REQUIREDREADING: beautyLIGHT
By Matthew Rolston
Published by teNeues
Reviewed by Annie Kelly

Browsing a friend’s design library recently, I
came across a book by the photographer
Matthew Rolston— Big Pictures: a book of
photographs published in 1991. The strong
portraits were startling, immediate, and com-
pelling, and had really stood the test of time.

From the cover featuring Cindy Lauper in a headdress, to early Madonna, Angelica Huston and Isabella Rossellini, I saw images recalling the 1980s that would live on in our collective visual history. I was wondering how the last fifteen years would look by comparison, whether today’s icons would convey the same glamour and originality. Rolston’s new book beautyLIGHT shows that in the right hands they can, and reminds us that he is one of the principal inheritors of the Hollywood legacy of the last century.

Most of us are probably tired of blurry fashion photographs set in grungy back alleys, so beautyLIGHT will come as a relief—a master photographer showing how to pull emo-tion and beauty from his subjects. Of course it helps that they are, er… beautiful, but Rolston manages to capture something memorable in these much-photographed faces.

Penelope Cruz ‘s unforgettable part as a deconstructed artist in Woody Allen’s recent VickyChristinaBarcelona is hinted at in Rolston’s dramatic photo of her with pythons eight years ago in Los Angeles, and Jack Nicholson’s blood-covered face reveals the actor at his most terrifying. Rolston takes their public personas and pushes them one step further, showing his sure grasp of popular culture. The book is dedicated to Andy Warhol, whose Interview magazine started many careers, including Rolston’s—his first ever job for them was to photograph director Steven Spielberg. Rolston went on to a major career photo-graphing stars like Michael Jackson, Angelina Jolie, Kelly Osbourne, Bob Dylan, Monica Bellucci, Johnny Depp, Lindsay Lohan, Matthew McConaughey, and Jennifer Lopez, most of whom appear in this book, transformed into mythical images by this skilful photographer.

To describe Rolston’s music videos and TV commercials would be like opening up a contents list of any issue of Rolling Stone or Vogue magazine— artists like Madonna, for example, or Christina Aguilera, Janet Jackson, Lenny Kravitz, or Beyoncé Knowles. He has also directed com-mercials for the GAP, Ralph Lauren, Neutrogena, L'Oréal, Clairol, Pantene, Burberry, Maybelline, Levi's, Bacardi, Elizabeth Arden, Max Factor, Old Navy and Revlon—the list is nearly endless.

as Ingrid Sischy, who was until recently the
long-time editor-in-chief of Interview maga-
zine, says in her introduction to the book,
“If Los Angeles is, as the activist and author
Carey McWilliams wrote in the ‘40s, ‘ a great
circus without a tent,’ then Matthew Rolston is its high-wire act. For more than two decades, his photographs have walked the tightrope between idealism and realism, and he always gets to the other side to the thrill of his audience.”

“A photograph can have the power to induce desire with an impossible reality,” adds the photographer in his own preface: “How could anything or anyone be that perfect, and why should we care? It’s because the concept of ideal beauty was born with our notion of perfection.” Edited by David Fahey, (whose gallery Fahey Klein plays a central role in the Los Angeles photography world), this art book is being published in two versions; one is an oversized limited edition, on heavy rag paper in a presentation box, plus a signed original photo—and the other is a more conventional book. I’m sure it will be a fixture on many chic coffee tables this Fall, as beautyLIGHT hits the zeitgeist head-on, and resolutely takes no prisoners.