“To collect photographs is to collect the world,” wrote the critic Susan Sontag in an essay included in her 1977 collection, On Photography. When museums and galleries shut their doors at the start of the pandemic, the veteran collector and gallerist Peter Fetterman decided to bring the world into our homes with the online series “The Power of Photography.”
Now Fetterman has partnered with ACC Art Books to publish a coffee-table book featuring 120 of the photographs from his series. All the big 20th-century photographers—Eve Arnold, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Bailey, Elliott Erwitt, Neil Leifer, Norman Parkinson, Sebastião Salgado, Weegee—get their due, as do lesser-known ones.
There are portraits of Jackson Pollock and Jean-Michel Basquiat; John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Bob Dylan; and Audrey Hepburn. There’s also Liefer’s iconic 1965 photo of Muhammed Ali standing victoriously over Sonny Liston. “If I were directing a movie and I could tell Ali where to knock him down and Sonny where to fall,” Leifer writes in the book, “they’re exactly where I would put them.” —Clara Molot
Clara Molot is an Associate Editor for AIR MAIL
