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One of the most charismatic photographers of the last forty or so years. Born in Paris, she spent her youth in Romania. Enigmatic, glamorous, complex, sophisticated, artistic, literary, her iconic photographs have appeared in a multitude of publications, from Zoom to Vogue to Playboy, over twenty books of her photography have been published in Europe, in Japan and in the United States, and exhibitions of her works have taken place in just about every important place in the world with one exception: Britain.
Irina Ionesco has extraordinarily erotic vision - all her images are charged with her quirky, highly personal imagery, a compound of choice of model, angle of view, accessories, and above all a complete mastery of light and shadow. Her black and white photographs have influenced two generations of photographers, and done so with a minimum of accessories: a hand-held 35 mm camera, a light or two when not using available illumination, and bits of fabric, broken dolls, bits and pieces she found in skips. When she decided to work with colour, she mastered that as well.
Various attempts at exhibiting her in Britain were generally halted by a pusillanimous and somewhat atavistic fear of associating her eroticism with the fact that she often used her daughter as a model, on her own or with other models, in particular an amazing set of pictures taken in the Mucha home in Prague. Young Eva was an extraordinarily precocious child who wrote Surrealist poetry at the age of eight, was a star model for several major photographers, appeared in several movies, including one of Polansky's, and is now herself a photographer and video artist.
