"SAM SHAW. A PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW" par Lorie KARNATH. Editions Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern. 2010. Imprimé en Allemagne. Petit in-4, couverture toilée anthracite photo, titre estampé. 240 pages. Textes en anglais illustré de 199 reproductions photographiques noir & blanc, in-texte et hors texte, par Sam Shaw.

 

"Actor-director John Cassavetes once wrote, "Sam Shaw is my closest friend, and one of the things that I love about him is the fact that twenty other people say the same thing." In the two decades that Sam and I explored the world together, I definitely counted myself among these twenty. Wherever he went, Sam always carried around his neck two beaten-up Nikons that pretty much functioned as extensions of his arms. For all the years that he took my picture, he took pictures that only one who truly knows his subject can take. This was the same for all of Sam's protagonists, and it is this that differentiates his pictures of Marilyn Monroe from any of the other likenesses of her. Although throughout his lifetime Sam photographed virtually every great name in show business, notably specializing in the female of this species, a group comprising many of the world's greatest beauties, Sam never sought merely the "pretty" photo. Instead, his work offers bold, candid portrayals of his subjects in front of as well as behind the camera, representing the distilled beauty of life's essence transformed into the reality of his art. Sam was an artist first and foremost, one who happened to choose photography as his medium. He very much viewed the world and his own life experience from a cinematographic perspective, rather like a series of film takes. For Sam, the camera was an important tool that served to record the world around him in a candid manner without guise or deceit..."

 

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