Story by Editor at Large CAROLINA OGLIARO
TASCHEN returns with a trio of formidable releases that reaffirm the publisher’s singular ability to blend cultural reverence with visual opulence. With each new title—Tina Turner by Peter Lindbergh, Ralph Gibson. Photographs 1960–2024, and Valentino. A Grand Italian Epic—we’re invited into a world where photography transcends documentation to become a living archive of human brilliance, style, and sensibility. Bound in precision and driven by story, these editions carry the weight of icons, translated through the gaze of masters.
Tina Turner by Peter Lindbergh
A Love Letter in Shadows and Light
There are collaborations that redefine the visual language of celebrity. Then there are encounters—like that of Tina Turner and Peter Lindbergh—that become symphonies of trust, elegance, and emotional honesty. In Tina Turner, Lindbergh’s lens is both intimate and epic, capturing the music legend in moments suspended between strength and surrender. His monochrome style, rich in grain, devoid of artifice, echoes Tina’s own essence: raw, radiant, and timeless.
More than a monograph, this volume is a personal tribute to their enduring creative bond. A heartfelt foreword by Turner’s husband, Erwin Bach, imbues the pages with warmth and memory, grounding the glamour in human connection. The result is not just a book of photographs, but a luminous dialogue between two titans who found poetry in one another’s presence. Multilingual and masterfully designed, this 224-page homage is as much a cultural document as it is a visual elegy.
Ralph Gibson. Photographs 1960–2024
A Six-Decade Sonata in Form and Contrast
Few photographers have sculpted light with the intellectual rigor and sensuality of Ralph Gibson. With Photographs 1960–2024, TASCHEN offers the most comprehensive retrospective ever assembled on the Leica virtuoso, chronicling over sixty years of artistic inquiry. Gibson’s frames, stark, enigmatic, often erotic, carry the unmistakable signature of someone who sees not just objects, but symbols, metaphors, and myths.
The book reads like a visual diary written in chiaroscuro: each image, a carefully composed note in a lifelong symphony of observation. From street scenes to surreal abstraction, Gibson’s work never settles, it evolves, questions, seduces. Accompanied by multilingual commentary and released, also in two Art Edition formats, each including a signed, limited fine art print, this publication is a collector’s object and a masterclass in photographic vision. A true testament to the architecture of thought and emotion behind the lens.
Valentino. A Grand Italian Epic
The House of Dreams, Bound in a Book
With Valentino. A Grand Italian Epic, TASCHEN moves from lens to runway, tracing the grand arc of a fashion empire that helped define the modern lexicon of elegance. Spanning 576 pages, this tome is more than a biography, it’s an orchestrated crescendo of aesthetics, ambition, and intimacy. Inside, archival articles from the world’s most revered publications meet exclusive interviews by Matt Tyrnauer, offering a backstage pass into Valentino’s universe, his atelier, and the minds of those who walked beside him.
But perhaps the most moving tribute comes from fashion’s own oracle, Suzy Menkes, whose homage anchors the book with personal insight and critical gravitas. From the Roman salons to red carpets across continents, Valentino is a tribute to legacy not frozen in time, but ever unfolding—stitched with discipline, adorned with romance.
Each of these TASCHEN releases is a portal into the soul of a singer, the mind of a photographer, the heart of a maison. Together, they form a curated chorus of visionaries, immortalized not only through their own work but through the lenses and language of those who saw them with wonder. For lovers of photography, fashion, and the sublime, this season’s TASCHEN offerings are not simply books but they are heirlooms of modern culture.
