Portrait of an Artist by Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton has spent three decades building her reputation as a painter working primarily in oils and watercolors. She's built a legacy finding a way to paint and portray celebrities from the 80s to 00s and everyday people from her personal life with the same intimate point of view, collapsing the distance between fame and the ordinary. But Portrait of an Artist, published in 2009, marked a departure: Peyton with a camera instead of a brush.

The book emerged from Peyton's 2006 Larry Aldrich Award—recognition for her painting—yet the accompanying solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presented something unexpected: her first-ever photography show. The images weren't a pivot but a revelation of what had been there all along. Peyton had spent years taking snapshots, not as a photographer but as a painter gathering reference material and documenting her world. Shot primarily on a Contax T3 point-and-shoot between 1995 and 2008, the book features her circle—artists like Matthew Barney and Piotr Uklański, musicians including Jarvis Cocker, plus her longtime painted subjects reframed through the camera's eye. The Contax's compact simplicity allowed for spontaneity and what feel like real candid moments that are both casual and studied. What emerges is a document of a specific milieu ranging from downtown New York to London's art world, filtered through two decades of Peyton's experience within it.

The book stands as both a companion piece to her paintings and evidence that her vision transcends medium. Our team has a passion for scanning art books—Portrait of an Artist is the first of many from our personal collections that will feature on a monthly basis.

Subjects include:

Wolfgang Tillmans
Jarvis Cocker
Maurizio Cattlan
Spencer Sweeney 
Elizabeth Peyton
Tony Just
Chloë Sevigny
Marc Jacobs
Alex Turner
Matthew Barney