The Bad and the Beautiful

From Natalie Wood breast-feeding to Bernedette Peters biting into a snack, one hand tucked into the front of her pants, celebrity photographer Graham's portraits capture fragile, unguarded moments that cast her well-known subjects as both everyday and extraordinary. This collection of 160 duotone photographs, plucked from the pages of magazines like W, Time and Newsweek, as well as from Graham's personal archive, will appeal to admirers of unadorned portraiture. Nothing--not costume, context or setting--gets in the way of the photographer and her subject. In fact, it's quite possible that those who casually skim through this book may not immediately recognize many of the actors, performers, artists and socialites featured here. A morning-fresh, makeup-free woman wearing a tee-shirt that reads ""Be Kind to Animals or I'll Kill You"" is, upon closer inspection, Doris Day; a man in a hammock with a mustache and a mysterious twinkle in his eye, sipping on a Coors beer is, in fact, a young Robert Wagner. In his introduction to this compilation, John Loring, design director of Tiffany & Co., writes that Graham's work is ""not overly concerned with documenting the face of a bigger-than-life spirit, but with stealing a bit of the spirit itself in a moment of joy, frivolity, defiance, pride, bravado, chagrin, and distraction."" It is this spirit and, for those who are really looking, star-power that illuminate the shadows of Graham's work.