Underworld

Amazon.com
Anne Rice writes the introduction to this excellent, large-format collection of emotionally charged, sometimes kinky photos of partially clad people. The title puns on the word underwear and sexy, secret lives. No wonder it attracted Anne Rice's intelligent attention--that and the fact that author Kelly Klein is donating all her proceeds to the CFDA Foundation Fund for AIDS.

"The camera empowers you to be intimate with the lens, even abandoned, in a way that may not be possible with another human," Rice muses. "This book is a monument to our freedom, not only to express ourselves but to want more than we are allowed. The camera is the safest vehicle for this excess."

Klein has superb taste in shutterbugs: Brassai, Man Ray, David Salle, Sally Mann, David Hockney, Cindy Sherman, and anonymous snappers of eye-grabbing scenes. The juxtapositions are good: Christy Turlington perfectly complements a 1930 Lartigue model; a Bruce Weber tableau matches a 1945 Playtex ad. You see a side of the doomed model Gia here in curlers that even the tell-all bio Thing of Beauty can't tell you about.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The theme is underclothes--and the bodies in and under them. An intimate, startling, and sometimes shocking collection of 154 color and b&w photos of males and females taken by photographers from the 1880s through the 1990s. Includes work by such renowned photographers as Imogen Cunningham, Man Ray, Eve Arnold, Jerome Zerbe, Helmut Newton, and Brassa￯﾿ﾽ. 11" x 14".

ANNOTATION

Here are photos--154 in black-and-white and color--of men and women clothed or unclothed, taken from the 1880s through the 1990s by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Imogene Cunningham, Steven Meisel, Bettina Rheims, Helmut Newton, Kurt Markus, Ellen von Unwerth, Andre Kertesz, Louis Dahl-Wolfe, Brassai, and 75 others.

FROM THE PUBLISHER