A01=Andrew Ginger
art book
art books
Author_Andrew Ginger
best sellers
Category=AJCD
Category=DNBF
coffee table book
contemporary photography
creative photography
documentary photographers
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
essay
forthcoming
gift books
historic photography
iconic photography
illustrated book
ispiration book
monographs
narrative
philosophy
photo book
photo collection
photo inspiration
photo series
photographic art
photographic essays
photography
photography book
photography books
photography gallery
photography lovers
photojournalism
story
visual art book
visual memoir
visual storytelling
Product details
- ISBN 9780847875719
- Dimensions: 216 x 279mm
- Publication Date: 29 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This revelatory book offers a fresh and profoundly personal perspective on Cecil Beaton s life, shaped through his final and most sustaining love affair. Drawing on never-before-published photographs Beaton and his last partner, Kinmont Hoitsma, took of one another, as well as the tender, revealing letters they exchanged, it opens a rare window onto the private world they shared the homes they lived in, the rooms they inhabited, and the emotional space they created together. By 1963, Beaton was at the height of international fame, working in Hollywood on My Fair Lady. Yet behind the public success lay decades of fraught and often unfulfilled relationships, shaped by the criminalization of homosexuality in Britain. In Hoitsma an American ex-Olympian fencer and art historian who lived openly within San Francisco s emerging gay community Beaton found something wholly unexpected: mutual affection, emotional honesty, and a sense of peace. Their year together at Beaton s home in Wiltshire marked a turning point, allowing Beaton, for the first time, to acknowledge his identity with a new clarity and openness. Though they ultimately accepted that a permanent domestic partnership was not possible, their bond endured until Beaton s death in 1980. Framed through this late-life relationship, the book traces the broader arc of Beaton s extraordinary career and inner life his artistic ambitions, his cultivated interiors, and the seamless way he wove photography, fashion, theater, and design into a singular aesthetic vision. At once a love story, a portrait of an artist, and a meditation on self-acceptance, this book reveals Beaton as never before seen.
Andrew Ginger is a British art historian, interiors specialist, and author best known for his richly illustrated 2016 Rizzoli book, Cecil Beaton at Home: An Interior Life.
