In Plain Sight: The Photographs 1968 - 2017
Published by Damiani, 2017
This monograph entitled 'In Plain Sight' is a survey of the multifaceted career of Jean Pagliuso who began her career in fashion and quickly rose to collaborate with film studios and directors. Her images, such as the unforgettable
American Gigolo, have found their place in the visual history of the Motion Picture Industry.
Always present in the last two decades of her work is a backdrop of subtle theatricality that has continually seeped into her expansive landscapes and even into the subtle Poultry Suite, showing portraits of chickens. An extensive traveller, Pagliuso examines the mystery of place. Her willing subjects become the temples and pyramids of Egypt, Peru, Mali, Cambodia, Burma and in the deserts of New Mexico. These fragile structures have inspired her to employ an equally sensitive approach to printing. The result is a unique process of hand-applied silver gelatin on rice paper.
The book contains photos with text by the photographer and with a text edit by Joan Tewkesbury who scripted the award-winning film, Nashville.
Poultry Suite: Photographs by Jean Pagliuso
Published by Hirmer, 2015
Jean Pagliuso is a world-class fashion photographer whose photographs of fashion models and film stars from Susan Sarandon to Sophia Loren filled the pages of Vogue and Rolling Stone for nearly three decades. But for her most recent work, Pagliuso trained her lens on a much less conventional subject: the chicken. An homage to her childhood in Southern California, where she helped her father breed and show Bantam Cochins, Poultry Suite showcases more than twenty breeds of chickens—from Sebrights to Spangled Hamburgs—as they have never before been seen.
Just as in conventional fashion photography, Pagliuso has applied her well-developed eye to creating interesting compositions while also bringing out each subject’s unique beauty and personality. In one photograph, a plump hen stares head-on at the camera through a mass of white feathers. In another, a proud red-combed rooster turns to peer curiously at the camera. Each portrait in Poultry Suite features a chicken arranged against a simple background, encouraging viewers to explore the animals’ anthropomorphic traits. The photographs are complemented by an accessible collection of texts.
Carefully designed by Shahid and Company, New York, and with reproductions of nearly fifty photographs, Poultry Suite impeccably applies the aesthetic excellence of fashion photography to form a true appreciation of the diversity of these birds.
Fragile Remains
Self-published, 2003
This handmade book is a self published compilation of photographs rendered on rice paper and bound in Japanese knotting. It was printed in my studio in an edition of 50.
The following is excerpted from a forward by author, Susanna Moore:
“ These photographs are of a world so essentially fragile that the promptings and implusions of time spread out before us in unsettling presentiment.
There is a dream of origins, ritual and memory in places where nothing has ever happened. Where everything has happened. The tombs, the monastic chambers, the sanctuaries of chosen stone, caves cradled in the earth’s sweet contour, blood-bowers, desiccated seas ( I do not think these place were always fragile, but strong).
The relation of these transmuted places to the earth is secretive, unquestioned; neither victorious nor contrite. They absorb our ardor with detached repose. They are collaborative, suggestive; the boundary between history and imagination…it would be unseemly.
The banished gods would not like it….