Can a photograph change your life?
More than 50 acclaimed photographers, musicians, filmmakers and collectors tell curator and gallerist, Zelda Cheatle, about their life-changing encounters with a single photograph. Candid stories, presented alongside their chosen photographs, give unparalleled insights into the creative influences of contributors including: Alec Soth, Alex Prager, David Bailey, Duane Michals, Gregory Crewdson, Jack Davison, Joy Gregory, Mari Mahr, Megan Winstone, Michael Walter, Nan Goldin, Richard Gere, Takashi Arai, Valerie Sadoun, Zhang Kechun.
Photographs are everywhere, we consume them in vast quantities (in 2020 there were in excess of 290 billion images uploaded on social media platforms daily). They are absorbed into our conscious and unconscious mid almost by osmosis. This book is, hopefully, an antidote to the photographic sugar rush.
Here is a compilation of the photographs that do not involve the subliminal, nor are part of the daily visual onslaught, but are important images, seared into memory, a myriad of photographs that have, in some way, stopped people in their tracks.
Stories telling of how each person, in their own way, found in a two-dimensional picture an image that entered their mind and nothing was ever quite the same again.
Every picture tells a story but, in this case, every story tells a picture.
- Zelda Cheatle