Philip Gefter is the author of Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Bloomsbury); two biographies: What Becomes a Legend Most: The Biography of Richard Avedon, (Harper) and Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, (Liveright) which received the 2014 Marfield Prize for national arts writing; and a collection of essays, Photography After Frank (Aperture). He was an editor at The New York Times for over fifteen years and wrote about photography for the paper. He was the photography critic for the Daily Beast in its early years and contributes frequently to The New Yorker: Photobooth and Aperture, the quarterly of photography. He produced the award-winning documentary, Bill Cunningham New York. He resides in New York City.
BOOKS
Cocktails With George and Martha
“It’s terrific…. With a dynamically deft touch, Philip Gefter chronicles how a uniquely volatile mix of timing, talent, pressure and passion turned a landscape-altering play into a cinematic detonation. Savor this juicy bit of time travel, because we’ll never see the likes of these people and these circumstances again.”
—Steven Soderbergh, Academy award-winning filmmaker
“[An] erudite study . . . Gefter persuasively credits the film with setting the template for more bracing Hollywood depictions of love after romance’s first blush. This will renew readers’ admiration for the classic film and its source material.”
—Publishers Weekly
Richard Avedon – A Biography
“Wise and ebullient….Gefter takes the reader inside so many of Avedon’s photo shoots, and so deftly explicates his work, that you’re thirsty to sate your eyes with Avedon’s actual images . . . . One of the achievements of Gefter’s biography is to argue persuasively for Avedon’s place, as a maker of portraits, as one of the 20th century’s most consequential artists.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Imagine the offspring of Marcel Proust and the Energizer Bunny—that’s who Richard Avedon was, a chronicler of fashion, an analyst of social types, the author in pictures of his era. And Philip Gefter captures him. His biography is an Avedon of Avedon.”
—Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club
Sam Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe
“An admiring and absorbing biography… As cultural history, Wagstaff’s life story parallels the ascent of the gay rights movement in New York. Gefter tracks the social changes that allowed Wagstaff to escape the charades and debasements of living as a closeted homosexual in the intolerant past.”
—Deborah Solomon, New York Times Book Review
“I just couldn’t stop reading this book!… Sam Wagstaff was the ultimate collector–of talent, of beauty, of silver, of boys. He had everything: looks, taste, money. He almost invented the idea of photography as art, valuable art worth collecting. This is a book not only about the New York art scene of the 70s but also about an entire generation.”
—Edmund White
Photography After Frank
“When people ask me what they need to do to understand the world of fine art photography, I tell them: go to galleries, preview auctions, and read the photography criticism in The New York Times. The Times suggestion was in large part because of the timely, eloquent, and provocative writing of Philip Gefter, the picture editor and photography writer for the paper’s Arts & Leisure section. Gefter has now left the paper although he continues to contribute as a freelance critic and you’ll now see his byline in other publications. But the good news is that Aperture has gathered his pieces in one volume that noone interested in photography should be without. “
—James Danziger
Lovers: The Story of Two Men
“He was Night and I was Day. He represented all that was dark and mysterious about the world, and I represented goodness and daylight and sunshine.”
—Philip
“I was attracted to him because he was everything I wasn’t.”
—Neil
“They could be anyone; for love, whether experienced by Marcel Proust or Mildred Pierce, afflicts us all alike…. So skillfully unadorned, so touchingly thorough, so fragrantly contagious that any fool or genius could be caught in its nice erotic sadness. ”
—Ned Rorem