Portrait of an artist. Photographs 1994-2008

Although she has become well known as a painter in her more than twenty year career, Elizabeth Peyton has always practised photography too, portraying artists, friends, acquaintances, people and personalities who in one way or another have passed through her life. In the light of the strong interest in portraits by Nadar, Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Mapplethorpe - artists who particularly liked immortalising their friends - Elizabeth Peyton has brought together an assorted collection of portraits that is outstanding for a casual aesthetic of extraordinary beauty. Whether photographed at the elegant Chateau Marmont or in more intimate domestic atmospheres, the people introduced in Portrait of an Artist emerge thanks to the artist's spontaneous method and to the defect - never calculated - of over/underexposed images and subjects out of focus. The sixty-two portraits published in this book are of well known and less well known people, the same ones shown in the 2008 exhibition at the Adrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield: from Marc Jacobs to Matthew Barney, from Chloë Sevigny to Jake Chapman, from Nick Relph to Spencer Sweeney.