Peggy Sirota Livres

The list of celebrities who have sat for New York-based photographer reads like a Who's Who in American show business. Sirota's works is highly distinctive, her approach unconventional, and she has an extremely intense relationship to her subjects. In fact, it is Sirota's autodidactic style, perhaps, which lies at the heart of her success. Many of these photos, originally published under the title Guess Who, are part of a series of enigmatic and misleading portraits of celebrities. By disguising faces that are otherwise immediately recognizable, Sirota raises questions about the genre of celebrity portraiture, and allows us to look beyond the glamorous surface and into the person within. In addition, this volume includes many of Sirota's intriguing investigative and landscape photographs. All of the works have one thing in common: They cross borders, flirt with visual puns and allow the viewer a revealing glimpse behind the facade.

American photographer Peggy Sirota has been shooting celebrities for the last fifteen years. Commissioned by magazines such as Vanity Fair, Italian Vogue, French Vogue, Rolling Stone and GQ, her photographs instinctively draw out her subjects' qualities, capturing them in a unique, playful, and soulful way. Her subjects are never contrived or forced into situations that are not "them." Sirota's photographs are real and magical and are never over-stylized to fit into society's obsession with image and appropriated style. Guess Who, Sirota's exciting debut book, is a tongue-in-cheek homage to the seemingly ubiquitous celebrity phenomenon. Sirota asked various celebrities, athletes and musicians to lend their images to benefit and AIDS charity. The trick is that these celebrities are in disguise-captured in a whimsical and spontaneous manner that renders them unrecognizable at first glance. The reader will be teased, challenged and surprised while looking at the photographs, trying to figure out who's who. For Guess Who approximately 180 celebrities play along with Sirota and actually let go of their celebrity identity, creating a visual feast that resounds with wit and humor.