The photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor
Subtitle: artist and lover
By: Ian Collins, Olivia Stewart
Contributors: Collins, Ian (Art critic), author; Stewart, Olivia, author
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9781910376942
Copyright date: 2018
Subjects: Catalogs; Pictorial works
Other titles: Joan Leigh Fermor
Description: "Elusive, enigmatic and beautiful, Joan Leigh Fermor [a.k.a. Joan Rayner] (1912-2003) was also one of the finest photographers of her time. Although hailed and hired by John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly from the 1930s, and a remarkable recorder of the London Blitz, she most excelled in pictures of unspoilt Greece taken between 1945 and 1960 as visual notes and with no thought of publication. The scale of her achievement was only discovered after her death in 2003. What emerge in her wide-ranging work is an eye of immense subtlety and empathy, and an entire absence of ego. The artist's ease is reciprocated in the faces of Cretan shepherds, Meteoran monastics and Macedonian bear-tamers. Her vision is both intimate in portraiture and architecture, and panoramic in landscape, and most firmly focused in an abiding love of Greece. The archive of 5,000 images now in the National Library of Scotland - and partly introduced in this monograph - reveals, at long last, a 20th century photographer of significance."--