Chris Boot

George Dureau: The Photographs is an album of the great photographic portraits made throughout the 40 years of Dureau's artistic career--a New Orleans romance between the photographer and his subjects. All of Dureau's exquisite photographs, many of them nudes of black and disabled men, were made in his studio in the French Quarter of New Orleans, or on the city's streets. He began photography for the pleasure of photographing his lovers, and as research material for his paintings. Only later on did he begin to take his photographs seriously as works of art in their own right. Many of his subjects became part of Dureau's "extended family," whom he photographed on different occasions over many years. Surprisingly, only one book of Dureau's photographs has been published, New Orleans (1985), a modest paperback long out of print. This Aperture book is possible now because of the commitment of Dureau's supporters. George Dureau: The Photographs is edited by Chris Boot, with a text by Philip Gefter. George Dureau (1930-2014) was a painter, sculptor and photographer known for his focus on the male nude. His paintings, which draw on classical and baroque traditions, command regional and national recognition, and his photographs of nudes, street people and people who are maimed and deformed (often figures also incorporated within his paintings and sculptures) have garnered international acclaim. Often compared to Robert Mapplethorpe's work, Dureau's black male nudes predate Mapplethorpe's Black Book pictures by several years. Also classically formal, they distinguish themselves from Mapplethorpe's work by the nature of the connection between photographer and subject. Dureau's career has been the subject of retrospectives at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (2006 and 2011) and the New Orleans Museum of Art (2009). The first exhibition of his photographs in New York (at Higher Pictures) was in 2012.

The Photographs

George Dureau

Ian Berry

In the postwar period the South African government gradually developed a policy that was meant to retain forever the rights and privileges of a white minority - apartheid. Whereas in many other societies racial prejudices and tensions create difficulties, only in South Africa was segregation institutionalized and regulated, producing bizarre and often absurd situations. This aspect of the South African experience, the duty to "Live Apart" while occupying the same space, has been uniquely recorded by the camera of Ian Berry. Berry first set out for South Africa as a boy of seventeen and thus began a career of recording ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances. While working as a photojournalist for Drum, the major magazine of the black community, he was present at the Sharpeville riots in 1960 and over the course of the following decades he was to return to South Africa many times and capture many of its most significant moments. In the 1990s the collapse of apartheid and the rise of Mandela have resulted in a remarkable form of reconciliation at the same time as an alarming escalation of urban problems and violence. Once again Berry has been back with his camera, recording the election and its aftermath.

Living Apart

This book explores the 'photo story' through 61 master classes by some of the world's greatest photographers, all members of the international photographic agency Magnum.

Chris Boot

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