This book compiles the works of American photographer Joan Liftin (born 1935)—from boys posing with a bust of Reagan in the Soviet Union in 1988 and images of brutality in the American South during the civil rights movement to more personal moments of her life with photographer Charles Harbutt.
Liftin began her photography career while working as a photo editor at the United Nations from 1971 to 1975. She photographed assignments for UNICEF in Haiti, Peru, Chile, Algeria and Iran while at the UN. In 1975 Liftin joined the staff of Magnum, and served as Director of the Magnum Photo Library until 1980. Her recent monographs include Drive-Ins (2004) and Marseille (2016).
Marseille is a love letter from an American to France’s oldest and second largest city. Joan Liftin’s photographs of Marseille, one of Europe’s most ethnically diverse cities, show us a place where much of life still unfolds on the street. The city’s spirit and raffish glamour resides in its people rather than in its monuments, and Liftin captures day and nighttime encounters, moments of quiet beauty, allusions to corrosive crime and poverty, and the diverse heartbeat of this soulful Mediterranean port city. Her photographs offer us an honest, intimate vision of Marseille, at once timeless and passionately alive. Joan Liftin’s photographs have appeared in New York Times Magazine, Aperture and Creative Photography. Her work is included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Princeton University, and the Center for Creative Photography, Tuscon, among others.
Joan Liftin: Marseille