MARIO TESTINO
A collection of bold, fun, colourful images giving an insight into the life of Mario Testino, one of today's top fashion photographer. Over the past few years the name of Mario Testino has become synonymous with the cutting edge of fashion photography. His redefining images of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Madonna, as well as numerous campaigns for Gucci, Versace, Missoni and others, have established him as an arbiter of Nineties style. Born in Lima, Peru, he moved to London in his twenties and set about becoming a photographer. His tremendous energy and love of life carried him through the tough journey that finally earned him innumerable pages in Vogue and an address book that is positively bursting at the seams. Any Objections? is Testino's first book. Provocative and sometimes shocking, it is a lightning roller-coaster of unpublished images which brilliantly illuminates the vision of one of photography's shrewdest eyes. Fashion and the gutter, nature and artifice, high life and low, jostle for his attention. Faces of the very famous in the least expected places, bodies of the very beautiful, landscapes and cities, close friends and extraordinary passersby all find their place in a pattern which is held together by Testino's evident sense of the absurd. The book is an insight into the raw material of fashion, where a glimpse of life from a street in Tangier can be the inspiration for a fashion story in New York. At once diary and commentary, picture after picture (all reproduced full-page) provoke reactions as diverse as their subject-matter: from shock to amusement and from surprise to delight. Whether or not you have any objections, you can't help being intrigued by Testino's very personal view of the world that surrounds him.
