I Will Never Forget You...: Frida Kahlo to Nickolas Muray Unpublished Photographs and Letters

""Kid, don't forget me. Write once in a while... That will be enough to know that you still remember this wench!"" Khalo writes in this volume of love letters and photographs, making charming use of then contemporary English slang-her preferred mode when addressing Muray, the American glamour photographer and her lover. Reading Khalo's wildly funny tirades against Andre Breton and other French surrealists (""coocooo lunatic son of bitches"") is a unique and worthwhile pleasure, but this book's finest offerings are its photographs, though the results are of uneven merit. The many casual snapshots have a patina of unearned nostalgia-an effect that will satisfy many, but leave others feeling as if they're sifting through yellowed photos in an antique store. The standout images are Muray's more formal portraits of his lover. The photographic techniques available to Muray in the late '30s and early '40s created layered colors that have an almost painted effect, and are delicious to look at now. Khalo was both a woman and a myth-complicated, challenging, talented and, perhaps, masochistic (or so the Khalo specialist Grimberg asserts in the book's one essay)-but readers will see these qualities best through Muray's photographs, not Khalo's letters.