I Am A Camera, The Saatchi Gallery

The first issue with Tierney Gearon's controversial front image

Author

Martin Maloney, editor

Publisher

Booth-Clibborn Editions, London, 2001

Printing Details

First edition, first issue (with the more controversial image by Tierney Gearon to the front cover). Book design by Graphic Thought Facility. Flexible card covers. 27.5 × 21cm, unpaginated (c440pp)

Powerful images by seminal photographers, realist painters and sculptors—including Tierney Gearon, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol—which sparked a high-profile row about the boundaries of taste when exhibited at London's Saatchi Gallery. I Am a Camera presents primarily photographic work organised into three "True Life Adventures", "Fiction and Artifice", and "Places Portraits Still Lives Tableaux". Some of the works included are from emerging and unknown artists while most are fully fledged art stars. Sam Taylor-Wood's panoramic views of contemporary domestic life; Jessica Craig-Martin's cropped close-ups of high society social life reveal nameless wrinkles and age spots on the rich and famous; Andreas Gursky's exaggerated images of urban existence, a sterile display of Nike sneakers or the endless grid of hotel's balconies, show modern life with barely a trace of human existence. The works included vary greatly from each other but each offers a compelling interpretation about how we live.