would often have the figure of Priapus holding his oversized phallus prominently displayed by the entrance and the...
Place is ever so important to artists and Lake Bolsena is a unique place. A large and deep volcanic lake north of Rome with two islands it was the centre of the Etruscan cult for over a thousand years and here catholics believe not one, but two miracles occurred. A meadow slopes down...
I have just finished the first biography I have ever read of a photographer, the Canadian Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002)*. So well known in the immediate post-war period that to have one's portrait taken by him was referred to as being 'Karshed'. He was an émigrée from Armenia, a survivor of...
Do artists still work from poetry? In the past it was common for a painter to be inspired by the poets, but is there poetry in Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (AKA The Pickled Shark) ? I ask this as I have just finished a biography of Samuel...
An exhibition in Bolsena Le Sorgenti (The Source) in the little lakeside town of Bolsena has developed from small bar and bookshop to much larger restaurant and bookshop. I am full of admiration for Le Sorgenti's founder Katia Maurelli. To sell books anywhere these days is nothing...
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