The Photograph That Changed My Life

The Photograph That Changed My Life by Zelda Cheatle, 2021

Format: A5 /  23.7 x 16.5 cm/ 9.5 x 6.5 in

Signed copy

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

Zelda Cheatle is a well  known curator, and editor of photography.

She opened her gallery in 1989, after a decade at the Photographers Gallery. She exhibited photography nationally and internationally for 16 years. The gallery showed countless 20th century photographers including Eve Arnold , Mari Mahr and Robert Frank.

The Zelda Cheatle Gallery also consistently exhibited emerging artists and photographers,
whilst working with those established in the medium. The Galleries sister company, Zelda Cheatle Press, also published monographs of contemporary British artists and photographers.
Cheatle began and managed the first Photography Fund which primarily collected fine prints of the 20th Century. The Fund also exhibited and published the collection of over 6,000 iconic prints including a Russian 20th century collection, Eve Arnold’s vintage archive and icons and masterpieces of the European and American schools.

As lead curator for the World Photography Organisation for many years, Cheatle has spoken extensively about photography and its place as fine art. Her recent photographic exhibitions include Cecil Beaton in both the State Hermitage, St Petersburg and Blenheim Palace; Yan Wang Preston in China; photography from the Gulf countries exhibited in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the Dubai Photo Exhibition comprising 868 photo works; and a  show at the Royal Photographic Society in Bristol. Zelda Cheatle continues to curate and publish, to review and challenge photography.