Alive, Mario Testino’s third book, is a visual travelogue through the worlds he has both discovered and created. “ My pictures are my eyes,” he has said, “I photograph what I see – and what I want to see.” Published by Bullfinch Press Book, Little Brown and Company, 2001
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Foreword by Gwyneth Paltrow
The photographs of Mario Testino, one finds in describing them, are much like the man himself. Irreverent, assertive, and most of all full of life - brimming over with life, as if to push its very essence at you. Mario’s photos always seem to connect you with the truest and lightest aspect of yourself. The aspect that thrives on spontaneity, passion, and a perspective void of judgements.
Mario is intoxicating. When Mario takes your hand and brings you into his world, it is a brighter and edgier place. You feel more. You see more. I always note how “in the moment” I feel when I am with Mario. That is life happening right now. That he is helping me to see and taste it. You somehow feel as if you are at the epicentre of everything lively and new and stylish, whether you are across the table from him at a dinner or you come across a campaign he has done in a magazine. To bring people so startlingly into their “present” is a gift. It is a gift I receive as a friend of Mario’s and as a subject of his as well. It is a gift he shares with all of us through his photographs, which let each of us into the world of Mario Testino.
The title of this collection of photographs most aptly and simply characterizes the work contained inside. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines (a)live to be: “full of power, energy or importance, not obsolete or exhausted, glowing, unexploded, charged with or carrying electricity; not detached.” That is the very essence that each photo in this book shares. Regard the shot of the firework, bisected in its hottest moment; the intensity or unrest in the eyes of various subjects, challenging or questioning the moment that they find themselves in; the ferocity of a wrecked room, or a tropical storm; the lust in the flesh of the young. These images force upon us that kind of life. Even in the still and quiet pictures we find this power, only perhaps in a less combustible way. We find the reaching leafless tree at dusk, tranquil in its solitude. The empty row of pink satin toe shoes, waiting to be danced in. The unadulterated lines of a man-made space, or a set of footprints in the sand. These images coax us into connecting with that life power, that soundless power within us.
Since I first met Mario in Paris in 1994, he has been infecting me with his life force through a series of adventures. We have laughed and worked in the gardens of Long Island, cavorted and eaten through the raw and dark streets of Naples, and amused each other through parties, always joking in Spanish or taking absurd snapshots of each other. One of these aforementioned snaps appears in the pages to follow. It was the post-Oscar party that Vanity Fair magazine hosted in 1999. I had had quite an evening. I felt overwhelmed and very detached and quite numb, in a sense. As if I was simply attempting to get through the evening and the hordes of people so that I could go home and begin to process. Upon entering the fete, I saw Mario, his green eyes shining, his wide smile beckoning. He swept me up and took me in his arms, and we started to dance to the fantastic Cuban band that was playing. At that moment, I started to come to. I started to feel my girlishness and sense of humour re-emerging. And for the first time that night, I laughed and stopped taking myself so seriously. I had found myself a long way from where I started. I had found myself with Mario Testino. And, most important, I had found myself, alive.
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