We do not know if James Bond was a fan of a coffee table book — his days were so filled with incident and adventure that most likely he didn’t have the time for the leisurely perusal of a lovely, shiny mega-tome. For those of us less involved with international espionage, these books can offer windows into alternate lives — from a female surrealist artist pioneer to the humble honeybee.
Fragile Beauty — Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection
Edited by Duncan Forbes, Newell Harbin and Lydia Caston, V&A Publishing, £40
When Elton John emerged from rehab in 1990, he found a new addiction: photography. He began to amass a collection, focusing on fashion photography by artists including Horst P Horst and Irving Penn. When he met David Furnish in 1993, they bonded over a love of photography. The couple now have more than 7,000 prints, many of which are displayed in their homes. From this month some of the most striking are relocated to the V&A for an exhibition, also entitled Fragile Beauty, with this as the accompanying catalogue. It’s basically a history of photography from the 1950s to the present day and includes a Q&A with Furnish and John, and an afterword by Sam Taylor-Johnson. The images are divided into themes: desire, reportage, stars of stage and screen. John is obsessed with people who suffer for their art, such as Marilyn Monroe. The remit is wide, from images of civil rights protests in the 1960s and photojournalism from the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers to Herb Ritts’s sexy Fred with Tires. There is an emphasis on the work of two of the couple’s favourite photographers, Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe. “Many of these images are familiar but they are refreshed by their juxtaposition with one another,” Taylor-Johnson writes.
Dr No — The Birth of the Bond Cinematic Universe
By Paul Duncan, Taschen, £750
Ian Fleming was a Scotsman and spy who wrote the first Bond novels from his Jamaican redoubt, Goldeneye. He loved cars, gambling, women, fine tailoring and wine, as did his protagonist (modern readers might be surprised at how many martinis 007 gets through prior to complicated missions). The first Bond book, Casino Royale, was published in 1953. The first film, Dr No, premiered in 1962, and this handsome collector’s edition is the ultimate companion for any Connery-era Bond nerd. It’s hefty enough to take out a Smersh agent, with chapters on Fleming, the producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, pre-production and the shoots in Jamaica and Pinewood. There are scripts and behind-the-scenes photography — mostly Ursula Andress and Sean Connery looking gorgeous in skimpy beachwear — production schedules, call sheets and a day-by-day breakdown of what happened on set, plus images from the premiere, publicity posters, drawings of the villain’s lair and a news report about Thomas the tarantula, one of Bond’s most fearsome foes. All Bond life is here.
Eileen Agar — A Look at My Life
Thames and Hudson, £35
Eileen Agar’s memoir is a manifesto for non-conformity. A female surrealist artist — one of the few women to participate in the genre-defining International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 — she had a glamorous upbringing in Argentina and London, all balls and Cartier bracelets. But she took a different path, deciding to become an artist (although she was still driven to the Slade art school in a Rolls-Royce), sharing her life with the Hungarian writer Joseph Bard while having affairs with fellow bohemians including the artist Paul Nash. The text, written in 1988 and republished for the first time in 30 years, charts Agar’s extraordinary 20th-century life and is interspersed with images, personal photographs (a portrait by Cecil Beaton, snaps from a holiday in the south of France with Picasso) and more than 50 lush colour illustrations of her work, which include collages, paintings, assemblages and her famous Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse (1936, now in the V&A), stuck with shells, puzzle pieces, beads and fishbones. “Mankind as a part of nature/mankind outside of nature” were her themes.
What the Bees See
Photographs by Craig P Burrows, Chronicle, £30
The way we see flowers is very different from how honeybees perceive them. Craig P Burrows uses ultraviolet-induced viable fluorescence photography to mimic the vision of bees, which are able to see the ultraviolet spectrum, enabling them to identify pollen and nectar. The result is extraordinary: alien plants that glow from within, petals in blue and purple tippled with vivid yellow baubles. The 70 photographs of bees and flora, including anemones, orchids and cactus flowers, are accompanied with a text by Nick Worthington, covering the history of bees. They have been buzzing on this planet for more than 130 million years — and humans have been cultivating them since the 10th century BC. But industrialisation has resulted in the collapse of hives. This is an existential issue. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that three quarters of the world’s flowering plants rely on insect pollination to reproduce, accounting for one out of every three mouthfuls of food we eat. So this is not just a beautiful book, it’s also a call to arms. Burrows hopes that his apian insights will “get enough people to care to drive meaningful change”.
