He was a portraitist, a still-life artist, he became fascinated by the shapes of the dry earth of Death Valley. All in Sieff's elegant, shadow-crossed black and white. He liked to write, and the opening essays are remembrances, of people and lost worlds. It is a curious and nostalgic book, a combination of some of the best-known pictures with more surprising ones, with no real theme except, perhaps, the passage of time. Here ''screen idols,'' as they used to say, appear young and old, or ageless.
Faces mature, or wilt.
Beautiful bodies, in shadow and in light, contrast Youth with Ruined Faces, lightness with the weight of years, if not wisdom. Here is the novelist Francoise Sagan, portrayed as the gawky wunderkind she was in 1956, in her empty apartment, then again in 1994, after uncountable novels, fast cars and fast living, still gawky, leaning on another table with another cigarette in another, almost empty apartment. Here is Mia Farrow in 1968, all eyes, next to Zizi Jeanmaire 10 years later, all legs. Twiggy when she was still Twiggy, stripes of light over striped clothing, painting her toenails. Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, playing bogeyman to the model Ina in a Gothic setting.