In Their Youth

In Their Youth: Early Portraits comprises over 200 of the California-based photographer`s previously unpublished portraits from the last three decades, featuring famous actors shot when they were still unknown young men, from teen years into their early twenties. "I decided to do a project that expressed my infatuation with male beauty", Gorman explains, "especially in terms of the portraits don`t have lots of backgrounds, they`re straightforward. It`s really about the person, not the elements. It boils down to the graphics of the individual more than the graphics of the setting." Gorman`s intimate celebrity portraits hinge on the sense of his subjects` vulnerability. Here, famous young men are juxtaposed with photographs of promising unknowns: one of the first shots of Tom Cruise, for instance, shares a spread with some anonymous ephebe that Andy Warhol met at Studio 54. Greg Gorman discovered his calling after taking a borrowed camera to a Jimi Hendrix concert in 1968. In 1990, after producing images for over 20 years, he published his first book, Greg Gorman Volume One, which reveals his skills as a portraitist. Gorman has created innumerable unforgettable images (for instance, a 2000 portrait of Jeff Koons shows the artist perched on a filthy toilet, flanked by two leather-clad ladies). His work has been featured in ad campaigns and has been featured on the covers of a number of magazines, including Esquire, GQ, Interview, Vogue, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.