8 Minutes

The premise of this book couldn’t be simpler: 130 photographs of British bad boy artist Damien Hirst by the great British fashion photographer David Bailey, taken during a single shoot lasting eight minutes. Famed as the inspiration for the swinging 60s photographer character in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up (1966), Bailey was one of the first fashion photographers to merge with rock coterie and the international jet set. In this series of portraits, each pose is spontaneous and determined not by Bailey but by Hirst, who sticks his tongue out, mocking the camera. These photos are unrehearsed, in the spirit of Bailey’s recent work, which is characterized by an easy relationship with composition and lighting and no digital manipulation.With no text or even a title page, 8 Minutes resists the familiar, formulaic style of the usual coffee table book. Always the rogue, Bailey’s message is “what you see is what you get.”