Peter Schlesinger's Beautiful Life
Peter Schlesinger’s photos are an entrée into a world—less a window, and more a complete immersion; one where you can hear the laughter, feel the breeze, smell the flowers. You are there alongside him as he moves through his life, from California to England and the Continent.
At 18 Peter fell in love with one of his art professors, the not-yet-a-megastar David Hockney; it is Peter looking down into the pool in one of Hockney’s most famous works, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) [in 2018, it sold for $9.3m, at that time the highest price ever paid at auction for a painting by a living artist]. When Hockney returned to London in 1970, Schlesinger came too—smoothly falling in with Hockney’s bohemian set, mingling easily with all strata of society. While studying to be a painter, Peter photographed—first as studies for paintings, and then to document. Capturing a world of effortless chic, of youthful possibility, of creativity.
After Schlesinger left Hockney in 1971, he fell in love with Eric Boman—then a freelance illustrator, he later became a famous fashion photographer. The pair stayed together until Boman’s death last year; you can read my in memoriam post for Boman here. Two books of Schlesinger’s photos have been published, and you can feel the beauty of their love on almost every page—the intimacy of the photos Peter took of his partner, the tenderness passed between them in a glance.
In a world without mobile phones, there is an immediacy to the interactions captured—and an immediacy to the outfits. There is none of the artifice of looks and trends that we now find due to social media; the chic was real, not refracted through likes and comments.
Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the ‘60s and ‘70s (2003) is part memoir—Peter’s words and memories alongside the photos, leading us through his younger years. Peter Schlesinger: A Photographic Memory 1968-1989 (2015) is strictly a photo book. While there is some overlap between them, there is enough variance in images that I would recommend both. I scanned these images from both books, attempting to compile some of the inherent beauty of the methods of living, the objects, and the clothes of Schlesinger’s world.
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