Love and Desire: Photoworks - Tapa blanda

Love and desire are fundamental to human experience. These most powerful of emotions have been universal themes of myth, art and literature for millennia. In Love & Desire, William Ewing has selected photographs which take us to the heart of affection, longing, pleasure, sexuality and adoration. From parental tenderness to body worship, from romantic love to the outer limits of sexual experience, eight sections stress the myriad different readings photographic imagery makes possible. Some of the photographers are anonymous, but keep company in this collection with the art form's greatest practitioners - Brassai, Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Harry Callahan, August Sander and Andre Kertesz amongst them. Newer names such as Mario Testino, Nan Goldin, Helmut Newton and Ellen von Unwerth, together with the rising stars of the contemporary scene, point towards the future. Love & Desire is destined to become a classic, both as a companion to Ewing's hugely successful and influential book The Body, and in its own right as a rich archive of what is surely photography's most compelling, most enigmatic and most provocative subject.

A sequel to "The Body", this volume contains over 300 images, discovered during a lifetime's discriminating research into a century and a half of photography. They represent love and desire in all its many forms: the love of parents for their children and vice versa; the love between men and women; between men; between women. There is forbidden love. There is love as a saleable commodity and love as a symbol of absolute generosity. There is love of the body and love of the divine. Sex, affection, adoration, adulation; all these words have their visual equivalents in these images.