“If you know how to do what I do you can make anyone forget why they’re there, and when you reach that moment all kinds of secrets reveal themselves.” – Chris Floyd
Photographer Chris Floyd rose to fame during the heights of Britpop and has since become one of the most in-demand celebrity portrait photographers in the world. Not Just Pictures, published by Reel Art Press this month, is the first monograph dedicated to Floyd’s 30-year career.
A visual memoir, Floyd’s selected career highlights are accompanied by his incisive, insightful recollections, first- hand accounts of, in his words, ‘unique encounters on the confrontation and collaboration line’.
Floyd’s subjects include Paul McCartney, Tina Fey, Yoko Ono, David Bowie, Bill Murray, Vivienne Westwood, Iggy Pop, David Attenborough, Kristen Wiig, Christopher Reeve, David Bailey, Paul Weller, Pet Shop Boys, David Cameron, Greta Gerwig and Marcus Rashford.
A highly unusual celebrity photographer, both meticulous and spontaneous, Floyd’s wit and vulnerability is present in every anecdote. Not Just Pictures is all about stories, from getting his first camera to getting mugged to believing one of his heroes would only want to buy the rights because “he disliked them enough to want them removed from the public domain”.
As the world seeks to sanitise its visual history, in the age of Google’s Magic Eraser, Chris Floyd’s Not Just Pictures is a permanent reminder of what real photography is all about.
Chris Floyd is a British photographer and filmmaker. His photographic work has appeared in some of the world’s most highly respected publications, including Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine and Wallpaper* among others. In April 2021 he was commissioned by The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to photograph them at Kensington Palace in London in honour of their tenth wedding anniversary. The resulting photographs were published all over the world to much acclaim and attention. He has shot advertising campaigns for Apple, British Airways, The National Health Service, Sony and Virgin Radio and has been selected several times for the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and the annual publication American Photography. The Verve: Photographs by Chris Floyd, a book of his era-defining photographs of the band was published in 2017 by Reel Art Press.
Chris Floyd : Not Just Pictures
Reel Art Press
Hardback; 320pp; 310 x 245mm
ISBN: 978-1-909526-86-0
£49.95/$69.95
www.reelartpress.com
@reelartpress
