Author Description

Photographs by Roloff Beny - passionate traveler, acclaimed photographer and creator of sixteen remarkable books - have until now conjured up timeless images of classical art and architecture, the beauty of nature and the exotic ritual of far-away lands. Here, at last, springs to life Beny's best-kept secret, buried deep in the archive at his home in Rome since his untimely death in 1984: an array of superlative portraits of some of the most famous and celebrated figures of our time, people from the creative world of the visual and performing arts, from literature and fashion, from politics, society and royalty. Beny, a native Canadian, first came to Europe in 1948 to study art and tour the classical sites of the eastern Mediterranean, and could soon count among his close friends Jean Cocteau, Tennessee Williams, Henry Moore, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the legendary art collector Peggy Guggenheim. People also includes some of Beny's finest and most lyrical studies of Renaissance and oriental sculpture, paired with powerful shots of ordinary people and ritual life discovered during his travels, which took him to more than forty countries around the globe.