In My Stairwell
Ah, the beautiful people! Their faces and circumstances change, individually and historically, but they seem always to be with us.Today's beautiful people are performers, not aristocrats and plutocrats. They exist to be seen, and, incapable of relaxing, they are always "on." Because few are classically good-looking, they are best photographed elaborately prepared, artificially lit, and in severely controlled settings. Seliger obliges them almost completely. He shoots every one of them in the skylighted elevator shaft--"three brick walls and a crown of sun"--he uncovered when renovating his studio in Manhattan's downtown. The first two subjects are those shar-peis of rock, Jagger and Richards, guaranteeing that beauty in any normative, let alone ideal, sense is banished immediately. Each subject is expressively posed and accoutered, many are nude (fortunately, most of these thereby put on their best faces, so to speak), and if you haven't heard of some of them, you're not a New Yorker. In black and white on 11-by-14-inch pages, they look marvelous, gorgeous, fantastic. But beautiful?Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved